Discipline, Conformity, Compliance—An Analysis of Italy and Tunisia’s Education Guidelines for ‘Westernized’, White, Middle-Class Nations

Abstract

The conjuncture of our present time, as Stuart Hall would argue, calls for a critical scrutiny of socio-political forces that aim to destabilize epistemologies and praxis of inclusion, diversity and equity. Such forces use education as a strategic site to perpetuate far-right ideologies and the idea of superiority of white, Western, middle-class nation-states. This article explores more recent manifestations of fortress Europe through the co-optation of inclusive education for migrant and refugee students in Italy and Tunisia. As critical scholars from opposite sides of the Mediterranean, we draw on anti-Blackness to engage in an analysis of the use of education policies to reproduce white supremacy in Italian society, while investing in humanitarian education in Tunisia to contain the movement of African migrants towards Europe. Lastly, the article intends to center the voices of Afro-descendant activists, who have increasingly gained a platform to speak back against such policies, and advocate for a more equitable society, with a more inclusive citizenship law.

1. Introduction

The global intersection of racialization, class, and other forms of systemic oppression, with nationalism has reached an undoubtedly dangerous and difficult moment. The resurgence of a neo-fascist rhetoric, coupled with even more explicit forms of white supremacy in the global North, have re-ignited conflicts in the global South and led to the perpetuation of multiple genocides. One of such genocides is taking place on the Eastern side of our shared Mediterranean. As scholars sitting on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, we discuss emerging forms of nationalism at the edge of fortress Europe, and the need to implement radical and transformative justice in the region. Following the publication of education policies embedded in the far right ideology, and the renewed collaboration of the Italian government with non-European neighboring countries for the containment of migrants, we explore how policies co-opt the concept of inclusion. Drawing from Dumas’ (2016) theorization of anti-Blackness, the article analyses how education policies in Italy and Tunisia are used to promote a state whereby the cis-gender, heteronormative, white, middle class, Christian male is seen as the ‘superior subject’.

The borderland regime at the edge of fortress Europe is institutionally operationalized via a line of color that catalogs specific racialized subjects through phenotypic absorbability within the nation’s color boundaries (Cuttitta 2012). Whiteness, in Italy and in the Mediterranean area, emerged through contrast and relational processes. These processes established gradually what constituted the norm in Italians’ identity, as well as deviations from it (Patriarca 2010). Because of these processes, race was constructed through the hegemonic ideas of the nation and of the subject of the nation (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo 2014). Internal and colonial diversity produced “the color of the nation, of its sovereign citizens and their racialized privilege” (Giuliani 2015).

The borderland regime at the edge of Fortress Europe produces exclusions that are marked by the level of proximity to the hegemonic condition. These forms of exclusion are then translated within migration legislation policing (forced) migrants’ risky bodies and bodies at risk of “invading” southern shores of Italy (Migliarini 2018), or the Tunisian nation state. Exclusions are also reproduced, as we will see in this essay, through the lack of a critical analysis of Italian colonial history in education and society more generally (Petrovich Njegosh 2022). In turn, these exclusions are passed on to the migrants’ progeny born in Italy or in Tunisia, and restricted in the suburbs of big cities, and deprived of their right to citizenship (Migliarini 2018). The exclusionary nature of the present citizenship law in Italy has recently been under great scrutiny, given the significant disabling impact on the education of racialized children and students, compared to other European countries. Racialized students, born and raised in Italy from migrant parents, cannot vote, become teachers, and access a variety of jobs and services. Indeed, their rights to participate in society are purposefully limited.

The article starts by presenting the theoretical framework of anti-Blackness by Dumas (2016). The conceptual framework guided us in the subsequent critical analysis of the new Italian National Guidelines for Early Years and Primary Education1, and the Inclusive Education Initiatives for Migrants in Tunisia2, which are deeply interconnected in their purpose. Lastly, the article intends to center the voices of Afro-descendant activists, who have increasingly gained a platform to speak back against such policies, and advocated for a more equitable society, with a more inclusive citizenship law.

