RISULTATI RICERCA

The author describes how steps taken by the institutions to tackle migratory flows are connoted by essentially repressive mindsets that seem to be in breach of fundamental human rights, following an emergency logic that, on the one hand, is in practice incapable of controlling a phenomenon that is becoming structural in the process of globalisation and, on the other, obstructs adequate theoretical elaboration of the problems and thus knowledge of the varied phenomenology of migratory flows, making it difficult to prepare suitable tools for their legal and social regulation.

Over the last decade or so, foreign victims of human trafficking have been on the receiving end of a variety of complex and contradictory rules and regulations at both supranational and national levels, a process that has peaked here in Italy with the reinterpretation of the crime as a case of enslavement. The figure of the foreign victim, the passive object of heinous crimes who is often forced to submit to humiliating practices, including forced prostitution and its exploitation, is nevertheless still difficult to locate in the sociological taxonomy of the images of foreigners, just as the legal status attributed to him or her in the legal framework of the Italian state is uncertain and ambiguous. This paper therefore aims to clarify the reasons why it is so difficult to achieve a focus on the victims of human trafficking in the context of the socio-legal reconstruction of the law of migration, through a critique of the violence that these victims suffer. Lastly, it aims to offer a potential interpretation for reconstructing the social relations of those foreigners (also victims) who manage to break free of the power of organised crime and of the manipulations of states, in terms of a living law whose salient characteristics are non-violent.

Excision (female genital mutilation) is a very ancient practice whose exact origins are still unknown. The aims of this essay are: 1) To explain the main reasons why some immigrants still perpetrate it on their daughters, also showing how this practice changes with the geographical area and with time; 2) To analyse the legal response to this practice in France, through a qualitative study of the judgements pronounced by the main criminal courts of the country: the Tribunal correctionnel and the Cour d’Assises.

In order to answer this question, the article refers to Philip Pettit’s theory of the collective actor. Pettit conceptually challenges the widespread eliminativism concerning the idea of the collective actor. The alternative view taken into account is that of Michael Bratman, as it shows the influence of ideological precepts when tackling the question of collective actors.The aim of this comparison is to identify two elements in particular. The first is that, if the starting point of the elaboration coincides with an excessively individualistic precept, it will be hard to recognise the conceptual and mental autonomy that collective actors display in practice. The second is that, on the basis of Pettit’s ideas, it might be reasonable to attribute conceptual, cultural and social personality to specific post-national collective entities. This would be a rather significant outcome in a multicultural perspective that calls for a legal form of regulation.

Migration to the city of Genoa has increased noticeably in recent years, to the point that there are now some 40,000 foreigners living there (and this figure only takes legal residents into account). From a numerical point of view, the Ecuadorean community is the largest of all, constituting a very active presence in the city and displaying quite unusual characteristics with regard to methods of arrival and permanence. The tendency for increasing proportions of women to number among Ecuadorean immigrants, their employment as domestic servants and their arrival through ethnic networks are the main subjects debated in this article. It ends with some considerations of immigration into Genoa for the future, also from a legal standpoint, though its validity is not restricted to the city itself, as immigration certainly constitutes a challenge both for the native population and for the civil authorities throughout Italy.

This paper aims at incorporating the concept of migration into mainstream thinking and revealing that there are better ways of understanding it: rather than a sectoral phenomenon taking place within a specific social sub-system, it should be seen as an integral part of contemporary society. Accordingly, the theoretical stake when describing, understanding and researching migration points to the creation of concepts and categories for imagining societal structure and its change as a whole. The paper considers three conceptual shifts in the study of migration, constituting three progressive steps to overcome the curbs in the sociological capacity to imagine the phenomenon. The first one comprises overcoming the distinction between immigration and migration, entailing a passage from a nation state-based perspective of migration to a systemic (or ecological) view of migration. The nation state-based frame is already insufficient for understanding the broader socio-economic implications of migration, not to mention for intervening and regulating it. The second step is to overcome the assumption that migration is an essentially one-way process oriented towards the integration and final settlement of migrants. In this respect, integration can be regarded not so much as a ‘sociological problem’, i.e. a problem sociology faces in the description of external social phenomena, but more as a ‘problem of sociology’, i.e. a problem that calls sociology into question as a discipline, with both its conceptual apparatus and its links to the social world. Finally, the third step is to overcome a naturalist conception of territory and to undertake the consequent shift towards a relational conception of territory. This means that territory is not land, but a social process that need not be anchored in space, as it cuts across scale levels, visibility thresholds and actors themselves. A relational conception of territory ultimately enables migration to be regarded integrally as legal pluralism, radically understood, i.e. legal pluralism not simply as a coexistence of concurrent legal orders, but as a multiplicity of relational forms that shape the architecture of human interaction at each scale level.

Italy’s temporary holding centres constitute a sort of black hole for the law. Established to detain migrants pending their expulsion from Italian and European Union soil, they shot into the news headlines and the socio-political and legal debate because, in addition to institutionalising reception, they have drained all meaning from one of the most important articles in the Italian Constitution (The freedom of the individual is inviolable). This is because migrants are detained for up to sixty days in these temporary holding centres by virtue of the Bossi-Fini Act solely because of having taken the step of migrating, which under normal circumstances should not constitute a crime. There is such scanty literature about this topic that the only way to achieve an understanding of its sociological nature is to make a comparative study of other models of detention, such as the open prison, the closed prison or closed institutions. This method of analysis immediately shifts the focus to the types of society that establish forms of custody of these kinds. It therefore follows that the contemporary societies that establish temporary holding centres to contain and manage migratory flows seem to be obsessed by the risk and by an almost pathological need for security which, however, only makes itself felt with regard to certain types of social actors. These actors are stigmatised and considered to be socially dangerous or liable to become so merely because they have no fixed position in society and in the working world. The dynamics of contemporary societies therefore tend to construct black-and-white mindsets (citizen v. non-citizen, legal v. illegal etc.) which, as such, produce new forms of exclusion, as well as an evident “dual regime” in law. As a result, temporary holding centres become the paradigmatic space of a society shaped by a world outside and another world of the internees, the latter regularly managed by a staff dedicated to what goes by the name of humanitarial work: a society shaped by a real, happy and productive world and by a world populated by discarded lives.

The aim of this article is to discuss forced marriages in Belgium, France, Italy and Sweden. Admitting the difficulty of defining what constitutes a forced marriage and the psychological, medical, legal and material consequences of such unions, the analysis then looks at civil and penal law in the light of internationally recognised regulations in the field of human rights and demonstrates the importance of taking political action to prevent such forced marriages, reduce their number and provide the basis for an effective commitment.