Sandro Mezzadra works as an Associate Professor of “History of Political Thought” at the Department of Politics, Institutions, History of the University of Bologna. His research work has focused on the classical modern European political philosophy (especially on Hobbes, Spinoza and Marx), on the history of political, social, and legal sciences in Germany between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth centuries (especially on the constitutional debates in the years of the Weimar Republic) and on several issues at stake in the development of contemporary political theory.

In recent years his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration and citizenship. Considering migration as a “social movement” (within the framework of the so called theory of “autonomy of migration”, which he contributed to develop within a wide network of researchers and activists based in different European countries) he has tried to analyze migration itself from the point of view of migrants’ practices of citizenship. The general hypothesis that these practices challenge the institutional borders of citizenship both at the national and at the European level has been developed in a series of historical and theoretical publications, where the general relevance of the issue of borders for the discussion of citizenship is underscored. As far as European citizenship is concerned, this approach has led on the one hand to highlight a tendency to the reproduction of border, with its constitutive violence, within the space of European citizenship, on the other hand to stress the chance to look at Europe from its borders, considered as contact zones, where new forms of political belonging are continuously born. In his research, Sandro Mezzadra further posits his interest for migration within a discussion of the transformations of labour (especially contributing to the ongoing “post-workerist” discussion on the issue of “multitude”) and within a dialogue with the developments of postcolonial theory, which he contributed to introduce in the Italian intellectual discussion.

Recent publications in English

Sandro Mezzadra – Brett Neilson, “Né qui, né altrove — Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue”, in Borderlands, e-journal, Volume 2 Number 1, 2003
(https://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol2no1.html)

Sandro Mezzadra, “The Right to Escape”, in Ephemera, IV (2004), 3, pp. 267-275 (www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3mezzadra.pdf)

Sandro Mezzadra – Federico Rahola, “The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present”, in Postcolonial Text, II (2006), 1 (https://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/393/139)

Sandro Mezzadra, “Citizen and Subject. A Postcolonial Constitution for the European Union?”, in Situations, I (2005-2006), 2, pp. 31-42 (https://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/viewPDFInterstitial/22/31).

Sandro Mezzadra – Etienne Balibar, “Borders, Citizenship, War, Class. A Dialogue with Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra”, ed. by M. Bojadzijev and I. Saint-Saëns, in New Formations, Number 58, summer 2006, pp. 10-30.

Sandro Mezzadra, “‘Property of the Self’, Individual Autonomy and the Modern European Discourse of Citizenship”, in P. Banerjee – S. Kumar Das (eds), Autonomy. Beyond Kant and Hermeneutics, New Dehli – London – New York, Anthem Press, 2007, pp. 37-48.

Sandro Mezzadra, Living in Transition. Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude, in Transversal, 11-07
(https://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/1107).