Unbounding Europe. Bordering and the politics of Mediterranean solidarity in Sicily and Tunisia.

At a moment of pervasive border fortification worldwide, Mediterranean borderlands are often cast as laboratories for hybrid claims to identity, and consequently alternative understandings of belonging to those proposed by bounded nationalisms. Drawing on research on colonial and contemporary migration and celebrations of multicultural coexistence in the central Mediterranean corridor between Sicily and Tunisia, the talk argues that rather than sites of transformative politics, borderlands may function as sites of reassertion and defense of precarious Europeanness at a time of heightened economic insecurity. Tracing the changing positionality of Sicilians in shifting geographies of uneven development and bordering in the Euro-Mediterranean region, the talk argues that ambiguous borderland politics are a result of Sicily’s simultaneous role as an external fortified border and a long-internally marginalized periphery. The talk also argues that institutional celebrations of Mediterranean coexistence may serve to simultaneously depoliticize structural inequalities, while naturalizing symbolic hierarchies between groups. Rather than idealizing mixing as an alternative to bordered nationalism, the talk calls for a historical and relational account of how current material and symbolic borders came to be, as well as the conditions under which effective solidarity can emerge.

Dr. Ilaria Giglioli is an Assistant Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Giglioli is a political geographer of migration and borders, with a focus on the Mediterranean basin (Southern Europe and North Africa). Her research examines the creation, legitimization, and contestation of borders, and the relationship between border fortification, territorial inequality, and social difference. She is particularly interested in how peripheral regions and internally racialized populations are incorporated into the nation-state, and in the possibilities and limits of solidarity across lines of uneven development and racialized difference.

Her book, Unbounding Europe: Bordering and the Politics of Mediterranean Solidarity in Sicily and Tunisia (Cornell University Press, 2025), traces the shifting positionality of Sicilians and Tunisians across colonial and contemporary geographies of material and symbolic bordering in the central Mediterranean, arguing against idealizations of Mediterranean coexistence and calling for a historical and relational account of the naturalization of the Mediterranean border. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming special issue in ACME on the Southern Mediterranean as a laboratory of border externalization.