Martina Tazzioli, Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)

Michel Foucault did not tackle migration in his works. Yet, there have been very fertile encounters between migration studies and governmentality-oriented research.1 Martina Tazzioli’s book is one of these encounters. The focus of the book is on “the interplay between migration movements and [the] revolutionary uprisings” (x) that started late 2010 in Tunisia and spread across the Arab region. Taking migration from Tunisia as a case study, it pays attention to “the ways in which migration brought upheaval to the northern shore” (x) of the Mediterranean Sea. The author intends to highlight the fundamental struggle between two perceptions of cross-border and especially, crossMediterranean movements: that of the European state-centered “migration regime” and that of the migrants themselves (and citizens of the “South”), who see mobility as a freedom they won by the revolutionary uprisings.