Carceral hegemony: Confinement, race and state formation in Italy

From the emergency laws used to suppress resistance in Southern Italy during the country's unification in the mid-nineteenth century to the detention centres in Libya that Italy funds today, confinement has served as a persistent instrument of governance. Yet how carceral institutions produce the very categories that justify their own expansion remains among the least theorised feature. This article introduces the concept of carceral hegemony and its operative mechanism, constitutive power: the capacity of legal technologies, spatial strategies, and epistemic practices to produce the categories of the dangerous, the deviant, and the excludable that carceral governance then claims merely to manage. Drawing on four historical phases of Italian state formation, the article demonstrates that the populations to which carceral power claims to respond are not pre-given facts about the social world but are produced through governance itself. This has a direct implication for reform: interventions that accept those categories as given risk reproducing the very logic they seek to challenge.