2. Theoretical Framework

This article draws on Dumas’s (2016) theorization of anti-Blackness in education policy, to critically read the new Italian education guidelines and the Tunisian education policy for integrating Western and Central African migrant students. Dumas’s theorization of anti-Blackness illuminates forms of dehumanization and exclusion of Black bodies at the borders of Fortress Europe. His work is particularly useful to the purpose of this essay, as he moves away from an analysis of policy discourse as focused on disproportionality or inequality. Instead, he sheds light on the cultural disregard and disgust for Black bodies in educational institutions (Dumas 2016). Much of his theorization examines how education policy discourse, and not just the practice and pedagogy, is deeply characterized by anti-Blackness.

Dumas (2016) situates anti-Blackness in the belief that Black humanity is a ‘paradigmatic impossibility’ or the antithesis of human subjectivity. As an epistemological framework, anti-Blackness explores Black suffering, interrogating the psychic and material assault on Black flesh, constant surveillance, and mutilation and murder of Black people (Alexander 1994; Tillet 2012). Anti-Blackness denies the Black person’s humanity and eligibility for full citizenship or regard within the polity (Patterson 1982). Dumas (2016) argues that anti-Blackness permits responses to racism in education discourse and policy formulation and implementation which go beyond a generalized concern about disproportionality or inequality to encompass a concern for the bodies of Black people, the signification of (their)blackness, and threat posed to their educational well-being.

Dumas’s aims to theorize anti-Blackness to come to a deeper understanding of the Black condition is particularly useful to this essay. We are now living in societies where there is an utter contempt for and acceptance of violence against Black people. In the current geopolitical moment, such a theoretical framework seems useful to also illuminate the motivation beyond the violence against the Palestinian people, and other historically marginalized groups. Anti-Blackness in education is a compelling framework to have a critical gaze on so-called ‘anti-racist’ institutions in Western societies. Racial capitalism is still rampant, but the stance of most nation states within Fortress Europe, is against racism. Nation-states have anti-racist laws, while a multiracial market is flourishing. As Sexton (2008) argues, the color line seems to be rather fluid at a time when Black (and other marginalized) lives are more contained and subjected to new forms of segregation and exclusion.

According to Dumas (2016), education policy is a site of anti-Blackness, as the Black body is constructed as a ‘problem’, ‘non-human’, ‘inherently uneducable’ or ‘unworthy of education’, and always a ‘threat’. Such construction of the Black body as ‘non-human’ is expressed in the education policies that we analyze in this essay. This construction is well camouflaged as comfort fantasies of inclusive education (Migliarini and Stinson 2020). Hence, we take anti-Blackness seriously in this analysis. We unmask the far-right ideologies rooted in such education policies, in the hope that more educators and scholars will become more aware of the implications of anti-Blackness, not only in education, but on the formation of the national and social imaginary. The following sections focus on the new Italian education guidelines and the Tunisian policy for the educational integration and containment of migrant bodies within the national borders.

3. Against the New Segregationists: An Intersectional Analysis of the of Italy’s New Education Guidelines for a ‘Westernized’, White, Middle-Class Nation

On the 11 March 2025, the Italian Ministry of Merit (former Ministry of Education), under the far right Meloni’s cabinet, published the new National Guidelines for Early Years and Primary Education, subsequently revised in June 20253. Such publication was received with indignation by critical scholars, teachers, school professionals, and members of the civil society. They point out how these guidelines express openly the far-right ideology of the current government through the language used, the pedagogical orientation and the re-framing of the school curriculum. For anyone cultivating radical hope for education as a site of transformative justice, these new guidelines make it even clearer that schools are institutions intended to represent and reproduce the dominant subjects of contemporary nation states, and their values. It is worth remembering that in the Italian/European contexts, the dominant subject is the white male, cisgender, heteronormative, able bodied, middle class, Christian, speaking the power majority language, and being electively multilingual for the sake of increasing competitiveness in the neoliberal economy (Migliarini and Cioè-Peña 2022).

