ABSTRACT
This book presents an in-depth study of immigrant activism and struggles in Italy, with a particular focus on conflicts and alliances with Italian pro-immigrant groups in four Italian cities in the North: Reggio Emilia, Bologna, Brescia, and Bergamo. This chapter explains how the book improves our understanding of immigrant activism in receiving societies, with a particular focus on local dynamics. Through the use of case studies of mobilizations that took place between 2010 and 2011, after the financial crisis that started in 2008 and the introduction of new restrictive immigration laws in 2008 and 2009, the book provides evidence of how we can improve current research. I anticipate that current explanations of variations in forms of civic and political participation and rights claims of immigrant groups in highly hostile environments are insufficient to account for the variety of mobilizations across cities. For this reason, I adopt an actor-oriented approach to analyze a multiplicity of pro-immigrant groups with different political orientations and their interactions with immigrant activists. We also need to put more emphasis on the role of immigrant activists to explain how they contribute to shaping local dynamics by interacting with other actors in a stronger position of power.
