Between Surveillance and Exile: Biopolitics and the Roma in Italy

Abstract

This article argues that the recent treatment of the Roma population in Italy can be best understood within the context of international debates on the rising use of biopolitics to govern refugees, illegal immigrants and other undesired groups. The study examines the evolution of Italy’s policy of containing Roma in camps since the 1980s and of subjecting them to increasing surveillance, culminating in the drive to collect the fingerprints of the entire ethnically-defined group in 2008 and carry out mass deportations of foreign Roma. It demonstrates that although Italy’s centre-right government has intensified official anti-Roma discrimination, these recent events are a coherent progression in a strategy of biopolitical control of Roma which has been evolving in Italy – and especially in the capital – for nearly thirty years. Drawing particularly on Giorgio Agamben’s discussions of homo sacer and the state of exception, it is argued here that a campaign is underway in Italy to force Roma to reside in relatively safe but isolated staterun camps in which their private lives are under the constant scrutiny and control of the authorities, or to become internal exiles, bare life in a condition of constant flight from the police and vigilante attacks. The article emphasises that while Roma are increasingly subjected to the two polarities of surveillance and exile, the process of stripping them of their political rights and exerting power over their bodies is still evolving and taking