Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings. By Martina Tazzioli

Abstract

This book addresses the political and spatial consequences of migration in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, with a focus on North Africa, particularly Tunisia, and southern Europe. Its approach is densely theoretical, drawing frequently on Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’ and on a ‘counter-mapping’ strategy, a method of radical cartography that aims to reveal ‘the struggle over (in)visibility upon which migration governmentality is predicated’ (p.xiii). This analytical framework is deployed to show migration as ‘an object of knowledge and government’ and a ‘contested strugglefield’ (p.xii). Tazzioli’s claim is that individual practices of cross-Mediterranean movement can be seen both as a freedom won by revolutionary uprisings and as a challenge to the European migration regime’s techniques and technologies of control. Chapter 1 establishes the book’s Foucauldian lens, offering an exploration of migration governmentality and ‘an investigation of the politics of truth at stake in the government of migrations’ (p.2). It argues that the power relations and resistances that characterise the migration strugglefield extend beyond physical borders and into the realm of discourse. Tazzioli describes ‘a discursive order which traces a moral geography by sorting people into exclusionary channels of mobility and corridors of layered protection’ (p.20, emphasis in original), and offers an eloquent though familiar critique of the politics of refugee status determination as a form of ‘governing through truth’ (p.29). Juridical categories, she suggests, are formed by an interpretative grid that is overlaid onto the speech and movements of people seeking asylum and designates the ‘truth’ and value of their claims. It is this same critical approach to governmental processes of legitimation and partition that leads Tazzioli largely to avoid reproducing such categories. Instead, she tends to write about migration as a whole while acknowledging that a wide range of subjective conditions motivate departures from Tunisia to Europe, with the Syrian and Libyan conflicts as important context. An explanatory note to this effect appears on the book’s penultimate page, but would have been better placed in the introduction.