There are many histories of the police as a law-enforcement institution, but no genealogy of the police as a form of power. This book provides a genealogy of modern police by tracing the evolution of "police science" and of police institutions in Europe, from the ancien régime to the early 19th century. Drawing on the theoretical path outlined by Michel Foucault at the crossroads between historical sociology, critical legal theory and critical criminology, it shows how the development of police power was an integral part of the birth of the modern state’s governmental rationalities and how police institutions were conceived as political technologies for the government and social disciplining of populations. Understanding the modern police not as an institution at the service of the judiciary and the law, but as a complex political technology for governing the economic and social processes typical of modern capitalist societies, this book shows how the police have played an active role in actually shaping order, rather than merely preserving it.

In this paper I will try to understand in what sense it is possible to talk of a migrant or refugee ‘crisis’ in the EU. I will also consider the consequences a narrow interpretation of the ‘crisis’ in terms of increasing migratory pressure has had for the evolution of the EU border control regime. I will first describe the essential features of this border control regime. I will show how the intense public debate on the ‘crisis’ has prevented public opinion from seeing how its root causes were not to be found in exogenous factors hitting the EU from the outside, but, rather, lie in the intrinsic weaknesses of the EU border control regime which the political instability in the Mediterranean region has brought to light. I will then look at the EU response to the crisis, showing how this has moved in the direction of an attempt to restore the EU border control regime. Finally, I will argue that the alleged ‘crisis’ has brought about a further consolidation of the uneven political geography of the EU borders.

The article explores the ambiguous dialectic between the technocratic ideology of risk management and the recurrent call for emergency measures which characterizes Euro-Mediterranean border control policies, showing how Frontex has ultimately succeeded in capitalising on the recurring cry to humanitarian emergencies coming from some Member Countries. Far from seeing its legitimacy undermined as a risk management agency that should predict and prevent potential migratory crisis, it has incorporated the emergency rethoric into its official communication, making it a legitimating tool for a steady expansion of its role, prerogatives and resources to the detriment of alternative actors in migration policy. This reproduces the paradoxes of a humanitarian policy which is intended at protecting the bare life of migrants and asylum seekers, while violating their fundamental rights to escape and find asylum elsewhere.

The article explores the ways in which law has worked as a reservoir of theoretical categories to frame risk and as an institutional tool to govern it. It shows how this has affected modern liberal legal categories, giving rise to the emergence of a variety of legal security technologies whose main characteristics and functions are here discussed in detail. The evolution in these security technologies is analysed in relation with the changes that have affected the main governmental orientations in modern societies and related social control strategies. The article concludes with an examination of the overall political significance of an increasingly risky-oriented evolution of legal systems in modern societies.

The article explores the relationship between immigration detention and criminal justice by presenting the results of an ethnographic research that was carried out inside one of the main Italian pre-removal detention facilities. Challenging the idea that immigration detention centres are to be considered as legal black holes where migrants are reduced to ‘bare life’ and subjected to a form of absolute power, this article suggests that detained migrants possess an extraordinary ability to resist and undermine the deportation machine, reproducing a condition that, reversing Nicolas De Genova’s formula, I would define as of their ‘undeportability’. The article explores the microphysics of power relationships shaping detention conditions inside a pre-removal centre showing how in the clash between police attempting to deport migrants and their opposition to deportation, immigration detention turns into a de-facto punishment. While the overlapping of administrative and punitive functions under the framework of immigration law and policies has been extensively analysed, this research illustrates how it is produced in practice suggesting that the evolution of immigration detention into a deterrence tool is to be considered as the outcome of the failure of the Italian deportation machine rather than a conscious policy choice. Finally, this article provides an opportunity to explore further the relationship between migration control and what Michel Agier has defined as humanitarian government, showing the many paradoxes and contradictions incurred by humanitarian agencies when they are called upon to manage custodial facilities such as immigration detention centres.

This article presents the results of an empirical research carried out within Italian reception centres for asylum seekers. The article shows how reception centres can become a trap from which asylum seekers are no longer able to escape as they become victims of a process of social disempowerment making them dependent on the 'humanitarian government'. This reproduction of dependence enables the reception system to carry out a subtle social control function, achieving the effect of confining asylum seekers within a concentrated place that can easily be controlled by the police. But this form of control is exercised even though the law does not provide any explicitly repressive means for keeping them under surveillance. So-called reception centres exert a centripetal force which is hard to resist, and which in a sense has an ability to trap asylum seekers more than any wall. The Italian reception system amounts to a form of 'humanitarian confinement', in that provide hospitality for asylum seekers, while subjecting them to a form of control enacted through humanitarian agents.

