Stefanie Georgakis
Planning, Governance, and Globalization
Virginia Tech
Abstract
Among the many discussions of the consequences of the so-called Arab Spring(s), questions of mass migration to Europe have taken center stage. Perhaps the most well known case of this phenomenon is the Italian island of Lampedusa, which in 2011 saw a doubling of its population in approximately 72 hours, as people fled instability in Tunisia. This paper will analyze contemporary discourses of migration in Mediterranean Europe and the emergence of the detention camp in Lampedusa, Italy. Through an engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, this paper argues that the camps in which migrants are held in “border zones” like Lampedusa can not only be understood through regimes of biopower but also deserve to be theorized through a critical problematic of sovereignty and the “borderization” of the Mediterranean region.
Keywords: Italy, migration, borders, European Union, Agamben
Introduction
Earlier the same day another group of migrants was taken to the port and transferred by the Siremar run ferry to Porto Empedocle first and then to the detention centre in Crotone in Southern Italy. The port lays just down the hill from the airport and the adjacent detention camp. While the tourists were boarding the ferry the police escorted a group of 50 migrants from the detention camp to the port. Dressed once more in dark blue sport outfits and carrying a white plastic bag, migrants reached the port after a 20-minute march—walking rigorously one behind the other—and were made to sit on the ground behind a large van for the tourists to complete the embarkation and have a last unperturbed glimpse of the town of Lampedusa.” (Andrijasevic, 2006, p. 120)
The tiny Italian island of Lampedusa is a sleepy outpost in the Mediterranean Sea. It is home to 4,500 permanent residents and is a temporary destination for a modest number of tourists. Lampedusa would largely go unnoticed were it not for one key feature of its geography: it lies fewer than 140 km off the coast of Tunisia, much closer to Africa than to the mainland of Italy. As a result of its location, Lampedusa has found its population doubling practically overnight, as it has become a prime destination for irregular migrants and asylum seekers migrating from Northern Africa to the European Union. Its geographic placement in the south of the Mediterranean Sea has given Lampedusa a level of notoriety that it would otherwise not merit.
For those North African migrants who crowd into rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean Sea to flee political and economic instability, the island of Lampedusa represents an Italian shore—a gateway into the European Union. When these irregular migrants are “caught,” they are often placed in detention camps in Lampedusa, waiting to be identified, processed, and deported. They have made it to Europe, but they remain in limbo, in the space of exception.
In this paper, I argue that the establishment of detainment camps for irregular migrants can be viewed as a process of producing and crystallizing the border represented by the Mediterranean region. I contend that geographic borders, like the Mediterranean Sea (which separates Europe from Africa), are not inert, inherent facts of nature. Rather, borders are made; they are created discursively and through institutions. Often, migration is seen as a problem that needs to be controlled through legislation or foreign policy. Indeed, the European Union spends a lot of time and energy creating policies towards non-EU Mediterranean countries to try to control irregular migration. Put more simply, I contend that the “camps” in which irregular migrants are detained are not simply used to deal with a migration problem per se, but rather, the camps produce and solidify the notion of the Mediterranean as a definitive border. To elucidate this point, I take the example of Lampedusa, Italy, as a particularly powerful and concentrated site of this border-making capacity.
Before proceeding, a word of clarification is needed about the term irregular migration. There are a number of terms deployed to refer to the illegal entrance into a country or to the presence in a country without proper visa documentation. The adjectives illegal, irregular, undocumented, or clandestine are often used interchangeably, but all have different nuances. I use the terms irregular or undocumented migrants in this paper because the language of illegal immigrants is often politically charged. An irregular migrant is someone who has contravened the immigration laws of entry or residence of the country in question. This can happen through overstaying visas or through illicit crossing of borders into a country, although this paper focuses on the later.
