Exploring the inclusion exclusion dynamic : Kurdish refugees in Italy

The PhD project explores whether the prevalent refugee discourse provides adequate analytical tools for understanding the policies and practices of reception as developed in Italy in response to Kurdish refugees since November 1997. The thesis will suggest that dominant state-centric analyses are unsatisfactory and that an important step forward can be achieved through a multidisciplinary approach, which will allow us not simply to reveal how reception works, both de jure and de facto, but also to problematise the way in which refugees are conceptualised and located within the receiving society. An exploration of the dynamic of inclusion, exclusion and in-between will demonstrate why analyses of reception policies do concern IR discipline; why refugees are not necessarily inscribed within systems of exclusion; why the (taken for granted) homogeneity of the political community needs to be contested; why the dominant political opposition between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ is highly problematic; why the representation of the refugee as the ‘negative other’ is unsatisfactory and why spaces of inclusion, exclusion and in-between are constantly negotiated and modified according to the way in which political, socio-economic, ethical and diplomatic contingencies are understood and tackled both at the local and national level.