Spaces of Governmentality

Martina Tazzioli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. She holds a PhD in Politics from Goldsmiths University of London, UK. She is co-editor of ‘Spaces in Migration’ (2012) and ‘Foucault and the History of our Present’ (2014).

Tazzioli offers a refreshing analysis of the contradictions of the mainstream narrative of the Arab uprisings as a delayed march toward freedom. Her original insights reveal that European applause of the Tunisian democratic revolution was soon replaced with a profound anxiety about people leaving Tunisia for Europe in order to exercise their newly found freedoms. She provides different snapshots of movements from and into Tunisia in the aftermath of the uprising: Tunisians wanting to travel in Europe without hindrance, Eritreans protesting their treatment in an isolated Italian island, Syrians stopped in the French city of Calais, and third-country nationals escaping from Libya only to be stranded in a desert camp in Tunisia. She builds on Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to offer a critique of the European migration regime characterized by illiberal practices of detention and deportation. Her criticism of using the country of origin to distinguish between ‘legitimate’ asylum seekers and ‘illegitimate’ economic migrants is especially compelling. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.

• Introduction / 1. Border interruptions: Working with Foucault between migrant upheavals and spaces of governmentality / 2. Troubling mobilities: Migrants’ discordant practices of freedom and the power’s hold over time and life / 3. “Which Europe?”: migrants’ uneven geographies and counter-mapping at the limits of representation / 4. Democracy as a strategy of containment and migration in crisis in revolutionized Tunisia / 5. The desultory politics of mobility: Mediterranean patchy invisibility and the humanitarian-military border / 6. Unspeakable maps: Toward a (non-cartographic) countermapping gaze / Conclusions