As Andrijasevic (2006) notes in the above quote, irregular migrants are rarely simply turned away from the shores of Italy. Rather, they are held on Italian soil until their identities are confirmed before being deported. The liminal spaces of Italy—the islands that are closer to Northern Africa than they are to mainland Italy—are particularly interesting for an analysis of how migration becomes implicated in the construction of borders. Detention centers where migrants or would-be refugees are processed have become the source of heated debates regarding security, sovereignty, and human rights. As Wendy Brown (2010) notes, sovereignty is very much performative in nature. These detention centers, where migrants are held within the political space of the European Union but are not “free” to exist inside of the polity, are indicative of this sovereign performativity. Using Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) theorization of the state of exception and bare life, as well as David Campbell’s (1998) argument about the productive relationship between foreign policy and identity, this paper will argue that these detention centers should not be seen simply as places where a problem of sovereignty is “dealt with.” Instead, I focus attention on the role of the detention centers, and the space of Lampedusa more broadly, as the source of highly symbolic discourses that purport to remind us that the border between Europe and Africa is distinct and clear. In other words, while Lampedusa lies closer to North Africa than to the rest of Europe, it is a space whose status as a “civilization” border is reiterated and insisted upon. Together, Agamben and Campbell help us understand how borders are made and insisted upon through practices like detaining, cataloguing, and deporting potential immigrants. These authors help articulate the ways in which borders are created, and they speak to the contingent nature of borders and the relationship between boundaries and practices of sovereignty.
Lampedusa: An Inconvenient Geography?
The Mediterranean Sea is often discursively constructed as the clear cut barrier between the “civilized world” of Europe and the seemingly (both geographically and culturally) faraway land of Africa. As a result, practices of state sovereignty are “played out” in places like Lampedusa. Put more simply, there is a tendency in policy making within the EU to treat places like Lampedusa as lines or borders that clearly delineate the “inside” from the “outside.” In this paper, however, I argue that the Mediterranean is not an inherently objective border, but rather it comes to be made as such, through the insistence of discourses and policies that make it seem as such. Over the course of 48 hours in February 2012, more than 4,000 migrants and asylum seekers attempting to escape the political unrest in Tunisia sailed across the Mediterranean Sea to Lampedusa (Figure 1)—thereby doubling the population of this tiny Italian island (Amara, 2011). The story created a media frenzy, in which the geographic position of Italy being “perilously close” to Africa was highlighted. For example, a TIME magazine article noted that refugees could reach Italy in the amount of time it takes “a rickety, overloaded ship to cross…the Mediterranean Sea” (Faris, 2011). In the midst of the humanitarian crisis on Lampedusa, as Italian authorities were trying to decide what to do with the mass influx of refugees, the Spanish Interior Minister said that Italy is the door of Europe, and a European solution will be needed to solve the problem (Lekic, 2011). Similarly, Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni warned that the island of Lampedusa was threatening the “institutional and social structures of Europe” (BBC, 2011).
Figure 1. Map of the Mediterranean region showing the position of the Italian island of Lampedusa relative to the African Coast and the Italian mainland.
Italy thus becomes constructed as a zone of hybridity. The Mediterranean is quite literally a borderland, a liminal space which functions as the barrier between the “civilized world” of Europe and the seemingly far away land of Africa. Practices of state sovereignty are “played out” in places like Lampedusa. The detention and deportation of migrants from Lampedusa takes on a particularly strong military and securitized aspect. Andrijasevic describes the way that Lampedusa “lives out” its securitized role, as “the operations of detention and deportations from the detention centre in Lampedusa came to a larger public attention in the fall of 2004 when, on October 3–7, more than thousand irregular migrants were expelled from Lampedusa to Libya on military airplanes” (Andrijasevic, 2005, 121).
Often, Italy is characterized as being a “firm” cultural border or boundary that distinguishes Europe and Africa. This perception reifies myths of a closed, clear-cut boundary between Huntingtonian style civilizations. Indeed, Samuel Huntington (1993) acknowledges in “The Clash of Civilizations?” that the Mediterranean is representative of an obvious, naturalized border. Even though Huntington sought to explain a new “phase” in international conflicts, his assumptions should be problematized. Huntington’s analysis relies on a vague notion of “civilization identity” and locates borders as definitive spaces where the “personification of enormous entities” occurs (Said, 2001). However, Huntington takes for granted the static nature of borders. The illusion of an inert, unchanging geographic border places Lampedusa in a precarious position, as the “final frontier” in the protection of European space. In other words, borders and security are discursively related, especially as security in the south of Europe is “prima facie linked up with security within European borders” (Pace, 2010, p. 431). In order to deal with an increased security threat posed by migration from North Africa, the European Union has turned attention to securitizing its southern borders, placing states like Italy, and places like Lampedusa, at the center of debates about security, identity, and sovereignty.