La detenzione amministrativa è un’eccezione rispetto al delicato equilibrio tra potere politico e libertà personale disegnato dalle moderne costituzioni. Solo per motivi di stringente necessità è consentito al potere esecutivo di ricorrere a misure restrittive che, nel quadro dello Stato costituzionale di diritto, sono una prerogativa esclusiva del potere giudiziario. In molti paesi occidentali la detenzione amministrativa degli stranieri è tuttavia diventata una pratica di controllo ordinaria che non ha bisogno di essere legittimata da particolari emergenze. L’abuso dei poteri detentivi nel quadro della politica migratoria ha sottoposto migranti e richiedenti asilo ad una sistematica limitazione dei diritti, assoggettandoli a forme di restrizione della libertà che offrono minori garanzie rispetto a quelle previste dal sistema della giustizia penale. Il volume analizza il processo attraverso cui si è giunti ad una normalizzazione della detenzione amministrativa, combinando la prospettiva della teoria politica, della sociologia e della critica del diritto. Particolare attenzione è dedicata al caso italiano, discusso alla luce dell’evoluzione della normativa internazionale ed europea in materia di migrazioni ed asilo, nonché del dibattito teorico sulla questione del rapporto tra migrazioni, libertà e sicurezza nelle democrazie occidentali.

L’articolo analizza lo statuto legale della detenzione amministrativa degli stranieri, illustrando come il cosiddetto processo di “securitarizzazione” delle migrazioni abbia finito per immunizzare, rispetto alle garanzie offerte dal diritto internazionale e dell’Unione europea a protezione dei diritti fondamentali, le misure di controllo dei confini adottate dagli Stati. La legittimità di misure restrittive che rappresentano una chiara eccezione rispetto al delicato equilibrio tra sicurezza e libertà personale disegnato dalle moderne costituzioni democratiche, viene adesso direttamente derivata dal principio di sovranità territoriale e dall’idea dell’esigenza di difendere la sicurezza nazionale dalle intrusioni indesiderate, a scapito del divieto di detenzione arbitraria sancito dai più importanti documenti internazionali in materia di protezione dei diritti umani. L’ipotesi che tale contributo intende dimostrare, è che il processo di “securitarizzazione” delle migrazioni abbia finito per “normalizzare” l’esteso ricorso alla detenzione amministrativa degli stranieri effettuato dai governi delle principali democrazie occidentali, trasformando tale eccezionale misura restrittiva in uno strumento di assoluta banalità amministrativa cui gli Stati possono, nel rispetto di limitate formalità, ricorrere senza necessità di proclamare la sospensione delle garanzie costituzionali previste a tutela della libertà personale.

Immigration detention centres have an ambiguous legal status. Functioning outside the criminal justice institutional circuit, they can be hardly framed by ordinary legal categories. Their legal ambiguity is perfectly reflected in the existing literature, which proposes different interpretations of the legal status of immigration administrative detention. This article explores the issue trying to isolate four theoretical points of reference out of the complex debate that political, social and legal sciences have conducted on the expanding role of administrative detention within the framework of contemporary immigration control policies. Each theoretical perspective defines the legal status of immigration detention starting from a particular image of the stranger, seen as an enemy, as a risk bearer, as a person in need of humanitarian aid and, finally, as a non-person. The analysis will then converge into a final reflection on the relationship between migration, freedom, and security in contemporary democracies which will discuss borders as the contemporary blind-spot of human rights.

Estimulado por los enormes cambios que afectan al régimen fronterizo moderno, la teoría política y las ciencias sociales contemporáneas han empezado a pensar las fronteras más allá de nuestro imaginario geopolítico clásico, ilustrando su compleja naturaleza de dispositivos biopolíticos llamados a la producción de subjetividad, de la gestión de la movilidad y el gobierno de las poblaciones. A pesar de su común matriz teórica foucaultiana, había profundas diferencias en el tipo de diagnóstico propuesto para analizar las prácticas de control de fronteras, por lo que la literatura parece oscilar entre dos lecturas diferentes del papel biopolítico esempeñado por las fronteras. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo reconstruir el debate sobre la securitización de la migración discutiendo críticamente las diferentes perspectivas teóricas sobre la función biopolítica desempeñada por las fronteras que se pueden encontrar en la literatura existente. Una vez completado este primer intento de clarificación conceptual, la última sección del artículo concluye con una descripción de la función desempeñada por las fronteras como "dispositifs" securitarios que representa un intento por efectuar una síntesis de las diferentes perspectivas teóricas críticamente examinadas en las secciones anteriores.

