PRIN 2022 - SHUT-MED

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed human mobility governance, warranting a reappraisal of how migration is constructed as a threat. SHUT-MED examines how irregular mobility across the Central Mediterranean has been securitized between 2000 and 2023, why the framing of migrants as threats has changed across countries and over time, and the impact of such processes on the practices enacted by the military, law enforcement, humanitarian, and commercial actors operating at the borders of Niger, Libya, Malta, and Italy. By tracing how migration control discourses and practices diffuse across actors, countries, and borders along the Central Mediterranean corridor through externalization and privatization, SHUT-MED does not only examine the governance of human mobility, but also tracks the mobility of human mobility governance.

The project investigates the co-constitution of border control discourses and practices by combining a textual analysis of media articles and official documents on irregular migration with a visual analysis of the pictures used to illustrate these texts. This innovative content analysis will be combined with semi-structured interviews and ethnographic research at state borders. Integrating these different methods combines the expertise of the PI and the vice-PI, two under-40 scholars with a strong research record of on irregular migration and expertise in content analysis, visuality, and fieldwork at Europe’s Southern borders, but also harnesses the strengths of both linguistic and practice theory-based approaches to securitization. Investigating the securitization of human mobility before and after the Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics allows for reconceptualizing the widely-held argument that coexisting narratives of threat and vulnerability frame irregular migrants as both a risk and at risk. When health risks are evoked, threat and vulnerability become mutually reinforcing categories that transform the threatened into threats irrespective of their intention to harm host societies. During global health crises, migrants may thus be constructed are threats not simply despite their vulnerability, but precisely because of it.

By reframing the relationships between discourse and practice as well as the interplay between threat and vulnerability narratives, SHUT-MED provides an ambitious theoretical contribution to international relations. Studying the mobility of border security practices across countries and actors also provides insights into norm diffusion and European governance by conditionality, highlighting the agency of countries in the Global South and migrants themselves in reinterpreting, contesting and resisting externally-imposed mobility governance agendas. Research findings will be disseminated through various channels, including the creation of a permanent observatory of human mobility that will serve as a hub for dialogue between scholars, practitioners, and activists from both sides of the Mediterranean.

ENTE PROMOTORE: Unione Europea - MUR

NOME PROGETTO: PRIN 2022 Securitizing Human Transit across the Central Mediterranean migratory corridor: shifting mobility governance discourses and practices in Italy, Malta, Libya, and Niger (SHUT-MED); COD MUR: 2022NKLAFW

PERIODO E DURATA: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025

FINANZIAMENTO: Missione 4 “Istruzione e Ricerca” del Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza ed in particolare la componente C2 – investimento 1.1, Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN) – del Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, dedicata ai Progetti di ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale - CUP J53D23005760006

COORDINATORE: Università degli Studi di Messina  

REFERENTI SSSA: Dr. Luca Raineri, Prof. Francesco Strazzari, Dott.ssa Chiara Loschi