The Inherent Liminality of the Mediterranean
Many contemporary European anxieties about the symbolic “infiltration” of the potentially dangerous “Other” call upon historical narratives of the Mediterranean region as a weak link in European security. As Barry Buzan (1993) notes, “[T]he fear of being swamped by foreigners is…easy to mobilize on the political agenda as a security issue, not least because it happened so often in history” (p. 45). For example, policies centered on controlling migration in the Mediterranean speak to the potential threat of crime, terrorism, or trafficking as associated with immigration. Because of its “ambivalent geographical position [Italy is] described as ‘a sort of centaur, with its head well stuck into Europe and hooves reaching down into the Mediterranean” (Pace, 2010, p. 115). This narrative leaves Italy at the center of discussions of insecurity and fearful of the “weakness” of its borders. Moreover, these sentiments about Italy as a sort of centaur, half European and half Other, are extended more broadly throughout the Mediterranean. In this way, Lampedusa and Italy become particular sites through which one can view the characterization of the Mediterranean as “between two worlds.” Yet, the view of the Mediterranean as a hybrid does not easily fall in line with the previously discussed presumption that borders separate mutually exclusive spaces. The question of interest then is how does the Mediterranean come to be constructed as an obvious and unproblematic geographic boundary; how is its innate hybridity obscured? I argue that the energy and resources that are put into securitizing Lampedusa show precisely this process of “borderization,” or the active production of a space as representative of a particular border.
The “problem” of migration in the Mediterranean forms particularly dense networks of discourses that result in state-run practices, like the formation of “camps” at the sites of borders. The Mediterranean becomes securitized as a particularly important (and dangerous) political space that must then be “managed” in specific ways, and becomes a site for European concern about the integrity of borders. Securitization in this context refers to the process through which a person, group, or even a space becomes the object of discourses of security of the state. Put another way, “security threats” are seen not as natural but rather as constructions of both discourses and institutions, and emphasize the process through which things become seen as security threats. Here, one can begin to see how the state, and the persistence of the Westphalian model, rely upon the insistence of imaginative geographies (Said, 1979), which can discursively be called upon to (re)produce particular knowledges. Because the Mediterranean countries are, by definition, at least partially surrounded by water, they have been the subject of many discussions about being the point of entry for unwanted migration into the EU.
Amid the romanticizing of the Mediterranean as a luxurious vacation spot, the area is also portrayed as a space of vulnerability, particularly considering its geographical proximity to Africa and the Middle East. These portrayals or characterizations of the Mediterranean are important to the understanding or theorization of the making and continual reproduction of borders. As Michael Shapiro (2001) notes, “the separation of the world into kinds of space is perhaps the most significant kind of practice for establishing the systems of intelligibility within which understandings of global politics are forged” (p. 319). Because of the free travel within the Schengen Area (i.e., the 26 European countries that have agreed to operate as a single travel and immigration zone with no internal border checks), there are concerns about undocumented migrants entering through southern European countries and subsequently traveling throughout the continent.
Consequently, Mediterranean borders become implicated in greater discourses about securitization for the continent as a whole. Because of the particular difficulty in securing coastal borders, southern Europe is caught up in discussions of the security and vulnerability of the European mainland. The securitization of Mediterranean Europe and the sea in particular as a space of uncertainty is increasingly important in European discourses about security and safety, particularly in the age of the Global War on Terror (Klepp, 2010).
Agamben and the Production of Bare Life
In his seminal work Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben (1998) seeks to complete or correct Michel Foucault’s (1990, 2008) discussion of biopower (i.e., the state’s ability to manage or govern physical or biological aspects of groups or populations within its sovereign space) and its relationship to political life. Agamben argues that although Foucault associates the emergence of modernity with a shift from sovereign power to biopower, biopower is actually inherent in sovereignty. In contrast to Foucault, for Agamben the distinguishing feature of modern state sovereignty is the articulation of the permanent state of exception and the emergence of what he calls the “camp.” Agamben notes that the appearance of the “camp” in modern politics is a new way in which the interworking of sovereign power and biopower is brought to light.
