How cities shape refugee centres: ‘deservingness’ and ‘good aid’ in a Sicilian town

ABSTRACT

While scholars have devoted increasing attention to the dynamics at play within refugee centres, analyses have often been driven by the ‘exceptionality’ of these institutions, overlooking the ways in which what happens inside the centres is largely connected to what goes on outside of them. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a Sicilian refugee centre and the surrounding town, this paper investigates the extent to which economic, historical and political configurations inform how local actors conceptualise aid and how they interact with refugees on a daily basis. Overall, the study found that both centre workers and the general population mobilise moral arguments that can only be understood in light of dynamics that are external to the centre itself. These findings ultimately point to the extent to which state-level dysfunctions influence popular images of what a ‘deserving’ refugee might look like as well as local understandings of the ‘right way’ of providing help.

KEYWORDS:

• Hostility
• suffering
• moral economy
• asylum
• Italy

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Riccardo Ciavolella for his thoughtful guidance and supervision of my Master’s dissertation on which this article is based, and to Silvia Pasquetti for her invaluable support and generous advice at various stages of this research. I am also very grateful to Didier Fassin for his critical reading and thoughtful comments and to Michel Agier for his insights and encouragement. I owe special thanks to Théo Leschevin, Hadrien Malier and Enrico Cioni for being so generous with their time in discussing and revising previous drafts. Thank you also to the two anonymous peer reviewers whose comments helped improve and clarify this work. Needless to say, this research would not have been possible without the contribution of the people I met in Paese. I am deeply grateful to them for accepting to share their time and thoughts with me. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While this is also the case of other SPRAR centres, it is not a rule. Each centre is autonomous in its hiring criteria.

2. For this reason, throughout this paper I refer to the SPRAR staff as ‘centre workers’ (or simply ‘workers’) as a way to distinguish them from professional ‘social workers’, ‘humanitarian workers’ or ‘civil servants’.

3. Further information about the SPRAR network is available at: http://www.sprar.it/english.

4. After I left, some told me they had finally received payment for one month, but not the full period.

5. That said, one worker who had already worked in the Sicilian public sector told me she had just been paid for a job completed four years previous, something that gives a better sense of the order of magnitude of the delays.

6. Sometimes they would speak of a general ‘anti-white racism’ that supposedly prevented migrants from accepting workers’ explanations.

7. The speaker references the SPRAR’s funding of driving classes and final exams for 5 refugees.

8. These comments should be read in relation to media reports revealing widespread corruption in the Italian refugee reception system (e.g. Sironi 2014).