12 February 2020
An in-depth look at the Italian government's attempts to co-opt tribal leaders in southern Libya and the adoption of the securitised Italian approach to migration by EU institutions.
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"ROME—Over three days in May 2017, the Italian secret service—masquerading as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization—summoned to Rome two dozen delegates from the southern edge of the Sahara desert. The pretext was to promote a peace deal for their war-torn region; the real goal was to bring them on board with an Italian plan to curb migration.
The details of the meetings, published here for the first time, expose the pitfalls of a foreign policy that conflates peace and development with migration control. This was just one piece of a wider set of European initiatives with similar features, now widely regarded as a failure by analysts and policymakers. In Libya, they contributed to igniting a humanitarian catastrophe."
Italy’s Failed Migration Fix Has Led to Chaos in Libya (Foreign Policy, link)
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