Being a critical scholar and militant of intersectional inclusive education (Migliarini and Elder 2023), I (author 1) read and analyze these new guidelines with the same consciousness of past ones, published under “Leftist” governments. For instance, national guidelines for education such as the 2014 Guidelines for the Integration of Foreign Students4, published during Letta’s cabinet (i.e., Italy’s former PM), maintain an assimilatory and racial-evasive approach to the inclusion of migrant and forced migrant students (Migliarini 2017, 2018). While the educational ‘experts’ invited by the Democratic (left) Party in 2014 told teachers and school professionals that migrant and forced migrant students are de facto persons, the enlisted commissioners of the current Ministry of Meritocracy clarify that the idea of subject (persona) has been exclusively conceptualized by the Greeks and the Romans5. This is a rhetoric that centers the (Southern) European subject, carrying the Roman/Hellenic legacy, as the only one capable of identifying who counts as a dignified person, and who instead is to be considered as lacking humanity, as Dumas (2016) argues, and disposable, ready to be thrown at the margins of our societies. The political ideologies at play in such policy narratives might seem different, but I believe there is an important point of convergence, not immediately accepted by the Italian ‘Left’. The government (of any political faction), and most of the public (within and outside educational institutions), are not interested in recognizing, discussing and disrupting white supremacy, the Italian colonial past and the political, social, educational, material, and psychological implications of race. Thus, they evade any systematic analysis of past and contemporary racialization and exclusion processes.

The premise of these new education guidelines seems to be that schools and society are not in service of, or should support, historically marginalized communities living at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression. In the new guidelines, the policing of critical pedagogical practices is enforced, alongside a very prescriptive curriculum. The work to guarantee access, participation, and equitable education to those systematically dispossessed of them has become almost a crime, just like in the US under the Trump administration6, or in Britain where teachers are asked to promote ‘British values’ only7, while controlling the behavior and attitudes of Muslim students as indicated by the anti-radicalization policy8. Anti-radicalization in the UK is primarily managed through the Prevent program, a part of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy (CONTEST) that aims (supposedly) to protect vulnerable people from becoming involved in terrorism by providing support and challenging extremist narratives. The implementation of these guidelines needs to be interpreted in the context of Italy’s political and legal apparatus, where policies and laws protecting minoritized populations are almost nonexistent (Migliarini and Elder 2023). Further, it is important to ask to what extent will the Italian people leave the government free to reproduce white supremacy? How far will teachers and school professionals go in dehumanizing diverse and non-conforming bodies? I hope that the analysis that I present in the rest of this section will provide an answer to both questions and offer a motivation to shift the civil society’s attitude towards the guidelines. I will focus on analyzing the cultural introduction to the new education guidelines, as well as the section dedicated to the teaching of history, and aspects of the new proposed prescriptive curriculum, through the lens of anti-Blackness.

3.1. Co-Opting Inclusive Education for a Eurocentric Subject: A Critical Analysis of the Cultural Prologue to the New Guidelines

When it comes to social and educational inclusion of people with disabilities, Italy has been regarded as world leading for passing in 1977 the milestone policy of Integrazione Scolastica (Ferri 2008). This policy made the education of all students with disabilities in regular classrooms, along with their non-disabled peers, mandatory. Additionally, considering such a policy, institutions and authorities are compelled to provide financial support and specialist staff, to guarantee personalized forms of teaching for all students needing additional support (D’Alessio et al. 2018). Integrazione Scolastica was published more than a decade before the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education (UNESCO 1994), which paved the way to the education of children identified as having disabilities or SEND in regular classrooms. Since the Salamanca Statement, signatory governments have engaged in policy discourses around inclusion while leaving education structures to be disabling and exclusionary for multiply marginalized students (Slee 1996). This is particularly true for Italy, where concerns for the disenfranchisement of new marginalized groups, such as disabled migrant and refugee children continue to emerge.

In 2012, under a ‘Leftist’ government, the then-called Italian Ministry of Public Education introduced the macro-category of Special Educational Needs (SEN) through a three-tiered categorization system that focuses on different types of provisions for learners. While the first sub-category (i.e., children with severe physical or intellectual impairments diagnosed by local health units in line with Framework Law 104/1992) is entitled to additional provisions and funding, the second and third sub-categories (i.e., children with learning difficulties certified by public or private clinical diagnosis—Law 70/2010, and students with cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic disadvantage without certified medical diagnosis but still requiring support) are only entitled to receive personalized support, including compensatory and dispensatory measures put in place by classroom teachers (D’Alessio 2014). The consequence of the introduction of this new macro-category has been the increase in the number of students, especially those from migrant backgrounds, identified with ‘SEN’ (MIUR 2014). Interestingly, both the Ministry guidelines and recommendations of 2014 and 2015 on the integration of migrant children in Italian public schools present data on the increasing disproportionality of migrant students in the category of SEN, but do not offer operational indications for teachers to tackle this issue (MIUR 2014, 2015). Indeed, such disproportionality in the identification of migrants as students with SEN shows schools’ strategy to obtain additional resources for children not entitled to support under previous legislation on inclusion. Importantly, it also highlights how Italian national education policy—in line with the Salamanca thinking—constructs cultural and linguistic diversity as forms of deviance and pathology, when compared to the white Italian/European norm (Migliarini et al. 2018).

