Based on more than ten years of research in Italy, Albahari’s first book provides valuable insights into how the emergencies and the escalation of border deaths unfolding in the Mediterranean are political technologies embedded in the ‘democratic’ project of Europe, rather than being exceptions to the rule of law. The author draws his main argument from the work of the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, a key figure in the struggle for the abolition of psychiatric confinement in Italy. In Basaglia’s thought (Reference Basaglia and Basaglia Ongaro1975), state practices of control of the mentally ill were ‘crimes of peace’, institutional crimes perpetrated with the aim of pre-empting potential threats by individuals. Albahari brings this insight into the anthropology of the state and its borders, suggesting ‘crimes of peace’ as an analytical tool able to inform debates around the institutional violence of border control.
Through this lens, the author traces back the history of Italian and EU pre-emptive policies regarding maritime migration throughout the last twenty-five years, and crafts an ‘artisanal ethnography’ (p. 30) moving back and forth between ethnographic observations, policies, media representations and other sources. The book opens with a vivid picture of the different actors involved in the ‘border spectacle’ (De Genova 2013)—a humanitarian and military spectacle at the same time—spanning from the navy, to the smugglers, the migrants themselves, NGOs, the police and intelligence-gathering organisations. Analysing both the mechanisms and the conditions of possibility of landings and shipwrecks that occurred between 1991 and 2013, the author assembles a complex picture of state and inter-state mechanisms of control, as well as civil society’s involvement, analysing in depth both the moralities of ‘salvation’ at stake, and the ambiguous political economy surrounding migration management, from energy politics, to arms exports, and local surveillance/military and reception/detention industries. Thus, the regional focus on Italy and on the (dis)continuities between the Albanian migration of the 1990s and the following ‘waves’ of arrivals from North Africa from the early 2000s to the Arab Spring, becomes a paradigmatic standpoint enabling a wider analysis of the European governance of migration.
The book is divided into three sections: the first, ‘Journeys’, is intertwined with the biography of the author himself, who, as a young boy living in the southern Italian region of Apulia, witnessed the first ‘irregular’ arrivals from Albania. The first two chapters trace a historical genealogy of the intersections between care and confinement and between rescue and pushbacks—thus exposing how the military and humanitarian logic are two facets of the same political technique, which has increasingly become a constitutive element of contemporary European borders also beyond the Mediterranean.
Section 2, ‘Middle Passages’ focuses on two aspects of sovereignty: its moral facet promising ‘salvation’ and its undocumented facet working towards pre-emption. Through an in-depth analysis of the ‘political grammar of shipwreck representation’ (p. 96), Albahari shows how not only border control calls for more regulation, but also border humanitarianism calls for more militarisation and more sovereignty. Moreover, moving beyond the scene of rescue and guiding the reader into the experience of administrative detention, the chapter shows also how ‘undocumentedness’ is a prerogative of sovereignty, since the latter is not held accountable for arbitrary practices inflicted on non-citizens (p. 134).
The third and final section, ‘Borders Adrift’, looks at more recent developments unfolding throughout the upheavals in North Africa and at the renewed centrality of Lampedusa in the mechanisms of militarisation and humanitarisation of the Mediterranean; the author concludes advocating for more ‘public citizenship’, focusing on the role of citizens in opposing state-perpetrated ‘crimes of peace’.
While the book often dwells on technicalities, the actual ‘fabric of sovereignty’ (p. 10), its ethnographic breadth also sheds light on how this fabric affects and intersects with the lived experience of maritime migrants and border transgressors tout court. By focusing on pre-emptive policies and on arbitrary practices of ‘attribution of intention’ (p. 129), Albahari pays particular attention to the way the ‘migrant’ is ‘manufactured (…) through biopolitical and bureaucratic processes’ (p. 128), rather than being an ontological given. Travellers, the book suggests, are translated into immigrants through a racist logic that intersects also with class dimensions. One episode taken from chapter 4 particularly clarifies how the epistemic violence of academia itself is not neutral to such translation. Here, a family of Bulgarian citizens of Turkish ethnicity is arbitrarily detained on the grounds of attempting to settle in the EU irregularly. While exposing the ‘undocumentedness’ and ‘illegality’ of the state, Albahari’s analysis does not get trapped either in ‘pre-emption’, or in ‘redemption’, as he recognises that both forms of knowledge are produced from the standpoint of authority and lie at the core of the partitioning of migrants. Instead, the author actively chooses to ‘trust ethnography’: indeed, uncovering the ‘truth’—that is to say, suggesting to the reader whether the Bulgarian travellers were or were not ‘really’ planning to settle irregularly in Italy or Greece—would not change the fact that border control acts through ‘attribution’ as a tool of production of knowledge around ‘migrants’.
Yet, while powerfully exposing the complicity of the epistemic violence of academia and other institutions, the book itself risks fixing migrants at the moment of border crossing and/or detention, so that the characters of the book often lack subjectivity, and their stories reproduce particular patterns of representation of those classified as ‘migrants’. In spite of this lack, Crimes of Peace is a valuable contribution that unsettles the reader from any comfortable neutral position and reminds us, to use the words of Walter Benjamin (1968), that ‘the current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible (…) is not the beginning of knowledge,’ but rather the product of contingent social, political and historical processes.
