ABSTRACT
Between the last years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first, the crisis of welfare culture has produced deep transformations on different spheres of public policies. Especially after the attacks of 11 September 2001 the sensation of constant fear and social insecurity has increased and several measures guided by the security obsession have been deployed in a great part of Western countries. The state of ‘global war’ – which before 2001 was not such explicitly recognized (Dal Lago 2005a) – the ‘preventive’ attacks, the militarization of the penal system, the practice of torture and its transterritorialization, the fight against ‘illegal’ migrants 1 and, in brief, the spread of fear and emergencies feed back demands for harder severity. Western Europe and the Euro-Mediterranean countries have been the receivers of such policies. The mentioned global war led to the ‘need’ of securing the threatened cities, to control everything that happens there and the people who stay, enter or exit. So, public spaces (from the city to specific places of transit like airports or border posts), but also individuals, are the centre of the proliferating mechanisms and strategies of control.