The double role of the Italian government, as the protector and violator of inclusion continues to be expressed in the new Guidelines for Early Years and Primary Education. The cultural prologue to the guidelines emphasizes the centrality of the ‘person’, and the family as subjects to be included within the space of schools:

“School, which is the Constitutional school, puts the student as a person at the center of its actions, and promotes their talents through an education that considers all aspects: cognitive, affective, relational, physical, aesthetic, ethical and spiritual. It is in the personal and cultural identity of each student that it is possible to recognize the dignity of the subject, which the school needs to enrich”.

(p. 1, verbatim translation in English by Author 1)

It seems clear that such policy upholds the values of inclusive education, enshrined within Italian and international legislations. However, the idea of inclusion presented in the document resembles the notion of ‘comfort fantasies of inclusion’, that is a model of inclusion that is de facto an assimilation into the monolingual monocultural power majority (Migliarini and Stinson 2020):

“The term person has its historical and cultural roots in the West, particularly the ancient Roman and Greek civilizations. […] Such understanding of the term person is present also in the Italian constitution, and in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which defines the person (or subject) as having universal rights, which are inalienable: every individual has the right to life, liberty and security (art. 3).”

(p. 1 verbatim translation in English by Author 1)

“The relationship with the other and other cultures is the privilege of our civilization.”

(p. 2 verbatim translation in English by Author 1)

“Freedom is the most important value of the Western world, and its civilizations since ancient Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, […] and the Constitutional school needs to promote and reverberate such fundamental value.”

(p. 3 verbatim translation in English by Author 1)

The notion of inclusive education portrayed by the new policy is co-opted to comfort policy makers in positions of power, for the following reasons. First, the policy clearly states that only the Western world, descending from Greek and Roman civilizations, knows the worth of individuals. Other cultures seem to be dispossessed of any basic understanding of human life and fundamental rights. In fact, as Dumas (2016) would put it, other cultures and especially Black cultures, are not perceived as human at all. Second, only the Western world, and in this case Italy, knows how to best ‘manage’ intercultural relationships. In this regard, the new guidelines say the following in relation to Italian language and citizenship:

“Italian is now the common language of those who are born and raised in Italy, regardless of having Italian citizenship. The school welcomes universal challenges and deals with them with an openness towards the world, the promotion of equality and the recognition of all differences”.

(Ianes 2025, p. 20)

This passage represents a form of institutional gaslighting towards multiply marginalized communities in Italy, who are forced to learn Italian to be perceived as worthy of inclusion in the host society, and who are subjected to a very discriminatory citizenship law. The above passage, positive and inclusive in its message, stands in stark contrast with existing research showing how the educational inclusion of migrant and refugee students in Italy is conceptualized as a violent integration into monolingual and monocultural spaces (Migliarini and Cioè-Peña 2022). These monolingual and monocultural spaces push migrant and refugee students to feel the urgency of learning Italian as the power majority language, while simultaneously devaluing their home language, to perform the ‘good immigrant’. Further, the racialization, disablement, as well as anti-Black racism against migrant and refugee students influence how Italian teachers and professionals perceive their linguistic capacity and effort (Migliarini and Cioè-Peña 2022).

The present citizenship law has an exclusionary character, impacting on the life and educational experience of racialized migrant and refugee students. The current Italian citizenship law was adopted in 1992, and it is based on the principle of Ius Sanguinis, or citizenship by blood, and it is influenced by the racial archive discussed above. Contrary to countries such as the United States of America where citizenship is granted by birth, the Ius Sanguinis establishes that Italian citizenship is granted by blood, thus if you have at least one Italian parent (Santagati 2013). Since its adoption, the law has been subject to several political debates due to its exclusionary jurisdiction, especially towards the progeny of migrant families residing in Italy (European Commission 2022).

