Arab Springs Making Space: Territoriality and Moral Geographies for Asylum Seekers in Italy

This paper engages the instabilities of the category of ‘asylum’ looking at Arab Uprisings' mobility to Italy and highlighting the contested encounter between governmental practices in managing asylum seekers and the embodied experiences of mobility from Libya and Tunisia to Italy in 2011–12. Focusing on asylum application processing, our analysis tackles its sorting rationalities (asylum seekers versus irregular migrants, country of birth versus country of refuge), its produced spatialities (processing centers and ‘humanitarian emergency zones’), and its moral predicaments (how vulnerability and protection are put to work). Our aim is to contribute to a political epistemology of asylum whereby asylum's normative instabilities are mobilized to trouble its exclusionary boundaries and the profiling of the refugee as the alter ego figure of the citizen. The paper revolves around four episodes: it opens attending to an epistemological challenge; it stages a critical engagement with the Italian ‘North Africa Emergency’ in the second and third section; finally, it puts this analysis to work on the terrain of a political struggle to demand a right to presence for Libyan war evacuees