Resource Frontiers

What are the terms of accumulation and resistance to capitalist extraction?

How are the rights of access to the world’s so-called ‘natural resources’ formulated, negotiated and contested?

How are the boundaries between legitimate or il|legitimate extraction, production and exchange drawn, reproduced and maintained in today’s increasingly globalized spaces of resource commodification?

Who is included?

Who is excluded?

What kinds of politics are involved?

What kinds of spatial connections and disconnections do we see emerging?

My research focuses on the geographies of so-called resource frontiers: environments where public authority over the commodification of ‘nature’ is fundamentally being questioned, reconfigured and reformulated. More specifically, I am asking how the relations between capital, labour, & public authority are actively negotiated and renegotiated in the globalized spaces of supply chain capitalism.

My interest has brought me, amongst others, to study the political ecologies of minerals and agricultural commodity markets and their violent reconfigurations in Central Africa (Democratic republic of Congo) as well as in Southern Europe (Italy). These engagements have enabled me to raise wider questions about the limits of sovereign power, both in a geographical and anthropological sense. In all these cases, I regard the boundary between legitimate or il|legitimate authority as a liminal zone, a grey space where regulations and norms are fundamentally reformulated.

These personal pictures above refer to my research in commodity frontiers in Central Africa -particularly minerals extraction in Eastern DRC- and in Southern Europe -particularly agro-food production (in Puglia’s and Basilicata’s industrialised tomato fields). In this research I continue to combine my theoretical interests with a dedication to in-depth longitudinal ethnographic study among the people involved in such commodity production as well as a strong public engagement beyond the confines of policy-oriented research.

I am currently employed as senior assistant professor in Geography at the University of Bologna. For contact details please visit my university web page.

Recent Posts

The Natural Border

I am happy to announce the publication of my new monograph The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean, with Cornell University Press.

Feel free to write me to obtain a 30% discount and/or ask any further information related to book promotion activities and planned events.

The book tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. In the book, I show how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies.

Taking the example of the tomato—a typical ‘Made in Italy’ commodity— I ask myself asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the ‘naturalization’ of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power—and thus, as The Natural Border demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.

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