Leiden University Student Repository

Bonica, Matteo (2017)

Italy’s response to boat migrants from Albania in the 1990’s and Libya in the 2000’s compared

Master thesis | History (MA)

This thesis compares the Italian reception of boat migrants from Albania in the 1900’s and Libya in the 2000’s. The first aim of the thesis is to examine the migration streams from Albania to Italy, focusing on the years 1991 and 1997, and from Libya to Italy in 2005/6 and 2008/10. The purpose is to understand how Italy reacted to the various cases and why the strategies implemented by the various governments at diverse moments of history were so different. The second, but definitely no less important objective of this thesis, is to test whether or not the gap hypothesis could be applied to Italy’s policies towards boat migrants. By doing so, this thesis could shed new light on whether there was a possible gap in the outcome of the policies implemented during the various years by Italy due to European influence. The hypothesis is that there could be a gap caused by the increasingly more powerful EU and European Court of Human Rights of Strasbourg in the field of migration policy...Show moreThis thesis compares the Italian reception of boat migrants from Albania in the 1900’s and Libya in the 2000’s. The first aim of the thesis is to examine the migration streams from Albania to Italy, focusing on the years 1991 and 1997, and from Libya to Italy in 2005/6 and 2008/10. The purpose is to understand how Italy reacted to the various cases and why the strategies implemented by the various governments at diverse moments of history were so different. The second, but definitely no less important objective of this thesis, is to test whether or not the gap hypothesis could be applied to Italy’s policies towards boat migrants. By doing so, this thesis could shed new light on whether there was a possible gap in the outcome of the policies implemented during the various years by Italy due to European influence. The hypothesis is that there could be a gap caused by the increasingly more powerful EU and European Court of Human Rights of Strasbourg in the field of migration policy implementation, a policy field historically strongly bonded with state sovereignty.Show less

Migrations

Italy

Libya

Albania

Boat migrations

Boat people

European Union

Ngo

Push backs

Gap hypotesis

Author

Bonica, Matteo

Note

The central research question of this thesis is: Why did Italy adopt contrasting approaches to the different migration waves of boat migrants leaving from Albania in the 1990s and from Libya in the2000s? An important sub-question is: did the Italian governments have complete autonomy or did supranational institutions such as the EU and the ECtHR create a gap between what the Italian governments wanted to do and what they could actually put into practice?

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence

Supervisors

Glynn, Irial

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en