Migrazioni, sicurezza, confini nella teoria sociale contemporanea

Abstract

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.