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Francesco Della Puppa & Giuliana Sanò (eds.), Stuck and Exploited. 
Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Italy Between Exclusion, Discrimination 
and Struggles
Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2021, 362 pp.
At a time when the guarantees that international protection seemed to offer are 
being constantly undermined across the Global North, Stuck and Exploited offers 
a comprehensive approach to the current processes of retrenchment of reception 
rights and the dismantlement of reception structures through an in-depth anal-
ysis of the Italian case. With a strong ethnographic lens, Della Puppa and Sanò’s 
edited volume compiles 16 contributions of academics, activists, and practitioners 
working in the field of asylum to examine the processes of exclusion and discrim-
ination of asylum seekers in their passage through an asylum reception system 
marked by arbitrariness, neglect, and opacity. Divided into two parts, the first part 
of the volume examines the national developments and characteristics of the Italian 
asylum reception system in its insertion within wider tendencies of migration gover-
nance through reception in the Global North. However, it does not fail to deepen in 
the particularities of different Italian regions and municipalities, highlighting how 
the implementation of national and EU policy is interpreted and reinterpreted at 
the local level and how, within this context, the discretion of “street-level bureau-
crats,” as described by Lipsky, and other intermediaries, as well as the actions of 
social movements or the civil society can become a tool for “debordering” or yet 
another strategy of further control over migrants’ lives. In this sense, one of the main 
contributions of this book is that it offers a perspective of migration governance 
from the ground, including the voices of activists, practitioners, and academics alike, 
and proposes a strong ethnographic lens that captures the intimacy and experience 
of refugee reception. It complicates and nuances the field beyond essentializing 
narratives and discourses over refugee reception that plague the public discourse 
and, sometimes, academic work, which present public reception structures either as 
activist defenders of migrant rights or solely as complicit tools of state power over 
migrant subjects. Instead, Stuck and Exploited explores the complex relations (and 
lack thereof ) between migrants and the state through a number of intermediaries, 
showing how both reception and migration control are enacted through the voices 
of the very protagonists of the implementation of reception policies, who embody 
the tension between humanitarianism and control. Within this, the volume opens a 
particularly engaging discussion as it points to evidence that reveals the intersec-
tions between the experiences of the precarity of migrants and the struggles of the 
Italian citizenry for the protection of fundamental rights, particularly regarding the 
labor market (see the chapters by Storato; Sanò and Della Puppa; Marabello and 
Parisi; and Pascualetto and Perocco). While these questions escape the scope of this 
book, they would certainly make a case for a further publication.
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Book Reviews
In this in-depth exploration of the Italian reception system, it becomes clear 
that processes of externalization to the third sector exacerbate the opacity and 
arbitrariness of the system, if merely by increasing its complexity, but mainly due 
to structural lacks and policies of abandonment through the underfunding and 
reduction of costs of the system. Within this context of lack of resources, hierarchical 
categories of desirability and deservingness become central to the experience of 
asylum-seeking even among those already deemed “undesirable and undeserving” 
and excluded from the mainstream reception system. Between these narrow labels, 
the complex migration paths of people on the move highlight the precariousness 
of the different statuses forced onto people seeking asylum—or regularization or a 
livelihood. If something is missing from the volume, it could be to know more about 
how this comes to be, how the organizational socialization, the institutionalization 
of social interactions, and professional habitus within reception reinforce racialized, 
gendered, ableist, and nationalist discourses and narratives among reception work-
ers that contribute to the give-and-take of migration statuses and what are their 
intersections with the humanitarian and humanist understandings of care that most 
organizations in reception hold.
The second part of the book focuses on the consequences of the restrictions of 
the COVID-19 pandemic among the migrant population in their journeys through 
Italy. Although the two parts of the book can appear somewhat disconnected, the 
focus on the pandemic and its consequences for migrants provides a very neces-
sary picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the right to asylum and 
reception conditions. Far from being a contingent event, the pandemic has had 
a profound impact on life in Europe, with substantial consequences on the rights 
of citizens and non-citizens alike. As shown by the six chapters in this part, asylum 
reception systems force mobility and immobility among migrants, experiences that 
the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. The “emergency” narrative has led to 
“emergency” responses that have not hesitated to curtail the few existing mobility 
rights for asylum seekers and refugees and have had dire consequences on their 
reception conditions and the possibilities to access the right of asylum. Beyond 
that, sanitary measures have often had reverse effects on the asylum population 
as measures to prevent illness have become the source of insalubrity and malaise, 
particularly for those in situations of encampment or living in the street, thus exac-
erbating their processes of exclusion through reception. As Perocco notes in his 
chapter, the pandemic has become a litmus test—exposing the structural problems 
of contemporary societies—but also a “social accelerator” and “detonator” pushing 
forward existing societal trends and exacerbating existing hardships and inequali-
ties. Thus, these chapters confirm worrying tendencies over the retrenchment of the 
right of asylum, where the few guarantees that still seemed to hold dissipate “emer-
gency” after “emergency” and “crisis” after “crisis”.
The collection of papers in Stuck and Exploited thus shows how, despite posing 
as “citizenship technologies”—to use a construct created by Jonathan Xavier 
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Inda—aiming to reinsert those excluded, the fundamental structural deficiencies 
of the reception system make that “integration” measures such as the promotion 
of labor market incorporation, actually pave the way for exclusion and precarious-
ness, effectively becoming “anti-citizenship technologies,” that seek to control and 
contain excluded citizens. This tendency has become more evident by the shift in 
the Italian reception model from the SPRAR system, which, while far from being 
ideal, relied on facilitating asylum seekers’ processes of incorporation by offering 
“integration” services and possibilities of community engagement with the current 
model that excludes asylum seekers from the ordinary reception system and favors 
“emergency” solutions, often based on the encampment and large centers that 
preclude processes of incorporation (see the chapters by Ferrero and Roverso; Dal 
Zotto, Lo Cascio, and Piro; and Caroselli and Semprebon). Similarly, the role of recep-
tion workers also seems to mimic this trend as control duties take over humanitarian 
and “integration” tasks (see the chapter by Ferrero and Roverso). However, despite 
the heightened control, or perhaps because of the heightened control, the slippages 
of the system become as revealing of its underlying rationale as its efforts for incor-
poration. All through the book (see the chapters by Caroselli and Semprebon; and 
Pontiggia), the lack of statistical data on people on the move through Italian terri-
tory, particularly those that are in the most vulnerable situations and those excluded 
from reception, becomes yet another testament of how neglect is used as a strategy 
for the governance of mobility.
In short, this is a very rich book, which provides the most extensive look at the 
Italian reception system to date, and opens crucial discussions over the governance 
of migration within European democracies.
Alèxia Rué