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WORK TITLE: Crimes of Peace
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http://anthropology.nd.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-by-alpha/maurizio-albahari/ * http://anthropology.nd.edu/assets/222737/albahari_cv_jan_2017.pdf * http://news.nd.edu/for-the-media/nd-experts/faculty/maurizio-albahari/ * http://keough.nd.edu/profile/maurizio-albahari/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Università Degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, B.A., 2000; University of California at Irvine, M.A., 2002, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Anthropologists, educator, and writer. University of California at Irvine, graduate teaching assistant in the School of Social Studies and graduate research assistant in anthropology, 2001-05, teaching associate, 2005; University of California at San Diego, visiting research fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2005-06, then research associate, 2006-; University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, visiting assistant professor in anthropology, 2007-08, assistant professor of anthropology, 2008-16, associate professor of anthropology and associate professor at the Keogh School of Global Affairs, 2016-. Also affiliated with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Center for Civil and Human Rights.
European Association of Social Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of Europe, American Ethnological Society, Society for Cultural Anthropology.
Recipient of grants and fellowships.
WRITINGS
Contributor to peer-reviewed journals, including Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology Today, International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies, InTransformazione, and Journal on Migration and Human Security. Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Notre Dame magazine, and the Orlando Sentinel. Theme issue editor for Journal of the American Association for Italian Studies, volume 28, number 2, 2010.
SIDELIGHTS
Anthropologist Maurizio Albahari is primarily interested in the tension between humans and structures of power. This interest characterizes his ethnographic analysis of migration and refugee mobility; sovereignty, democracy, and human rights; citizenship, cities, and aesthetics; pluralism and religion in public life; and epistemology. His social-cultural and geopolitical vantage point is centered on the Euro-Mediterranean region, including the Mediterranean Sea. For example, Albahari’s research includes tracing modalities of participatory citizenship and trans-Mediterranean mobilization emerging in the everyday life and aesthetics of maritime spaces.
A contributor to professional journals and popular periodicals, Albahari is also the author of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations and the World’s Deadliest Border. Albahari examines why the Mediterranean Sea is the world’s deadliest border, where at least 25,000 people have lost their lives over approximately the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. The deaths are attributed primarily to people who tried to reach Italy and the rest of Europe but who, for the most part, drowned at sea. Coming from places such as Albania, Middle Eastern countries, and the Horn of Africa, the migrants usually made the dangerous journey across the sea in small boats that were overcrowded. Furthermore, the maritime smugglers who transported the migrants typically placed the passengers’ safety as a low priority.
According to Albahari, many people, from diplomats, bureaucrats, and military sailors to fishermen, priests, and bystanders, have shown little concern for the refugees. Furthermore, even when people and groups try to intervene, the results are often disastrous. Drawing from his own fieldwork in coastal southern Italy and various Mediterranean locales, Albahari transforms “abstract statistics into names and narratives that place the responsibility for the Mediterranean migration crisis in the very heart of liberal democracy,” wrote MBR Bookwatch contributor John Taylor. Writing for Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, K. Staudt called Crimes of Peace an “evocative, beautifully written, but painful-to-read ethnography.”
Albahari examines in depth the policing involved with Mediterranean migrations. “Policing in Albahari’s evocative prose concerns not only the practices of law enforcement officials but also the presence of many other diverse societal actors, ranging from the mayors of coastal towns to the Catholic Church and to individual citizens in the military-humanitarian border assemblage,” wrote Polly Pallister-Wilkins in a review for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford Web site. Pallister-Wilkins went on to note that the approach “works to provide a complex genealogy through which we can make sense of the present.”
