Spaces of Governmentality Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings [Hardcover]

Tazzioli offers a refreshing analysis of the contradictions of the mainstream narrative of the Arab uprisings as a delayed march toward freedom. Her original insights reveal that European applause of the Tunisian democratic revolution was soon replaced with a profound anxiety about people leaving Tunisia for Europe in order to exercise their newly found freedoms. She provides different snapshots of movements from and into Tunisia in the aftermath of the uprising: Tunisians wanting to travel in Europe without hindrance, Eritreans protesting their treatment in an isolated Italian island, Syrians stopped in the French city of Calais, and third-country nationals escaping from Libya only to be stranded in a desert camp in Tunisia. She builds on Michel Foucaults notion of governmentality to offer a critique of the European migration regime characterized by illiberal practices of detention and deportation. Her criticism of using the country of origin to distinguish between legitimate asylum seekers and illegitimate economic migrants is especially compelling. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.This is a unique work. I know of few other books in the booming field of migration studies that are as deeply philosophical in their outlook, as politically astute in their criticism, and as carefully situated in a given conjuncture - in this case the Arab uprisings? and their reverberations within the field of human mobility - as Spaces of Governmentality. When it comes to the politics of migration today the threshold of the intolerable remains too high. Tazzioli's ?impressive book will be an ally to those struggling to lower it.Spaces of Governmentality is an exciting and important critical intervention into the study of borders and migration, positively overflowing with a vibrant new repertoire of concepts, images, and imaginations. Tazziolis refreshing analysis is strategically aligned with the unsettling disruptions and turbulence generated by lD