Pieces by Martina Tazzioli

On September 9, 1971, detainees in the Attica prison in New York organised a collective uprising, seizing control of the building and taking hostage 42 prison staff until September 13 when the collective revolt was repressed by police and 33 prisoners were killed. A few weeks later, in the prison of Clairvaux in France, two […]

In April 2021, dozens of asylum seekers were moved back to the Napier Barracks in the UK, after the barracks had been emptied a month earlier following protests and media reports on its unsuitable conditions. Migrant support groups and NGOs denounced the ‘terrible conditions of the substandard accommodation and the effects it is having on […]

Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 304pp., £81.00 hb., £20.27 pb., 978 0 81669 710 6 hb., 978 0 81669 711 3 pb. The implementation of the EU Pact on Migration in September 2020 has marked a further step in the sheer politics […]

In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six […]

Martina Tazzioli [MT] Your latest book, published in 2017, Populisme: le grand ressentiment [‘Populism and deep resentment’], develops a critical reading of the concept and political role of populism today. 1 You offer an explanation for the apparent appeal of populist options in recent elections in Europe and the US, and you distance yourself from […]

Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Zone Books, New York, 2017. 368pp., £32.95 hb., 978 1 93540 886 4 Unequal access to visibility, along with the erasure of traces, determine the partial undetectability of various events of violence, crimes and human rights violations. Such thresholds of detectability consist, according to Eyal […]

‘Solidarity is not a crime.’ This is a slogan that has circulated widely across Europe in response to legal prosecutions and municipal decrees, which, especially in Italy and France, have been intended to act against citizens who provide logistical and humanitarian support to transiting migrants. Such criminalisation of individual acts of solidarity and coordinated platforms […]

Border deaths are not a new phenomenon. Since the early 2000s, the Mediterranean Sea has been named a ‘maritime cemetery’ by activists1 and critical migration scholars. However, over the last two years migrant deaths at the borders have gained more and more attention in the media and EU political debate after two deadly shipwrecks near […]

COMMENTARy ‘people not of our concern’ Rejected refugees in Tunisia Martina tazzioli ‘We stay here and we don’t move.’ This is the refrain in the Choucha refugee camp among those who have been stranded there, in the desert, since 2011. ‘Rejected’ and ‘non-resettled refugees’ are the categories through which these migrant stories have been sorted. […]