Crimes of Peace begins with two chapters focusing on European migration management in terms of its contradictory nature, within both a moral and a political context. Next, Albahari presents a chapter examining territorial sovereignty issues in connection with human rights. He discusses the violence of territorial sovereignty in terms of salvation, explaining how sovereignty’s ability to save people is also tied to sovereignty’s violence. Albahari also discusses sovereignty in terms of preemption, in which migrants can be detained, sometimes unlawfully and without documentation or any official reason. The book’s third section examines political and legal developments in Europe in connection with North African revolutions and Mediterranean migration from 2011 to 2014. Albahari closes with a chapter that discusses what he calls “public citizenship” and the need for a collective civil action to address the migration problem.
Crimes of Peace “powerfully addresses the uncomfortable question of how, between the state’s monopoly of both violence and of rescue, European publics have as of yet abstained from, but could always start, to advance a sovereignty of responsibility,” wrote Council for European Studies Web site contributor Valentina Zagaria. Faculty of Law, University of Oxford Web site contributor Pallister-Wilkins remarked: “While focusing on Italy, the book seeks to address bigger questions of state responsibility and criminality vis-à-vis non-citizens, and in doing so places under scrutiny Europe’s much-heralded values of democracy, human rights, and justice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, K. Staudt, review of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border, p. 1542.
MBR Bookwatch, November, 2015. John Taylor, review of Crimes of Peace.
ONLINE
Council for European Studies Web site, http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/ (March 17, 2016), Valentina Zagaria, review of Crimes of Peace.
Department of Anthropology University of Notre Dame Web site, http://anthropology.nd.edu/ (April 21, 2017), author faculty profile.
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford Web site, https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/ (September 16, 2016), Polly Palmister-Wilkins, review of Crimes of Peace.
Maurizio Albahari
Associate Professor
maurizio_biopic
**Professor Albahari is accepting graduate students for the 2017-2018 Academic Year**
B.A., Università Degli Studi di Firenze, Italy (2000)
M.A., Ph.D., University of California at Irvine (2006)
My research and active participation in broader public sphere discussions delve into the tension between human existence and structures of power. This overarching interest characterizes my teaching/advising (see cv below; graduate students’ applications are welcome) as well as my ethnographic analysis of migration and refugee mobility; sovereignty, democracy, and human rights; citizenship, cities, and aesthetics; pluralism and religion in public life; and epistemology. My social-cultural and geopolitical vantage point is centered on the Euro-Mediterranean region, including the Mediterranean Sea.
I am affiliated with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Italian Studies, and the Center for Civil and Human Rights. I am also a Research Associate at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UC San Diego.
My recent book Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations and the World’s Deadliest Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; paperback, July 2016) focuses on the harrowing bulletin, now spanning two decades, of refugee deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. As refugees intend to reach Europe and put their lives in the hands of smugglers, social actors such as fishermen, diplomats, priests, bureaucrats, armed forces sailors, and hesitant bystanders stagger between indifference and intervention. Who is responsible for spaces that belong to all and to no one, and for persons trapped in the expansive gaps between states? Crimes of Peace scrutinizes global fault lines critically reemerging in the Mediterranean: between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; military and humanitarian intervention; Catholic charity, hospitality, and police detention; transnational smuggling and resilient sovereignty; the universal law of the sea and the proliferating thresholds of a globally parochial world. Recent book reviews have appeared in the International Migration Review, Times Literary Supplement, Cultures et Conflits, and CrImmigration: The Intersection of Criminal Law and Immigration Law.
My current research is tracing modalities of participatory citizenship and trans-Mediterranean mobilization emerging in the everyday life and aesthetics of maritime spaces, as well as of changing cities in Italy and in the region. It seeks to capture the practice of a public citizenship that is urban and local, but not parochial; coherently political, but not institutionalized; transnational, but not national in the first place. Related scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology Today, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology Now, Anthropology News, Social Research, and InTraformazione (please see cv for access to other works and conference activities). I actively pursue the intersections of public scholarship and engaged citizenship through public lectures and contributions in venues including History News Network, openDemocracy, Mobilizing Ideas, Perspektif Magazine, Fox News, and CNN.
