ABSTRACT
This chapter examines insurrectional African migrants and refugee practices that highlight and disturb the legal and spatial relationship between institutionalized zones of capture and the city of Rome. There are two reasons to study the city of Rome as the brick door in relation to the contemporary European policies of migration control. First, the route that goes from East and Central Africa toward Libya via the Sahara Desert has been, at least until the summer and now again, the most trafficked and policed in North Africa and therefore the most dangerous. Second, it explores what is more, as a long time ago at the apex of its grandeur, Rome's vocation is linked to that of the Mediterranean. The chapter proposes one of the new frontiers of Europe within a fundamental paradox of the city of Rome: an inexorable expansion of buildings together with a mounting rejection and marginalization of an emergent immigrant population that is vital to the city's expansion.