To help accomplish this, Agamben (1998) calls upon the Roman legal figure of homo sacer (or man set apart). Such an individual existed outside the legal system and therefore could be killed without legal consequence (but not sacrificed in a religious ritual). Homo sacer is defined then not by his membership in a society but by his exclusion from it. Homo sacer exists in a permanent state of exception. For Agamben, sovereignty necessitates the inclusion of the category of the excluded in order to define its limits. Drawing on a Schmittian understanding of sovereignty, Agamben claims that not all life can be brought under the rule of law but, rather, that sovereignty requires the exclusion of homo sacer, or bare life. It is law, then, that has the power to define and designate bare life and distinguish it from the political subject.
In The State of Exception, Agamben (2005) elaborates the permanent state of exception and the role of the camp in modernity. He argues that the Bush administration’s 2001 declaration that terrorist combatants fall outside of the realm of the protection of the Geneva Conventions “erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being” (Agamben, 2005, p. 4). Similarly, the detained migrant who is stripped of any right or any sense of personhood exists in a space that is entirely removed from the law. Yet, what is different about the detention facilities on Lampedusa from a space like Guantanamo Bay is the fact that the detention centers are on Italian soil. Many arguments against the closing of Guantanamo rest on the fact that outside of America, individuals are not guaranteed rights afforded to U.S. citizens (this is also part of the reason that many argued against bringing detainees to the U.S. proper). However, the detention centers in Lampedusa are on Italian soil, and there is still a denial of rights to individuals and the production of bare life.
Agamben (1998)juxtaposes the existence of bare life, which resides in the state of exception, with the political subject who is endowed with rights. An essential feature of modernity is its ability to create a permanent state of exception, whereby bare life becomes dispersed throughout the polity. As Agamben (1998) notes, “modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict” (p. 124). For Agamben the (concentration) camp characterizes the conflation between law and life, where bare life becomes positioned as outside the rule of law and constitutes the state of exception. However, what is particularly interesting in Agamben’s (1998) argument is the point where, according to him, bare life no longer resides simply on the margins of society, but rather “gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction” (Agamben, 1998, p. 9).
It is here that we can begin to see the importance of Agamben’s argument for the theorization of migrant detention camps in southern Europe. The irregular migrant is representative of bare life. He or she is excluded from membership in the state and not subject to the rights of the law. However, the sovereign can still banish the migrant, or confine him or her within the confines of the state. Yet, while the detention center is technically a space within the boundaries of the polity, it is the outside within, the space of exception situated within the larger realm of the state. It is this inability to distinguish the inside from the outside that characterizes modern politics for Agamben.
Law, according to Agamben (1998), is defined through an articulation of what is its exception, as “law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exception” (p. 27). The outsider who attempts to enter the nation-state takes on a very important role for Agamben’s model of bare life and the state of exception, particularly as he or she “put[s] the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis (sic)” (p. 131). Irregular migrants cause bare life to appear within the space of the polity. The irregular migrants being held within detention centers in Lampedusa both inhabit the nation-state and are denied the rights afforded to citizens in the same space. The camp becomes a space of production of bare life, one that represents the state of exception permanently within the space of sovereignty. It is within the detention center on Lampedusa that rights and the rule of law become suspended, as is allowed by the logic of securitization of the Mediterranean.
Thus, if one were to tie Agamben’s (1998) argument back to Lampedusa, the “migration crisis” is presented in terms of a threat to both European security and identity, as well as Italian sovereignty. While Agamben sets out to complicate Foucault’s discussion of biopower, and he remains useful for situating the role of the detention center in expressions of state sovereignty, his analysis falls short in articulating the productive capacity of the camp. As Wendy Brown (2010) argues, Agamben’s analysis “begs rather than resolves the question of where political sovereignty resides, what or who has it, and whether and why it makes sense to call hyperbolic and extralegal expressions of state power ‘sovereign’” (p. 86).
While Agamben (1998) argues that walls are an exercise of sovereignty, Wendy Brown (2010) argues that they, on the contrary, represent a state of emergency for state sovereignty. In a time of seeming danger for borders and “conventional” state sovereignty, Brown argues that states perform symbolic acts of sovereignty to try to cling onto an illusion of sovereign power. Wall building on the part of states, then, can be understood for Brown as a condition of the changing global nature of sovereignty. As she argues, political walls “have always generated performative and symbolic effects in excess of their obdurately material ones” (Brown, 2010, p. 39). Picking up on Agamben’s critique of modernity and the contested nature of the political, Brown argues that walls can become a sign of the permanent state of exception that security regimes engender.