Curriculum Vitae
Contact
620 Flanner Hall
574-631-7759
malbahar@nd.edu
Maurizio Albahari
Maurizio Albahari
High Res Photo
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Office: 620 Flanner Hall
Phone: 574-631-7759
Email: malbahar@nd.edu
Visit Website
Areas of Expertise
Migration and refugee mobility in the Euro-Mediterranean region, the Mediterranean Sea and Italy; sovereignty, democracy and human rights; citizenship, cities and aesthetics; pluralism and religion in public life
Albahari is the author of “Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border” (2015, University of Pennsylvania Press; July 2016, paperback). The Times Literary Supplement described the book as “indispensable,” and the International Migration Review as “moving … elegantly written, ethnographically and historically rich.” Albahari has published extensively on the humanitarian, socio-cultural, legal and geopolitical components of the ongoing refugee “crisis,” as well as on European and trans-Mediterranean forms of civic mobilization and migrant integration. His scholarly articles have appeared recently in Anthropology Today, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology Now, Anthropology News, Social Research and InTraformazione. Albahari is also affiliated with Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Italian studies and the Center for Civil and Human Rights.
Maurizio Albahari
Associate Professor of Anthropology; concurrent associate professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs
Areas of expertise: Migration and refugee mobility in the Euro-Mediterranean region, the Mediterranean Sea, and Italy; sovereignty, democracy, and human rights; citizenship, cities, and aesthetics; pluralism and religion in public life.
Maurizio Albahari is associate professor of anthropology and a concurrent associate professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs. Albahari is a social-cultural anthropologist (Ph.D., U.C. Irvine) who explores the tension between human existence and structures of power. He is the author of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of its Series in Human Rights (2015).
Albahari has published extensively on the humanitarian, socio-cultural, legal, and geopolitical components of the ongoing refugee “crisis,” as well as on forms of civic engagement and migrant integration. His current research traces modalities of participatory citizenship and trans-Mediterranean mobilization emerging in the everyday life of maritime spaces, as well as of changing cities in Italy and in the region. It seeks to capture, ethnographically and conceptually, emerging practices of engaged citizenship that might be maritime, urban, and local, but not parochial; coherently political, but not institutionalized; transnational, but not national in the first place.
Albahari’s research has appeared in Anthropology Today, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology News, Social Research, InTraformazione, and the Journal on Migration and Human Security. He also has also written for media outlets including History News Network, openDemocracy, Diritti Globali, Mobilizing Ideas, Perspektif, Fox News, and CNN.
CV: http://anthropology.nd.edu/assets/222737/albahari_cv_jan_2017.pdf
Crimes of Peace
John Taylor
(Nov. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Crimes of Peace
Maurizio Albahari
University of Pennsylvania Press
3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
9780812247473, $65.00, 288pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Among the world's hotly contested, obsessively controlled, and often dangerous borders, none is deadlier than the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2000, at least 25,000 people have lost their lives attempting to reach Italy and the rest of Europe, most by drowning in the Mediterranean. Every day, unauthorized migrants and refugees bound for Europe put their lives in the hands of maritime smugglers, while fishermen, diplomats, priests, bureaucrats, armed forces sailors, and hesitant bystanders waver between indifference and intervention--with harrowing results. In "Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border", Maurizio Albahari (teaches anthropology at the University of Notre Dame) investigates why the Mediterranean Sea is the world's deadliest border, and what alternatives could improve this state of affairs. He also examines the dismal conditions of migrants in transit and the institutional framework in which they move or are physically confined. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of places, people, and European politics, Albahari supplements fieldwork in coastal southern Italy and neighboring Mediterranean locales with a meticulous documentary investigation, transforming abstract statistics into names and narratives that place the responsibility for the Mediterranean migration crisis in the very heart of liberal democracy. Global fault lines are scrutinized: between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; military and humanitarian governance; detention and hospitality; transnational crime and statecraft; the universal law of the sea and the thresholds of a globalized yet parochial world. "Crimes of Peace" illuminates crucial questions of sovereignty and rights: for migrants trying to enter Europe along the Mediterranean shore, the answers are a matter of life or death.
