Abstract
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has radically changed the political and social scenario in most countries of the world. Italy has tackled the health crisis by resorting to a variegated set of legal means: the declaration of the State of Health Emergency was followed by many decrees and administrative provisions, while a previously unknown strategy, lockdown, was experimented. For the first time in national history, people were forced to stay at home, except for special reasons. While Italy opted for this kind of solution, based on confinement and the restriction of individual mobility, other countries, especially in southeast Asia, chose a different and apparently opposed strategy, centered on contact tracing and controlled mobility. This project aims at questioning what in both scholarly and public debate is commonly perceived as an antithesis between these two paradigms of health crisis management. The polarization and rigid dualism will be questioned by showing the vast common ground they share both from a sociological, legal and historical point of view. To this end, an interdisciplinary approach will be taken: the historical reconstruction of the genealogy of these different practices and techniques will go hand in hand with a sociological study of how they actually work at different social levels, and with a legal insight into their implications in terms of rights and liberties. Moreover, both practices of restriction and techniques of mobility tracing will be framed through the same concept of “health bordering”, where the “-ing” is meant to capture the active and performative nature of the legal, institutional and technological tools devised to enforce sanitary borders. In this regard, the concept of “health bordering” will be defined as a dynamic process from which new social, institutional and legal borders arise, changing preexisting social landscapes and reshaping individual autonomy. It will therefore denote a wide set of strategies, technologies and legal as well as administrative techniques aimed at knowing, governing and regulating individuals’ movement to face health situations. By following this triple perspective, the project will make it clear how, far from being polar opposites, “confining” and “tracing” strategies are just variations on a same range of possibilities. Despite their manifest differences, both of them share a common element: the need for control. Confining and tracing therefore, can be considered as complementary options that can be mixed in different proportions to obtain different institutional recipes, but that virtually never occur without each other. Finalità e risultati attesi: The two key themes of the main project will be mirrored in a historical perspective: 1) by showing the interweaving of 'static' (quarantine, confinement) and 'dynamic' (cordons sanitaire, health seals, health passports, bills of lading, letters of recommendation) techniques within the solutions deployed in the pre-twentieth century era. With respect to the established idea of an Ancien Regime where the government of public health was predominated by static solutions (Foucault), it will be necessary to emphasise the dynamic component as well, which is well present but so far relatively neglected. Both static and dynamic devices responded to the same need for a controlled management of the movement of goods, animals and people aimed at never bringing it to a definitive halt. From this perspective, both the history of passports and identity documents in the modern age (Caplan e Tropey, Groebner, Torpey) and that of health borders and tracing techniques (Baldwin, Bashford) remain under-researched, it is therefore a primary objective of this research to begin to fill this gap. 2) by showing the productive and performative (and not only coercive) nature of the health techniques examined, emphasising how they determine precise real-life effects and contribute to creating new circuits of institutional collaboration and information-sharing beyond political borders; or, vice versa, constituting fundamental instruments for transforming previously permeable or disputed border zones into impassable boundaries. The development of health confining devices will be reconsidered within the framework of Eurasian areas and through a review of the historiographical debate, a re-reading of political and medico-political literature with particular attention to the 18th and 19th centuries, and by focusing on the comparative reconstruction of emblematic case studies (Ancient Italian States, 18th century Western Balkans, 19th century colonial India) (Harrison, Panzac, Roksandic), conducted on archival documents between the two macro- and micro-historical levels. 3) Freedom, privacy and security. The performativity of health bordering has not only to do with the action of socio-technical devices but also with that of legal and administrative acts, initiatives, and procedures. Our project will show how this performative aspect of legal instruments deeply affects important and sensitive aspects of social life as it restricts, or however conditions, several individual freedoms and liberties and reshapes the boundaries between the public and the private sphere. In the name of protecting public goods such as security, public order, public health and hygiene, institutional actors are legitimised to intervene by limiting and controlling movement and restricting the possibility of living the space. In order to better do that, they have to fulfil strategies of identification even more precise and intrusive, which can affect the ways people participate to several spheres of social and economic life. To this regard, our project will legally analyse the different performative effects of the various health bordering strategies and technologies and will provide an assessment of their consequences in terms of i) reduction of individual agency; ii) changes in the dynamic of people’s mobility; iii) impact of identification procedures on individual identity; iiii) effects on the participation to the labour market. Particularly, confinement practices explicitly and directly constrain movement and make people undergo to intrusive identification procedures which could undermine trust towards authorities, compromise solidarity and negatively affect the sense of belonging to the national community. Tracing practices, apparently, leave people more autonomy, even though they have an impact on the ways individuals can actually live the space. However, both strategies of health bordering prevent full participation in several aspects of social life, especially in economic activities. At certain conditions, therefore, controls and restrictions on mobility are institutional interventions which are made, or however allowed, by legal and administrative acts that condition important and sensitive dimensions of individual action which theoretically are protected by laws and regulations. Our project will provide analytical tools which, from a legal perspective, could allow scholars and practitioners to handle these potential contradictions. All the transformations resulting from health bordering, moreover, involve a deep reformulation of the notion of privacy, which plays a strategic role as it represents the joining link between the personal and the social dimension (Whitman). Specifically, it is a right which constitutes the prerequisite for exercising other civil, social and political rights, and hence is the pivotal element of a new form of citizenship which is able to strengthen not only individual protection but also citizens’ participation to public life (Resta, Rodotà). However, when, especially during health emergencies, technological, statistical and administrative devices are deployed to track individual movements and collect information and personal data, privacy is highly at risk. Consequently, in order to actually allow people to express their thoughts, act freely and claim their rights, formal and substantial guarantees have to be provided. Privacy, indeed, is a public and not a private fact: any interference in the private sphere potentially weakens and threatens the entire democratic system (Marella, Marini). Health bordering practices therefore have to be carefully scrutinized in order to be considered as compatible with the constitutional frame and not triggering a conflict between public health and privacy. Our project will analyse how the various kinds of health bordering strategies and technologies affect privacy and will provide an assessment of the potential risks associated with the different kinds of interventions deployed to face pandemics. Methodology. Our aim is to cross different traditions of research with their distinct methods and research techniques. We consider appropriate to propose a research project that connects different scientific and methodological skills in order to analyse common themes. In particular, the methodological lines that will be interwoven are: - sociological analysis (theoretical analysis, discourse analysis, document analysis, interviews with key informants) of health bordering practices meant as both socio-legal and socio-technical devices; - historical and historical-political analysis (archival analysis) of health bordering practices; - legal analysis of the institutional and constitutional impact of health bordering practices. Results. The main outputs of the project will be: • working papers (to be published within the end of the project) • a collective book • articles in scientific journals (one interdisciplinary and one for each unit) • articles in high divulgation scientific journals (three) • a website
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Giuseppe Sciara
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali
Coordinatore:
Università degli Studi ROMA TRE(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 201.931,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 103.882,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
18/10/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