There have been multiple debates over the transformation of this law. However, when discussed in public or in the media, the citizenship law seems to be always contentious9. The reform to adopt variations, such as Ius Soli (i.e., birthright citizenship), Ius Culturae and its recent variation into Ius Scholae10 (i.e, citizenship rights by school attendance), is not considered politically a priority and hence it was stopped. Ius Culturae and Ius Scholae are citizenship venues for those who have attended compulsory education in Italy. A child of migrant parents regularly residing in Italy, who has attended school for a minimum of five years can acquire Italian citizenship at the request of their parents (Migliarini and Elder 2023). This also applies to children born in Italy if they are aged 12. The persistent citizenship debate coupled with strident resistance to any reform supports the beliefs that “there are no Black Italians,” and that the color of the national identity should be protected from any “contamination” with Blackness (Migliarini and Elder 2023). If inclusive education is to be conceptualized beyond the comfort fantasy expressed by the new education guidelines and more intersectionally, then educational stakeholders should support more vigorously Italian citizenship reforms.

3.2. Promoting Western Values Through a Prescriptive Curriculum

“Only the Western world has a written history worth knowing. Ancient Greeks and Latins wrote History, while other populations experienced something vaguely resembling history. The teaching of Latin, and of the Bible, should be reintroduced in secondary school, as a means to foreground Italian language and culture […]”.

(p. 68 verbatim translation in English by Author 1)

Such utterances are the introduction to the history curriculum section of the new education guidelines. These sentences crystallize the ‘superiority’ of Western and Italian cultures. Elevating the Italian nation state as intellectually superior to the rest of the world, these guidelines instill fear towards other cultures and identities, such as those of migrant and refugee students, and encourage their dehumanization. According to the policy, the teaching of history should be focused on the Italian cultural tradition and the Italian nation state, not using historical facts but historical narratives.

“The teaching of history should not prepare children to read and interpret facts to then critically evaluate them considering different historical interpretations, we suggest a different approach. This is the teaching of history through narrative dimensions that mirror the human experiences of the time”.

(p. 69 verbatim translation in English by Author 1)

The critical interpretation of facts and events of Italian history, including fascism, is here dismissed and discredited. The guidelines advise teachers to read books such as La Piccola Vedetta Lombarda [The Little Lookout from Lombardy] to the students, which depict an idealized version of fascism. Advising teachers to avoid the critical interpretation of historical facts and events is a clear ideological tactic of the present Italian government. This ideological tactic instills fears towards the different and promotes control over what gets taught and how. The glorification of Italian history and civilization mirrors attempts to depict a monolithic Italian culture, which cannot be permeated by differences of any sort. The ‘perfect’ combination for the return of authoritarian leaders in Italy.

Alongside history, the curriculum that the guidelines propose is pre-designed and fabricated outside of the school context. It is passed through a “top-down” approach to teachers and students to know it and ‘transfer it’. In a democratic school, the curriculum should be interpreted as a tool stemming from the pedagogical relationship between teachers and students, in each context. Students are not supposed to know only curricular subjects, but they need to understand the origin and nature of this knowledge, what to do with it beyond being ready for the labor market. With the new guidelines, the curriculum is merely focused on competencies that the ideal Italian student needs to acquire. There seems to be no space left for interdisciplinarity and critical thinking. The teachers are told exactly what to teach and what not to teach.

Priority is given to teaching proper Italian grammar over learning to live together in a diverse and complex world. There is no emphasis on co-producing the curriculum and understanding pedagogical relationships that exist beyond the teacher-student duo. History and other curricular disciplines are essentialized without giving proper attention to values such as learning to know, learning to co-exist, learning to do and learning to be. Finally, this overt attention to the Italian national identity shows that for the new guidelines the ideal students are white, able-bodied, Christian, cis-gender, middle-class Italians.