Critique: In view of the current mass migration from the war torn countries of the Middle East to the nations of Europe where more than one and a half millions emigrants and refugees are in often hazardous transit attempting to (or planning to) cross the Mediterranean seas, "Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border" is a very timely contribution to what is looming as they major humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. Informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, impressive in both scope and scholarship, "Crimes of Peace" should be a part of every community and academic library collection. For personal reading lists it should be noted that "Crimes of Peace" is also available in a Kindle edition ($55.21).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taylor, John. "Crimes of Peace." MBR Bookwatch, Nov. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA435638122&it=r&asid=fe673bf221835c11560d183f11fb3448. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A435638122
Albahari, Maurizio. Crimes of peace: Mediterranean migrations at the world's deadliest border
K. Staudt
53.10 (June 2016): p1542.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Albahari, Maurizio. Crimes of peace: Mediterranean migrations at the world's deadliest border. Pennsylvania, 2015. 272p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780812247473 cloth, $65.00; ISBN 9780812291728 ebook, $65.00
(cc) 53-4578
JV8132
MARC
Before the world media focused on Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees fleeing to Europe in 2014-15, many migrants embarked on dangerous journeys in small, overcrowded boats across the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas from Albania, the Arab Spring countries, and the Horn of Africa, only to be met with a contradictory combination of military and humanitarian approaches. In this evocative, beautifully written, but painful-to-read ethnography, anthropologist Albahari (Univ. of Notre Dame) cites a carefully constructed research database of over 25,000 people who perished in these crossings from 2000 to 2014. The author raises many provocative questions, all of which cannot be answered, though readers will surely agonize over the moral and practical consequences of rejection, repatriation to unsafe countries, and death on this scale. From international laws to fisherman's codes to rescue of those in distress at sea, Albahari analyzes a reality of mixed compliance, ethical dilemmas, and tragic consequences. Overall, the book is an indictment of Italian, Maltese, and European Union policies and practices that forge agreements with dictators who collude to prevent migration in the first place. Comparable to Matthew Carr's Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent (2012). Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All public and academic libraries.--K. Staudt, University of Texas at El Paso
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Staudt, K. "Albahari, Maurizio. Crimes of peace: Mediterranean migrations at the world's deadliest border." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1542. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942989&it=r&asid=cfedb945c1a4a666f3434b9f017e3ab2. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942989
Book Review: Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migration at the World’s Deadliest Border
16 Sep 2016
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Guest post by Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam. Polly is on Twitter @PollyWilkins.
Review of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migration at the World’s Deadliest Border by Maurizio Albahari
Given the increasing attention of civil society, politicians, and policy makers to the deaths of people on the move at and beyond Europe’s borders, Crimes of Peace by Maurizio Albahari is a welcome addition to the growing body of academic literature that’s trying to make sense of the intersection of territorial sovereignty, border control, and humanitarian reason. Here, the book title Crimes of Peace requires both some explanation and offers a neat insight into what the book is trying to capture. ‘Crimes of peace’ is taken from the work of Italian psychiatrists Franco Basaglia, the ‘man who closed the asylums,’ and Franca Basaglia Ongaro, who used the phrase crimini di pace to talk about how the pre-emption of potential threats, crime, and deviancy generates actual crimes by the very institutions tasked with care. These crimes come into being through administrative mechanisms of institutional violence and the academic disciplines that structure and lend them legitimacy. For Albahari, ‘crimes of peace speaks to the ambitious, laborious, and resilient administrative, political, and ideological work of maintaining a “system” that has proven crumbling and volatile and that keeps proving unjust, violent and unequal’ (p. 21).
