BECAMP · Beyond the camp: border regimes, enduring liminality and everyday geopolitics of migration in Italy and Spain

Beyond the camp: border regimes, enduring liminality and everyday geopolitics of migration in Italy and Spain

The project BeCAMP is a comparative anthropological study of the reception system for asylum seekers in two European countries of first arrival, Italy and Spain. The starting assumption was that borders, rather than mere geopolitical demarcations separating the territories of different nation-states, are complex systems stretching towards the outside (border externalisation) through the entanglement of the military with the humanitarian. Borders also expand towards the inside of national territories (border internalisation) through the workings of the legal-administrative apparatus managing the lives of illegalised and racialised people. Nonetheless, the latter phenomenon has been understudied in comparison to the former. The project sought to fill this gap by investigating how the border follows the migrants after the crossing, particularly by critically addressing the migrants' reception system as an enactment and a constitutive factor of a more comprehensive border regime. As the project is now concluded, the researcher's experience on the ground, where she observed the daily workings of the reception system, validated and reinforced the initial idea of the project to look for the metamorphoses of the camp in other modes of containment beyond detention. Showing the effects of different policies on the reception system and living conditions of asylum seekers and illegalised migrants was intended as a way to build a counter-narrative and dismantle the bad image often associated with these groups. This determined the timeliness of this project: it addressed a multi-layered phenomenon that not only affects migrants and the respective national societies but also has profound implications for the endurance of the whole European project.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union