In conclusion, the idea of diversity and pluralism that Italian schools were trying to implement is succumbing under the pressure of creating binary divisions of students: the ‘standard’ students, and those in need of cultural and language remediation. By adopting such a clear far-right ideology, the guidelines are purposefully leaving out of the school gates the variety of narratives and identities that are rooted in historically marginalized communities of students. The following section shifts the focus to the ‘non-European’ side of the Mediterranean. It explores the Tunisian inclusive education policies, because of the economic and political agreements between the Italian and the Tunisian governments to prevent and contain the movement of Western and Central African and Tunisian migrants.

4. The Education of Black Migrants in Tunisia: Educational Inclusion as Border Externalization

Under Tunisian law, all children have the right and access to education, but many factors impede children’s ability to attend school. This is particularly the case of migrant children whose parents take the Tunisian borders as a transit springboard to Europe (De Haas 2021). According to a survey conducted by the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC), education services providers establish a priori access to education in place for all children in Tunisia, regardless of their country of origin. And yet, “no system exists to actively target the inclusion of refugee and migrant children” (MMC 2021, p. 23)11. In its current existence, Fortress Europe outsources border control to neighboring countries in Northern Africa. Tunisia is one of the transit countries that have adopted stringent migration policies against West and Central African migrants (Cassarino and Marin 2022). With heavy border militarization, compounded by incessant xenophobic and racist attacks, migrants and refugees find themselves stuck in Tunisia or deported to the hinterlands of its southern borders (Boubakri and Mazzella 2005). A large number of migrants who found themselves stuck and entrapped on the border and urban fringes of Tunisia are caregivers with children (See Me Hear Me 2024). The disruption of their migratory plans has a significant impact on the education of their children (Chemlali 2023a).

This externalization project at the EU borders is more palpable in the recent Memorandum of Understanding signed between Tunisia and Italy. Signed on 16 July 2023, this MoU prioritizes austere measures against irregular migration, “with a view to avoiding loss of human life and developing legal pathways for migration” (European Parliament 2023). Immediate aid of €105 million was released to support the Tunisian border patrol in cracking down on racialized black African migrants. The MoU also proposed €900 million in macroeconomic support and €150 million in direct budgetary support. Thus, this MoU on border control is the baseline of our comparative choice to analytically debunk the integration promises at the education level.

While expanding border policing in Tunisia, the European Union, in synergy with other international organizations and donors, as well as Tunisian institutions, sets up education cooperation plans to guarantee the educational inclusion of West and Central African children in Tunisian schools (Boubakri and Mazzella 2005). Conspicuous economical resources are invested for the implementation of inclusive education programs for migrant and refugee children, not so much to guarantee their right to education, but to transform Tunisia from a transit area to a “destination country”. In this section of the essay, I (author 2) analyze the Inclusive Education Initiatives for Migrants in Tunisia12. The critical analysis of the present policy sheds light on how education has taken center stage within EU-sponsored Tunisian migration policies. Albeit inclusive in its scope, this policy presents itself as an EU extension of border externalization, with the intent of offshoring the education of migrant children away from the public schools in Europe. The purpose of the policy analysis is to reveal the co-optation of education, and inclusive education, in the spatiotemporal containment of migrants and their children outside of Fortress Europe. In fact, in the Tunisian context, official promises to inclusive education projects for migrant children fall short, owing to increasing racial and xenophobic attacks against black migrants. An official example here is Kais Saied’s anti-black statement that led to violent confrontations between migrants, enforcement agents, and, at times, local populations (Chemlali 2023b). In his racist rant, President Saied said that “hordes of irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa” had come to Tunisia, “with all the violence, crime, and unacceptable practices that entails,” describing the situation as “unnatural” a criminal scheme to “change the demographic make-up” and turn Tunisia into “just another African country that doesn’t belong to the Arab and Islamic nations any more”13.

The policy analysis presented in this section of the essay shows how racialized migrants are excluded from accessing education systems in Europe through protracted and illegalized mobilities, as they are perceived as undesirable and unwanted racial groups. At the same time, money is invested in Tunisia for the implementation of inclusive education projects for migrants and refugees, against the backdrop of border externalization, containment, and exclusion. The policy on inclusive education considered here highlights how projects of inclusion are designed to address specific migrant children’s needs: language learning, vocational training, and community involvement. Leading among these programs is the Bridge Program, carried out by the Tunisian Ministry of Education in partnership with international organizations like UNESCO. The Bridge Program offers intensive language courses tailored to the linguistic needs of migrant students, as well as cultural orientation sessions to facilitate their integration into Tunisian society.