Beautifully written and loaded with the thick description of the anthropologist, the book offers readers a substantive ethnography of the policing of Mediterranean migrations and, in so doing, a sociology of the state itself. Policing in Albahari’s evocative prose concerns not only the practices of law enforcement officials but also the presence of many other diverse societal actors, ranging from the mayors of coastal towns to the Catholic Church and to individual citizens in the military-humanitarian border assemblage. This thick description works to provide a complex genealogy through which we can make sense of the present. Albahari’s research over two decades provides us with a map, tracing how the military-humanitarian border assemblage has come into being, while showing clearly that this genealogy is perhaps longer than many scholars assume. In addition, and as the author himself argues, such ‘rigorous and honest description is analysis’ within anthropology and sociology (at least) and ‘makes pointing to additional explanations superfluous’ (p. 25). Moreover, and this is where I think the book really comes into its own, such rigorous, honest, and unrelenting description, and the careful and repeated cataloguing of deaths, drownings, indifference, negligence, and absence, does more than work as an analysis of a violent military-humanitarian border regime; it acts as a political denunciation that is impossible to ignore.
One of the book’s most welcome contributions is the way Albahari takes us back to the 1990s and Albanian migration to Italy, reminding us that the events of today and their responses are rooted in much longer practices, sensibilities, and politics. What is particularly interesting here―and what runs through the narrative of the book as a whole―is the identification of two themes that have echoed down the decades and will seem very prescient to those who have been studying the recent ‘migration crisis’ and the respective Euro-Mediterranean response: (1) the care and control nexus―or what Albahari calls military-humanitarianism―and (2) the focus on smugglers as responsible for the suffering of people on the move. The author shows us how these two complimentary themes of border policing have genealogies that stretch beyond the ‘recent’ crisis. In so doing, the idea of crisis itself repeatedly comes into question, with Albahari concluding that ‘emergencies do not last two decades. The political priorities, active policies, and structural negligence that perpetuate them as such do’ (p. 203).
Both military-humanitarianism and smugglers as the perpetrators of violence both operate, it becomes clear, through Albahari’s rich description of crime of peace after crime of peace, to render invisible both the experience of people on the move themselves and the violence of territorial sovereignty itself. The agency of people on the move in producing the Euro-Mediterranean as a political space, like waves continually reshaping a beach, is a continuous force as powerful as any member state policy or European directive regarding some new technical mechanism for border control. In addition, the violence of territorial sovereignty, while never discussed in the theoretical detail I’d expect from, say, a political geographer, is nevertheless shown by Albahari to be at the heart of the emergencies by a continuous and unrelenting focus on the victims and a sort of academic cataloguing as bearing witness that in turn becomes an accusation.
Albahari goes beyond this cataloguing, however, by showing how the violence of territorial sovereignty works with what he calls ‘sovereignty as salvation’ where sovereignty’s power to save exists alongside, within, and because of sovereignty’s violence. It’s this sovereignty as salvation that underpins the military-humanitarianism of the Mare Nostrum mission, for example. Meanwhile, the absurdity—for want of a better word—of this assemblage is brought into stark relief through Albahari’s conclusion that questions whether ‘legal, political, symbolic, and physical partition of people can actually be accomplished, humanely or otherwise’ (p. 196). However, a critique of state sovereignty isn’t enough for Albahari. A crime of peace is founded on political and ideological work and, drawing on Arendt here, this work harms and isolates us all as it erodes the socio-political sphere of life. Liberty, then, is only liberty when it’s experienced collectively, when it’s held in the ‘company of equal others’ (p. 201). This book is an important and critical appeal that suggests we should save others not only out of some moral duty to a universal humanity, but also out of a duty to ourselves.
