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Coloniality and Migration Governance

Continuations and Evolutions

 2 CFU

26 and 27 May 2025

Law Department, University of Palermo, Italy

 

This two-day conference aims to reflect on the relationship between coloniality and migration on different levels, observing lines of continuity between colonialism and current migration and asylum policies and postulating that European migration governance may well be the backbone of contemporary forms of colonialism based on extractivism, assimilationism, agency dispossession and a renewed narrative of Western superiority.

The conference will focus on the manifestation of all this in Italy, the current laboratory of border externalization and extraterritorial sovereignty in the repatriation centers.

The following questions will drive the various presentations and debates. Are contemporary migrations towards Europe an after-effect of colonialism? How has the legacy of colonialism shaped the international human mobility control system? Is the unequal enjoyment of the right to move rooted in colonial, colonising movements? In the post-independence era of African and Asian nations, can Europe’s governance of migration be seen as a way of maintaining advantage and control over ex-European colonies, territories, governments and populations? How does contemporary control of human flows recall the narratives, practices, norms, and patterns constructed in the colonial era? Can integration policies and paternalistic welfarism be seen as forms of domestication echoing that of the colonial regime and its assimilation policies? Is university discourse on migrations still waiting to be decolonised?

We’ll aim to discuss these issues in formal and non-formal ways, combining lectures at the university with horizontal approaches to critical debate like walks and workshops with grass-roots activists, encouraging collective thought processes and learning beyond the confines of traditional academic settings.

 

Scientific board: Clelia Bartoli, Alice Nortier, Aldo Schiavello, Alessandra Sciurba, Massimo Starita

  

26 May 2025 – 9.00/13.00

Migration Law and Policies: Continuations of Colonialism and the Actual Manifestation of Coloniality

 

Chair: Aldo Schiavello and Clelia Bartoli, University of Palermo

• Luca Puddu, University of Palermo

• Thomas Spijkerboer, Gent University

• Simona Taliani, Centro Frantz Fanon, Università Orientale di Napoli

• Shahram Khosravi, University of Stockolm

• Kolar Aparna, University of Helsinki

 

26 May 2025 – 14.30/16.30

Focus: the Italy-Albania Asylum Deal and its Historical Legacy

 

Chair: Massimo Starita, Università di Palermo

• Fabio Bego, Aisseco
• Silvia Albano, Judge in the immigration section of the Rome court
• Luigi Nuzzo, Università del Salento
• Luca Masera, Università di Brescia

 

27 May 2025 – 10.00/13.00

Focus: The Politics of Italian Migration in North Africa

 

Chair: Alessandra Sciurba, Università di Palermo

• Chiara Pagano, University of Graz
• David Yambo, Refugees in Lybia
• Antonio Manganella, Avocats Sans Frontieres, in charge for the Euromediterranean area
• Sara Prestianni, Euromed Right

 

27 May 2025 – 14.30/17.00

“Word Cafè” with grassroots organisations

 

Chair: Alice Nortier, Paris 1 Sorbonne University