Deaths Attempting to Enter…Italy

RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES
Spring Quarter 2006

SILENT DEATH AND THE MORAL STATE: MAKING BORDERS AND SOVEREIGNTY AT EUROPE’S SOUTHERN MARITIME EDGES

Tuesday, April 18, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Eleanor Roosevelt College Administration Building
Conference Room 115, First Floor
Reception to follow

Presenter:
MAURIZIO ALBAHARI
Visiting Research Fellow, CCIS
Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, University of California-Irvine

Commentator:EIKO THIELEMANNGuest Scholar, CCIS
Assistant Professor in European Politics and Policy
London School of Economics, United Kingdom

Abstract:
The Italian Minister of the Interior has recently declared that according to his knowledge, 1,167 clandestine immigrants” have drowned in the last decade trying to reach Italy on boats and larger vessels.  Certain non-governmental sources estimate the death toll of would-be migrants in the Mediterranean, including asylum seekers, at 6,000.  This presentation, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, overviews the chronicle of death off the coasts of southern Italy from 1996 to the present.  This death is “silent,” in the sense that it is both soundless and unspoken. Building on the analysis of certain key incidents, as well as the responses of Italian and EU institutions and the mass media, Albahari explores how lethal border practices become morally and politically acceptable and legally enforceable.  He proposes that the EU and the state, in the daily struggle against would-be migrants and asylum seekers, find in the de facto power to “let die” a key prerogative of their sovereignty.  At the same time, they also propose themselves as agents of humanitarianism in rescue operations, finding in this moral intervention a paradoxical legitimization of border enforcement.

About the Presenter:
Maurizio Albahari is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California-Irvine, where he is completing his dissertation and has been offering a comparative course on contemporary migration.  His interests include migration, religion/secularism, and the public sphere; nationalism and other forms of identitarian engagement; and ethics, biopolitics, and the politics of space, and culture and identity in the United States and Europe.  Albahari received his B.A. in Letters and Philosophy from the University of Florence, Italy.  During 2006-07, he will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame.

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