While being of most obvious interest to scholars of migration, humanitarianism, and Europe’s border regime, Crimes of Peace should also appeal to those interested in critical questions of sovereignty and what is means to be a human in the twenty-first century. The book has a very clear geographic focus on the southern Mediterranean and Italy in particular, yet speaks to questions and themes that we see emerging elsewhere as sovereign actors attempt to control territory alongside mobile populations. As such, it provides a useful ethnography of the evolving humanitarian border and will be of interest to all those who wish to explore the intricacies of such an assemblage.
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Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border
In Tunis, on International Migrants Day, I attended a conference entitled “Migration Clinic: Reflecting on Care Across the Mediterranean.”[1] The event had been organized by Psychologues Solidaires, a group of young Tunisian psychologists who engage with what they view as mental health issues pertaining to their society, such as those of the “harqin”—a local term referring to young men who “burn” Europe’s frontiers by emigrating via irregular means—and of the loved ones they leave behind. For Psychologues Solidaires, therapeutic support for migrants and for their families must be thought through in tandem with a critique of the political and legal contexts that de facto illegalize those wishing to travel. They take pathologies related to migration to be inherently linked to their political settings.
This standpoint resonates with the work of Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, whose ideas lie at the core of Maurizio Albahari’s Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. Working in another borderland, that between Italy and Yugoslavia, which at the time sat on the threshold of the Iron Curtain, Basaglia revolutionized psychiatry in the 70s by exposing the state’s approach to psychiatric care as institutionalized violence. In his book, Albahari draws on what Basaglia and his wife Franca Ongaro termed “crimini di pace”: those “crimes of peace” committed by states in the name of security that serve to safeguard the status quo. Albahari thus embarks on a detailed and historically grounded analysis of the ways in which the Italian state’s management of migration perpetrates and reproduces structural violence, injustice, and death. Based on ten years of research in southern Italy and in various other Mediterranean sites, Albahari weaves together oral testimonies, journalism, NGO reports, discourse analysis, and legal documents to uncover the workings of today’s well-oiled European migration governance. While focusing on Italy, the book seeks to address bigger questions of state responsibility and criminality vis-à-vis non-citizens, and in doing so places under scrutiny Europe’s much-heralded values of democracy, human rights, and justice.
In the first section of the book, “Journeys,” Albahari takes readers back to the 1990s when, as a teenager living in Apulia (the Italian region situated at the heel of the peninsula’s boot), he witnessed the first maritime arrivals deemed unauthorized by the Italian government, those of Albanians fleeing the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. This is an important precedent to remind readers that the Mediterranean border did not just recently turn deadly in the aftermath of a summer characterized by huge media interest in migration. It is precisely the deeply unjust and yet recurrent, cyclical aspect of so-called “invasions,” shipwrecks, imprisonments, and deaths that interest Albahari. Employing a lucid and quasi-journalistic prose, he traces twenty years of seasonally proclaimed “emergencies” in Europe with regards to immigration, and shows that there is nothing preordained or incidental about the ways in which migration governance has developed since the 90s. The relative novelty of maritime migration at that time and the lack of legislation left more room for those inhabiting Southern European coastlines to organize spontaneously in the face of arrivals. Yet this does not mean that today, with all the legal machinery in place, alternatives are not available for states—or sought after directly by citizens (as the author hints to in Chapter 6).
The first two chapters, “Genealogies of Care and Confinement” and “Genealogies of Rescue and Pushbacks,” aim to shed light on the contradictions that have come to be at the heart of the moral and political spheres of European migration management. The author moves from shipwreck to shipwreck, relentlessly exposing the crimes of peace committed by governments across the political spectrum. As he documents events, readers unfamiliar with recent Mediterranean history discover how Italian bilateral agreements with Albania are replicated with Libya and Tunisia—thereby externalizing migration control to countries outside of the EU, how military involvement in securing the border gradually becomes the norm, how charities and church groups start getting paid by the state to run migration holding centers, and how ultimately humanitarianism and militarization have become two faces of the same coin when it comes to border control.
