Ghettos as Peripheral Political Spaces: Migration Governance, Informality and Racialised Labour in Southern Italy

This paper examines Italy’s migrant ghettos as a distinct and analytically significant form of non-urban and peripheral political space where migration governance is enacted, negotiated, and contested. While much of migration research centres on urban settings, many of the most consequential struggles around mobility in Europe unfold in rural districts, marginal agricultural zones, and areas historically shaped by uneven development. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Foggia district of the Puglia region in Southern Italy, and specifically on the informal settlements of Borgo Mezzanone and Ghana House, the paper advances an understanding of peripheral spaces not as governance “voids” but as arenas in which authority, labour, and belonging are continually renegotiated. Southern Italy represents a paradigmatic example of how internal colonial histories intersect with contemporary labour and migration regimes. The agricultural ghettos crystallise multiple layers of peripherality: geographical marginalisation, the long-standing subordination of the Italian South within the national political economy, the structural precarisation of agricultural labour, and the racialised positioning of Sub-Saharan migrants within supply chains. These overlapping peripheries produce a governance landscape where multiple actors, municipal administrations, prefectures, police, NGOs, employers, and informal work intermediaries known as caporali, exercise fragmented, overlapping, or contradictory forms of authority. State presence is thus uneven: assertive in policing mobility, minimal in welfare provision, and structurally reliant on informality for labour market functioning. The paper argues that these governance configurations make the ghettos a highly productive site for understanding multi-level tensions in migration politics. Peripheral municipalities often lack resources to manage large seasonal populations yet become responsible for implementing national or EU directives. Meanwhile, discretionary practices by local authorities, employers, and police produce shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. These dynamics reveal how migration governance is not simply “downscaled” to localities but is actively reshaped by the political economies and social hierarchies of peripheral spaces. Crucially, the paper foregrounds the agency of migrants themselves. Far from being passive governance recipients, ghetto residents engage in everyday forms of political and spatial agency: creating informal infrastructures, organising mutual support networks, coordinating labour mobility, and developing and participating in communicative projects such as Radio Ghetto. These practices challenge dominant portrayals of migrants as vulnerable or immobilised, showing instead how peripheral spaces are co-produced through the interplay of structural constraint and collective action. By conceptualising the ghettos as peripheral political formations situated at the nexus of racial capitalism, agricultural labour demand, and uneven territorial development, this contribution speaks directly to the workshop’s aim of expanding theoretical and empirical understandings of migration governance beyond the city. It argues that rural settlements like those in Foggia are not passive frontiers of state policy but active, contested arenas where labour regimes, mobility politics, and alternative forms of governance are continuously made and remade.