Mediterranean migration governance and the role of the Italian coast guard: varying political understandings of maritime operations in the 2010s

IF 2.2 Q2 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Contemporary Italian Politics Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI:10.1080/23248823.2022.2057046

S. Panebianco

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT Situated on the EU’s Mediterranean borders, Italy provides the setting for a case study aimed at understanding Mediterranean migration governance in the 2010s. We adopt an actor-centred approach to explore how the Italian coast guard’s humanitarian agency was constrained and reshaped in a changed environment. We draw upon the sense-making of Italy’s political leaders and its impact on the humanitarian practices of the Italian coast guard. Migration politics is marked by political discourses framing interests and priorities according to the sense-making of the political leadership. In the last decade, Italian political leaders have constructed and reconstructed discourses on migration, providing a different understanding of the technical capacity to respond to crisis situations. In a few years, the Mare Nostrum operation was dismantled and replaced by a restrictive ‘closed-ports’ strategy to guarantee border control. Humanitarian operations at sea, a pillar of migration governance in the mid-2010s, were de facto constrained. Focusing on the pivotal role of the Italian coast guard in conducting maritime operations, we explain why its role of vanguard in developing humanitarian practices was marginalized over time.

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地中海移民治理与意大利海岸警卫队的作用：对2010年代海上行动的不同政治理解

摘要意大利位于欧盟地中海边界，为了解2010年代地中海移民管理提供了一个案例研究的背景。我们采用以行动者为中心的方法来探索意大利海岸警卫队的人道主义机构是如何在不断变化的环境中受到约束和重塑的。我们借鉴了意大利政治领导人的理智及其对意大利海岸警卫队人道主义做法的影响。移民政治的特点是政治话语根据政治领导层的理解来确定利益和优先事项。在过去的十年里，意大利政治领导人构建和重建了关于移民的论述，对应对危机局势的技术能力有了不同的理解。几年后，Mare Nostrum行动被拆除，取而代之的是一项限制性的“封闭港口”战略，以确保边境控制。海上人道主义行动是2010年代中期移民治理的支柱，但事实上受到了限制。围绕意大利海岸警卫队在开展海上行动中的关键作用，我们解释了为什么它在发展人道主义做法方面的先锋作用随着时间的推移而被边缘化。

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来源期刊

Contemporary Italian Politics Social Sciences-Political Science and International Relations

CiteScore

4.40

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Contemporary Italian Politics, formerly Bulletin of Italian Politics, is a political science journal aimed at academics and policy makers as well as others with a professional or intellectual interest in the politics of Italy. The journal has two main aims: Firstly, to provide rigorous analysis, in the English language, about the politics of what is one of the European Union’s four largest states in terms of population and Gross Domestic Product. We seek to do this aware that too often those in the English-speaking world looking for incisive analysis and insight into the latest trends and developments in Italian politics are likely to be stymied by two contrasting difficulties. On the one hand, they can turn to the daily and weekly print media. Here they will find information on the latest developments, sure enough; but much of it is likely to lack the incisiveness of academic writing and may even be straightforwardly inaccurate. On the other hand, readers can turn either to general political science journals – but here they will have to face the issue of fragmented information – or to specific journals on Italy – in which case they will find that politics is considered only insofar as it is part of the broader field of modern Italian studies[...] The second aim follows from the first insofar as, in seeking to achieve it, we hope thereby to provide analysis that readers will find genuinely useful. With research funding bodies of all kinds giving increasing emphasis to knowledge transfer and increasingly demanding of applicants that they demonstrate the relevance of what they are doing to non-academic ‘end users’, political scientists have a self-interested motive for attempting a closer engagement with outside practitioners.