The chapters described above set the scene for “Middle Worlds”—arguably the most theoretically stimulating section of the book, perhaps because it is also the most ethnographically grounded. Here, Albahari explores the links between sovereignty and salvation (Chapter 3), and between sovereignty and preemption (Chapter 4). He goes through the laws that have resulted in deterring civilian involvement in rescue at sea, and offers a critique of the media and politicians’ discourses on human smuggling. He argues both are complicit in European citizens’ inaction in the face of migrant deaths and of profoundly unfair treatment of irregularized non-citizens. The Italian military cum humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum of 2013-2014 exemplifies for Albahari the way in which the state governs in a situation of “impossible sovereignty” (a term he borrows from Mae Ngai, 2004).
Following these reflections, Chapter 4 begins with a poignant vignette from Albahari’s fieldwork in 2005, when he was volunteering in The National Centre for the Identification of Asylum Seekers in Apulia. A group of Bulgarian nationals (which at the time was not an EU member state) were taken to the Center and detained unlawfully for a month despite their claim that they were just tourists, and their wish to return to their lives and jobs in Bulgaria. They were detained preemptively, and no document or official reason was ever provided by Italian police authorities with regards to their detention. Albahari asks once more how it is that blatantly unjust situations such as this are allowed to occur routinely without sparking civilian dissent and intervention. He shows how the living conditions in holding centers are not designed to address people’s needs, and that the preemptive power and knowledge these facilities conjure up are in effect unlawful and are based upon simplifications that are all but coherent. Ultimately, “undocumented border practices,” which stand at the opposite end of what is thought of as the ideal-type of legal and bureaucratic state, are actually at the heart of state practice and power. Albahari thus shows the connection between the detention of migrants and the inaction of locals. He then goes from discussing the preemptive properties of sovereignty, to also highlighting the preemptive urges of academia—the itch to identify, categorize, and attribute meaning in advance—thereby elaborating a spot-on critique of how both result in stunting alternatives, in obfuscating different possibilities, and in ultimately failing to take people and their choices seriously.
In the third and final section, “Borders Adrift,” the author brings us back to 2011 to outline the deadly effects of political and legal developments in Europe that emerged in response to revolutions in North Africa. Newspaper articles and his fieldwork on the Italian island of Lampedusa and in the Manduria camp in Apulia, Albahari work together to assemble major shipwrecks; official mourning visits; military operations with colonialist Latin names; migrant protests; indefinite leaves to remain granted solely to the dead; Nobel Prizes; boats left to die; NATO interventions; and monuments to the deceased, conjuring up a complex portrait of Mediterranean migration up to 2014.
Despite the comprehensiveness and critical perceptiveness of this account, I often wished the picture could have been infused with more ethnographic detail, that the author would have jumped more often between the larger story, which we have all been able to follow in the papers, and those smaller scale events that populate it and that show how its contradictions are lived on the ground. In documenting crimes of peace related to migration over a twenty year period, the book at times lacks a sense of how, as Sarah Green suggests for the Aegean maritime border, “border-ness was historically variable” and so experienced differently by its inhabitants over time (264).
In the concluding chapter of the book, Albahari advocates for more focus on instances of collective civil action, of “public citizenship,” in his words. Attending to the role of European citizens in this way must also require an understanding of how “today’s performance of border exists in the company of past performances of border that linger, not only in people’s memories, activities and understandings, but also in theories, places and things” (Green 264). Since new ways of relating cannot emerge in a vacuum, we must reckon with implications of residents in the state’s crimes of peace. Crimes of Peace is a valuable read for anyone interested in the very concept of Europe and of the rule of law. It powerfully addresses the uncomfortable question of how, between the state’s monopoly of both violence and of rescue, European publics have as of yet abstained from, but could always start, to advance a sovereignty of responsibility.
Reviewed by Valentina Zagaria, London School of Economics and Political Science
Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border
by Maurizio Albahari
University of Pennsylvania Press
Hardcover/272 pages/2015
ISBN: 0812247477