Politics

After the death of several dozens of refugees, most of them fleeing Afghanistan, in a shipwreck off the coasts of Calabria, in the South of Italy, on the 26th of February 2023, Lorenzo Alunni, current Member in the School of Social Science, and Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, wrote a column for Le Monde, analyzing how Europe had shifted from a politics of rescue to a criminalization of humanitarianism.

Politics is not merely a series of policy battles, but an ongoing struggle for the primacy of our favored understandings about both how the world is and how it ought to be. In this way, politics is a contest between diverse meanings that political...