Spurred by the huge changes affecting modern border regime, political theory and contemporary social sciences have begun to think borders beyond our classic geopolitical imagery by illustrating their complex nature of biopolitical “dispositifs” called for the production of subjectivity, the management of mobility and the government of populations. Despite their common foucauldian theoretical matrix, there were profound differences in the type of diagnosis proposed to analyze border control practices, so that the literature seems to oscillate between two different readings of the biopolitical performance played by borders. This paper aims at reconstructing the debate on migration securitization by critically discussing the different theoretical perspectives on the biopolitical function played by borders that can be found in the existing literature. Once completed this preliminary attempt at conceptual clarification, the paper’s final section concludes with a description of the role played by borders as security “dispositifs” that represents an attempt at a synthesis of the different theoretical perspectives critically discussed in the previous sections.

This article explains how, in the late 20th century, Latin America went through a transition in social-control policy that followed and paralleled the area’s transition from a pervasively authoritarian polity to a democratic one bearing a strong neoliberal imprint. Social-control strategies initially designed to serve a national-security doctrine mainly directed against political opponents morphed into strategies for the repressive government of the advanced marginal groups that for the most part live within economically deprived urban areas. The focus here will be on Buenos Aires and Mexico City. These two cases will be used to exemplify the way in which crime and public security in the Latin American megalopolis have become an important part of the political agenda and how the fears and concerns so amplified have stimulated strong neo-authoritarian pressures that in certain ways have stifled police-democratization processes which had got under way in both Argentina and Mexico in the last decade of the 20th century.

Questo libro nasce dalla convinzione, condivisa dai suoi autori, che non sia possibile comprendere il diritto osser- vando solo il diritto. Un giurista che conosca soltanto le «proposizioni giu- ridiche» non sarà mai un buon giuri- sta. Concetti giuridici fondamentali, quali lo stato, la proprietà, i diritti umani, cambiano il loro significato con il mutare della società e, se è vero che il diritto è un fenomeno sociale, non esiste descrizione dei fenomeni giuridici che non implichi una sua os- servazione da prospettive diverse. In nove brevi capitoli, il libro offre una riflessione sui principali temi del di- battito giuridico e politico, ai quali la sociologia del diritto può dare un con- tributo rilevante. È uno strumento uti- le agli studenti di diritto per acquisire una maggiore consapevolezza critica degli istituti giuridici con i quali do- vranno operare; ma è anche una lettu- ra utile a quanti, giuristi o cittadini, vogliano scoprire nuove dimensioni del fenomeno giuridico, messe in om- bra dalle narrazioni spesso autorefe- renziali della scienza giuridica.

Michel Foucault è stato uno dei più sottili studiosi delle forme di potere nelle società moderne. La sua genealogia delle tecnologie politiche ci ha offerto una magistrale descrizione dei meccanismi attraverso i quali gli individui sono sottoposti ad un costante processo di assoggettamento che ne normalizza gli impulsi e ne modella la materia biologica. Tale diagnosi, tuttavia, non è ispirata da un cupo pessimismo oltre il quale non si scorgono vie d'uscita. Se il soggetto è per Foucault sempre costituito, plasmato da determinati dispositivi di sapere/potere, esso è anche in grado di mettere in moto un processo di soggettivazione che rappresenta una forma di resistenza e d'insurrezione contro i poteri di normalizzazione. Potere e resistenza sono dunque inscindibilmente connessi nel processo attraverso cui gli uomini tentano di modellare la loro forma di vita, solo che la possibilità di pensarli passa attraverso un rinnovamento del nostro immaginario politico e giuridico. Il presente volume, oltre ad offrire una mappa per orientarsi nel pensiero politico di Michel Foucault, analizza criticamente il vasto repertorio concettuale su potere, diritto e politica che la sua ricerca ci ha consegnato, cercando di illustrare il senso della sfida teorica lanciata alla filosofia e alla sociologia contemporanee: è possibile pensare potere e resistenza senza ricorrere alle categorie politiche e giuridiche della modernità?

The so-called Arab Spring has thrown out of kilter the precarious balance on which the Euro-Mediterranean border-control regime has been built over the years, illustrating the need to set this regime on a new foundation. The breaking point in the crisis came when the flow of migrants landing on Italian shores in Lampedusa took a spike at the beginning of this year. I analyze how the Italian government manufactured the Lampedusa crisis by matching a discursive rhetoric to government strategy, and I highlight how the sovereign prerogative to define emergency was questioned at both a supranational and a subnational level. I also discuss the main assumption behind securitization theory, exploring the complex web of political and institutional relationships involved in the securitization process and illustrating the ambiguity of the security language deployed by the main securitizing actors. Finally, I look at the possible outcomes of the crisis by looking at the interests involved when it comes to reconfiguring the power to define and govern emergency within the framework of the European border-control regime.