Choosing to be political: some reflections on youth activism in the US

This article explores youth activism in the US, not through the lens of collective action, but as the product of personal choices. By drawing on existentialism, and particularly on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, this article proposes to shift the focus of the debate from youths’ collective action to the self – a conscious self that observes, perceives and makes sense of the surrounding world through personal experience. It is this conscious self that decides how, and whether, to intervene against the ‘wrong’ that the self experiences. In this perspective, it is not only the acts (of citizenship) that matter, but the conscious process through which the self chooses to become political. Such an understanding will ultimately help uncover not only how the undocumented act and how to conceptualise their acts but also how they perceive and experience their current status and who they want to become.     

Refugees, Institutional Invisibility, and Self-Help Strategies: Evaluating Kurdish Experience in Rome

The article investigates the way in which asylum reception hasbeen organized in Italy in response to Kurdish refugees. Theanalysis suggests that Italy, as compared to northern Europeancountries, has failed to develop a public system of reception,which has been counterbalanced by the parallel development ofa private one. The abandonment of the vast majority of asylumseekers to their own survival strategies should read as an institutionalfailure to develop adequate reception policies and serious protectionplans. The ‘Kurdish crisis’ has exposed the importanceof state intervention in providing reception, which could nolonger be left to local NGOs, self-help strategies and migrants'networks. In particular, the article looks at the way in whichItaly, during the 1990s, has organized refugee reception; the(non) reception system in the municipality of Rome; and finallysome private survival strategies that Kurdish asylum seekershave resorted to once no public help was made available to them.     

Speaking through the body: detention and bodily resistance in Italy

This work reflects on the character of the modalities that non-status migrants are deploying in the context of current politics of the camp, with special attention to the Italian context. It will suggest that once the possibilities of dissent through the voice (the political tool par excellence in a liberal democracy, and one associated primarily with rationality and the capacity for reason) are foreclosed, migrants tend to resort to another powerful tool: their own body. Detainees have made their bodies speak by resorting to practices of self-mutilation, hunger strike, suicide attempts, and lips and eyes sewing. Detainees' violent acts of dissent are not dissimilar from the violent modalities used, a few centuries earlier, by some enslaved people who chose liberty through death. The aim is not so much to make comparison between the two figures, but to emphasise the way in which, under conditions of extreme control, subjugation or unfreedom, acts of dissent and resistance – and thus acts of politics, as articulated in Rancière's concept of dissensus – are not necessarily enacted through democratic practices but, on the contrary, through whatever modalities are available to them, including violent (self-harm) modalities.     

Budget Deficits and Coalition Governments

This paper shows that compromise between different ideologicalmotivations within multiparty governments may result in a biastoward running budget deficits even if all parties in thecoalition prefer balanced budgets. The deficit bias increases withthe degree of ``polarization'' of the ideological motivations andgenerally decreases with the degree of concentration of powerwithin the government. Although the analysis is conducted assuminga proportional representation electoral system, the results willalso apply to majoritarian systems if the winning party comprisesideologically different constituencies. The relationship betweenbudget deficits and multiparty governments is investigated usingdata from a sample of eight European Union countries for the period1971–1990. Analysis on pooled data is partly in line with the theory.Time series within country analysis is less favorable: we findclear support to the theory only in the case of Italy.