Everyday statelessness in Italy: status, rights, and camps

ABSTRACT

This article is an invitation to reflect sociologically on statelessness, to date mostly absent from an otherwise burgeoning sociological debate on citizenship, rights, and legal status. Millions of stateless people worldwide confirm the need for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary forms of membership attentive to the interplay of different rights regimes. While the article characterizes the Roma as the undeserving stateless, so alien to the dominant imagination of citizenship as to be even denied access to the procedure for status recognition, it also argues that the experience of Roma families who have lived for years in Italy in absence of any formal citizenship complicates Hannah Arendt's insightful characterization of stateless people as rightless. The lack of any citizenship does not make the Roma bare life, it reveals instead political subjectivity as an embodied and emplaced process, where subjects actively negotiate their position in the world and vis-à-vis the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Statelessness
• Roma
• citizenship
• legal status
• state
• Italy

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the editors of this Special Issue and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on the earlier version of this paper. This article was written while I was a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence; thank you to Anna Triandafyllidou and colleagues at the European University Institute for being such gracious and generous hosts. Thanks also to Margaret Okole for editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This research was carried out as part of the ‘(Re)conceptualizing Stateless Diasporas in the EU’ project in collaboration with Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Barzoo Eliassi at the Oxford Department of International Development. The project is part of the Leverhulme-funded Oxford Diasporas Programme led by Professor Robin Cohen.

ORCID

Nando Sigona http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7882-1851

Notes

1. Interviews with Roma families in which at least one member of the family had applied for recognition as stateless were carried out in Naples, Rome, and Pisa. I wish to thank for their contributions to the research: Stacy Topouzova, Francesca Saudino, Antonio Ardolino, Sergio Bontempelli, Alice Cirucci, and Giulia Perin.

2. The debate over the boundaries between de facto and de jure statelessness has significant implication for UNHCR's mandate; for an overview of recent debate see Massey (2010). (http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4bbf387d2.pdf) and UNHCR 2014 http://www.unhcr.org/53b698ab9.html.

3. Compared to other European countries, the Romani population in Italy is small, numbering 160,000–180,000 people (Piasere 2012) and representing approximately 0.25–0.30 per cent of the population of Italy. As a result of two different historical migration flows, nowadays there are two main groups within the Romani population in Italy: Roma and Sinti; less than half of these people have Italian citizenship. Among the Roma there are several different communities: some settled in Italy centuries ago and are Italian citizens, others arrived more recently and have more precarious legal status. More recent arrivals came mainly from former Yugoslavia and Romania. Within the foreign-born Romani population in Italy, many fled their country of origin for reasons of war, extreme poverty, and racial discrimination. A substantial number live under the constant threat of being evicted and forcibly removed due to difficulties in renewing residence papers or complying with requirements set by Italian immigration legislation (ERRC 2000; Sigona 2002; Simoni 2005).

4. All names have been changed.

5. From Adi's account it was unclear if the criminal record had an impact on the decision to deny status recognition.