Carceral Borders: Confinement, Externalisation and Racial Capitalism in Europe

The Flamingo Revolution began in the spring of this year, when the Albanian government cleared the way for Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and Ivanka Trump to build a six-billion-dollar resort on the coast at Vjosë-Nartë. When villagers protested against the developers' barbed wire fences in May, masked private security guards dragged one protester across the dunes while state police stood by and did not intervene. Within days the protest had reached Tirana, and it has since become the largest public uprising since the fall of state socialism, bringing into question three decades of life under capitalism, from the destruction and theft of public wealth and the environment to the economic and political immiseration that has forced nearly half the population to leave the country. This presentation takes up the developmental practices of racial capitalism along these coastlines, where the same shore is enclosed twice over, as rent for surplus capital and as confinement for surplus populations. Drawing on ethnographic work in the towns and villages around the camps at Shëngjin and Gjadër, where Italy has screened and detained migrants intercepted at sea since October 2024, I situate the camp in the collective memory of migration, detention and deportation through which it is received in Albania, and in the wider circuits of racial capitalism that divide the world into tourists and prisoners.