While Brown (2010) points to the “frenzy of nation-state wall building today” (Brown, 2010, p. 24), both hers and Agamben’s analyses fall short of fully addressing the function of the detention centers, or perhaps more accurately, of the migrant body and its symbolic importance in the articulation of borders. It is not simply an exercise of sovereignty to erect walls (symbolic or material) to keep others out; it is an exercise that is productive of an idea of the inside/outside. Although it is true that walls are being erected by polities like the U.S., Israel, and the European Union, there is an institutionalization and bureaucratic function of these spaces. In other words, it is not simply about applying brute force to the borders of the community. If their function were simply to “protect” the European space, the militarization and securitization of the borders would simply turn away migrants at the border rather than holding them within the political space. Rather than being ways of dealing with emergent problems, the camp and the symbolic power of the migrant body are both necessary for the practice of statecraft and sovereignty (Soguk, 1999). As we can see in Lampedusa, the space within Italy becomes liminal in itself; it becomes the border zone, and contains the camp as the manifestation of the state of exception. As Brown states, wall building and detention centers are not simply about “offensive military technology” (Brown, 2010, p. 29). Rather, there are institutional logics that are created to deal with the migrant and reinforce a particular European subjectivity that is dependent on the inclusion of the excluded within the polity.
(Foreign) Policies of Bare Life
Agamben’s (1998) analysis, while useful for discussing the role of the space of exception and the articulation of state sovereignty, fails to address the capacity of camps and policies dealing with bare life to (re)produce particular subjectivities. David Campbell (1998) states that we live in a society of security, whereby identity is negotiated not simply through the relation to the Other, but through a particular “economy of violence” that positions the Other as an object of security to the self (p. 8). As the identity of the state is never finished, (in)security must constantly be renegotiated, in order to continually reassert the identity of the nation-state. Thus, in a break from traditional understandings of security studies, Campbell (1998) posits that (in)security is necessary for the articulation and development of identity, not a threat to it (p. 3). This assertion is tremendously important for the theorization of regimes of security and the networks of power manifested and represented through foreign policy discourses. In order for there to be a conception of legality, the illegal must exist (Van Schendel, 2005, p. 7). Thus, the goal of regimes of security is not to eliminate insecurity; rather, it is exactly the opposite. Without an articulation of insecurity, security is not intelligible.
Campbell (1998) goes on to argue that modern life is largely characterized by discourses that tell us what to fear (p. 143). Thus, identity is not simply about relationships with the Other but also includes a fundamental aspect of security. Modern subjectivity is produced through discourses that govern one’s relationship to a threat from the Other. As Derrida argues, modernity is largely about processes of dehumanization, as relationships are reduced to and understood through constructions of fear and Otherness (Cherif, 2008). Identity, perhaps, is then less dependent on inclusion than exclusion, and discourses of security articulate danger, which is positioned as outside of the social fabric, or as its antithesis.
Campbell’s (1998) analysis calls for a different understanding of the relationship between security, borders, and identity, as discourses of security frame certain relationships, upon which the negotiation of the limits of the political community relies. The society of security of which Campbell speaks, which operates through an economy of violence, produces not only identity but also subjectivity. One’s life may be governed through this engendered relationship with the Other. In practice, these discourses of fear and security produce policies that physically and symbolically exclude others. Within the European context, the security problem of migration is aligned against an assumption of what it means to be “European.” Migration within Europe, particularly that originating from the southern shores of the Mediterranean, exists as a cultural, political, security problem. In other words, the “Muslim migration problem” that much of Western Europe is experiencing is seen as (1) originating from North Africa and the Middle East, and (2) being “allowed” or facilitated by the lack of security along the Mediterranean shores of the EU. The illusion of “soft” borders in the Mediterranean becomes implicated in discussions of migration and the “security” of the European Union. Thus, there are processes that work to make these borders appear more solid and less porous. Campbell’s analysis lends itself to a deeper understanding of the securitization of migration in Lampedusa, or Europe more generally, in a few key ways.
