The Hotspot Approach in Italy: A Genealogy of Border Exceptionalism

Abstract

The Italy-Albania Protocol established in November 2023 centres operating under Italian jurisdiction outside EU territory, marking a qualitative transformation in European border governance. This paper deploys genealogical analysis to trace how border procedures evolved from territorial exception to extraterritorial projection, interrogating the mutations in governmental rationality that rendered such arrangements acceptable. Drawing upon multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2024 across key sites of border control in the central Mediterranean - Pozzallo, Lampedusa, Pantelleria, Tunisia, and the French-Italian alpine border - combined with systematic documentary analysis of policy frameworks and Standard Operating Procedures, the article identifies three distinct phases. The first phase (2015-2019) establishes checkpointization of the external border, where the hotspot functions as intraterritorial extrajudicial space - a threshold where legal order is suspended de facto. The second phase (2020-2023) witnesses fragmentation and mobility, as screening procedures splinter across quarantine ships and temporary sites, whilst "landings at the internal border" reveal renationalization of border control through programmed inefficiency. The third phase (2024-present) encompasses extraterritorialization: EU procedures enacted outside EU territory through disaggregated sovereignty. Rather than interpreting the Albania centres through operational effectiveness, the genealogical lens illuminates how exceptional measures normalized across a decade now materialize beyond territorial boundaries, with a shift from checkpoint to extraterritorial enclave.