Alpine Border Conflicts: Migration and Social Polarization in the Everyday Life of Intra-EU Borders (Crossing Borders in a Global World: Applying . Migration, Displacement, and Social Change)

Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers’ mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states’ debt, Alpine Border Conflicts focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies.

Cecilia Vergnano is social anthropologist and is FWO senior postdoctoral fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, member of the Observatorio de Antropologia del Conflicto Urbano (University of Barcelona) and the Observatoire des Migrations des Alpes Maritimes (University of Nice).