First, migration presents contact with the Other. As the relationship between the self and the Other is negotiated, political identity is created and this process says something important about borders. Rather than being understood as a threat to European society, as migration often is positioned, the migrant provides an important symbol for the articulation of the European subject. The migrant is either physically excluded, by borders, or socially excluded once he or she enters the European political space. Even if the migrant is “allowed” to integrate, the concept of integration necessitates or calls forth the notion of outsider status. European identity is negotiated as it is defined against or alongside the interpretation of what it means to be a Third Country National (TCN). Many contemporary political movements within Europe position themselves as anti-migration. Often, the associated political discourses revolve around images of over- crowded schools, social safety nets that are being drained by the undeserving “outsiders,” or increased violence in neighborhoods. There is a call back to a state of cultural or racial purity that has been compromised by the existence of the migrant within the European space. However, paradoxically, it is this securitization of the migrant that allows these political discourses to flourish. Then, in order for the narratives of a disrupted racial purity to function, the Other (in this case the migrant) must exist within that space. Difference and sameness exist in a dialectical relationship. Thus, it is the interpretation of the migrant as Other that produces the relationship between the European political subject and the “alien.”
Second, a particular European identity is constructed through the relationship between Western Europe, which is the destination of much non-European migration, and Mediterranean Europe, which largely acts as a portal. In fact, as much as 90% of irregular migration to Europe comes through the northern shores of the Mediterranean (Bigo, Carrera, Guild, & Walker, 2010). It is then the space of exception in the camp, legitimated through discourses of danger and securitization in the Mediterranean, and the production of bare life that allows for the articulation of a foreign policy that is directed towards the internal other.
Agamben’s (1998) theory of the state of exception and bare life are useful for outlining the emergence of the camp. However, this paper sought to further complicate the role of bare life in the production of borders. The migrant who inhabits a space within Italy yet is detained in the camp, thus representing the internalization of the excluded, the integration of bare life into the polity, allows for a foreign policy that is articulated against the internal Other. This proposed framework for integrating a critical understanding of foreign policy and identity making within Italy (and the European Union more generally) and the production of bare life in the modern nation-state allows for a more complex positioning of the migrant in European identity.
Conclusion
This paper argues that a more nuanced theorization of foreign policy and its relation to national identity can be used to complete the relationship between the state of exception and the detaining of the migrant as bare life. The concept of the European citizen endowed with rights is (re)produced through the detention and expulsion of the homo sacer. It is the methods and narratives of securitization that allow for the Mediterranean to be a liminal space, a border zone that is seen as a source of European insecurity. Furthermore, within the Mediterranean region, particular spaces become dense sites of the state of exception, whereby the migrant is not expelled right away, but is rather held and detained in camps within European space. Thus, homo sacer (understood here as the detained irregular migrant) is the object of foreign policy, yet remains within the space of the Italian state. In other words, foreign policy is directed to the “outsider” that resides within. I argue that the North African refugee/migrant/asylum seeker detained in Lampedusa, Italy becomes the object of foreign policy whilst residing within the state. These discourses of migration as a threat that needs to be “contained” are not only productive of the “camp” but also of borders themselves. It is the space of exception, in which bare life is produced, that allows for a foreign policy of the outside on the inside. Indeed, if Agamben (1998) is right that the production of bare life and biopower is part of the expression of sovereignty, then we can say too that it is also about the making of borders—the limits of the sovereign. In the same way that Agamben (1998) argues that modernity allows for a dispersion of the state of exception and the entanglement between inside/outside, citizen/non-citizen, detaining bare life in camps within the sovereign space allows foreign policy to be practiced toward the Other while they are on the “inside.”
Even though Agamben’s (1998) argument has some limitations, it is useful for positioning detention camps as a space of limbo where individuals await deportation within the liberal state. Furthermore, Agamben’s (1998) analysis of the role of the camp lends itself to a discussion of the nexus between the construction of the threat from the migrant Other and the reiteration of borders. These liminal spaces of detention of homo sacer (the migrant) are simultaneously inside the space of the state; yet contain the excluded form of bare life. Furthermore, these camps are bound up in the (re)production of discourses of European cultural and physical security, both on the state (Italy) and on the European level. It is not simply about foreign policy towards the outside. Agamben provides a framework for understanding the internalization and inclusion of the outside, of the object of foreign policy. The relationship between the migrant and the state, which is manifested in the existence of the camp, is a space of exception that allows for a theory of articulations of foreign policy towards the outsider within the sovereign space, and ultimately towards the borderization of Lampedusa.
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Author Note
Stefanie F. Georgakis is a PhD candidate in Planning, Governance, and Globalization in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia. She can be contacted at sgeorgakis@vt.edu.