Governare attraverso la paura: le politiche migratorie emergenziali e securitarie come paradigma

This paper discusses Danilo Zolo’s thesis on the link between growing complexity and insecurity in contemporary western societies. Within this frame, the article devotes a special attention to the role played by the political-administrative system in over-reducing complexity and thus in threatening democracy. First the essay reconstructs the reasoning developed by Zolo in Il Principato democratico: growing complexity generates insecurity; the political-administrative system regulates fear by reducing complexity; reducing complexity in authoritarian ways puts the quality of democracy at risk. Secondly it shows how these arguments have been deeply reviewed, about twenty years later, in the essay Sulla paura in order to take into account the end of organized capitalism and its transition to neoliberal global capitalism: within the new accumulation regime, the political-administrative system tends to govern through fear instead of governing with the aim of reducing fear. In conclusion, the article shows how this theoretical background can be used in order to critically assess contemporary migration policies and discourses based on highly selective border controls as a way to govern through insecurity. This mechanism can be seen at work within the Italian legal system: “state of emergency” linked to migration and law. Decree-laws on “immigration and security” not only develop a thick system of control on certain categories of vulnerable people; they also support the development of an authoritarian way of governing society based on the production and manipulation of fear.