Abstract
This article examines migrant agricultural labour in southern Italy as a concentrated site of contemporary extractive capitalism. Focusing on the 2011 strike of migrant workers in Nardò (Apulia) and the subsequent Sabr trial, it argues that labour exploitation in European agriculture is not a marginal deviation or the result of criminal excess, but a structurally organised regime sustained through migration control, labour flexibilisation and territorial governance. Situating the case within the framework of racial capitalism and state-mediated extraction, the article conceptualises Europe as a space of internal frontiers, where incorporation into production is systematically coupled with precarious legal and political membership. The Nardò strike exposed the racialised foundations of agricultural production, while the Sabr trial translated structural exploitation into individualised criminal responsibility. Together, they illuminate the dialectic between conflict and legality through which extractive labour regimes are both challenged and stabilised. By foregrounding the legal and institutional production of vulnerability, the article contributes to a critical understanding of how democratic legality coexists with, and mediates, extractive accumulation in contemporary Europe.
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In 2022, the Court of Cassation reopened the proceedings on charges including forced labour, illegal intermediation, extortion, and facilitation of irregular migration, underscoring the persistence of slavery-like labour relations within European agriculture. Analytically, the trial is significant not merely for its judicial outcome, but for the way in which structural exploitation is translated into individual criminal responsibility, thereby affirming the authority of the legal order while leaving intact the broader regulatory and economic conditions that enable extractive labour regimes – regimes of moral and political governance that recognise suffering while displacing its structural causes, transforming social violence into an object of compassion, management and legal containment rather than political contestation. See D. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A moral history of the present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
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The legal processing of exploitation should be understood as a modality of depoliticisation rather than as a mere failure of enforcement. By translating structural relations of domination into individual criminal responsibility, the state reasserts its legitimacy while leaving intact the institutional conditions of extraction. This dynamic is central to contemporary forms of democratic legality, in which recognition of abuse coexists with the neutralisation of conflict. See Fassin, Humanitarian Reason ; Simon, Governing Through Crime ; de Nardis, “The concept of de-politicization.”
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