It seems clear that the narrative presented in this policy is one that sees education as key in border externalization, to make the social fabric less disruptive. The need for quick and effective linguistic and cultural learning seems to conflict with how, for example, the moral panic relies on popular discourses of a Black invasion, which indirectly outsources border control to local populations (Gross-Wyrtzen and El Yacoubi 2024). The limited scope of migrant education around linguistic and cultural learning is a telling approach to migrant containment, of keeping them at bay from Fortress Europe (Ferdaoussi 2023). Limiting the education of migrant children, sometimes migrants themselves, to linguistic and cultural learning is an insidious reduction in education to the service of border control. The EU relies on success stories of inclusive education of racialized migrants into Tunisian public schools, to invest more resources to prevent them from entering the countries in Europe that they have chosen as their final destinations. This is shown in the policy, which includes an example of a success story of inclusion provided by the Bridge Program implementers:

“Fatima, a 10-year-old migrant from Libya, struggled initially to communicate and adapt to her new school environment in Tunisia. However, after enrolling in the Bridge Program, she quickly acquired the necessary language skills and formed meaningful friendships with her Tunisian classmates.”14

The above success story of educational inclusion reveals the instrumental dimension of education in migratory contexts, where education is a means to soft, insidious, and malevolent migrant containment in transit countries. This is because, as Dumas (2016) argues, Black migrant bodies are perceived as ‘non-human’. Migrant bodies in transit thus are an epitome of life in a “zone of non-being”, in the strict Fanonian sense (Fanon 1967). In the context of migration, as the excerpt above shows, the aim is to establish a smooth inclusion, to ground migrants and their children in particular forms of society that they are forced to embrace, which migrants themselves do tactically. Education becomes a tinkering tool to sedentarize and corral off and tether the movements of Black migrants to the southern edges of Europe. Acquiring local language and cultural norms, as well as the ability to make friendships, render education a problem rather than a right to personal, career, and community growth. In such initiatives as the Bridge program, the education of Black migrant children is seen through a deficit model of development, as lack, inferiority, and the hollow slogans of liberal inclusion.

Decentering the Humanitarian Logic of Migrant Education: Community-Based Education Centers (CBECs)

The humanitarianization of migrant education is key to this developmental approach to migrant inclusion. Formal modes of schooling are often mixed with nonformal ones in the education of migrant children. Community-Based Education Centers are one example where the education of racialized migrant children is seen as a humanitarian concern that needs to be addressed and relegated to charitable and grassroots organizations. In the case of Tunisia, the Tunisian Association for the Support of Minorities (ATSM) takes this initiative as an educational center within marginalized migrant communities. These centers offer a comprehensive approach to education, combining formal schooling with nonformal education activities such as sports, arts, and cultural events. They also provide psychosocial support and legal assistance to migrant families.

The humanitarian logic embedded in the education of migrant children adopts a minimalist approach to learning, instead of questioning the bordering logic so entrenched in the educational aspect of migrant integration. CBECs are set to establish “social cohesion” through educational inclusion. The outcome is that migrant communities are gradually co-opted into the logic of humanitarian borderwork that seeks to choreograph and contain migrants and their children to the re-entered spaces of border control, like Tunisia. This impact of community-based educational activities is touted as central to this: “CBECs play a crucial role in promoting educational inclusion and social cohesion among migrant communities, fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment.” A migrant testimony attests to this mix of minimalist and contentment politics:

Maria, a migrant woman from Syria, found refuge in a marginalized neighborhood in Tunis. Through the CBEC in her community, she enrolled her children in school and participated in adult literacy classes, enabling her to gain confidence and build connections with other migrant families.15

Diverse forms of partnerships and collaborations seek to advance such inclusive education initiatives. Government agencies, international organizations, local NGOs, and migrant communities are stepping up cooperation to achieve this endeavor. Another EU-funded project that relates to the education of adult migrants is the Skills Development for migrant Youth (SDMY) project. SDMY is funded by the European Union and implemented by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES). While it seeks to provide vocational training to adult migrants, its scope of employment opportunities is limited to certain professions that never translate into actual work. Vocational training is rendered as an educational practice through a series of training and workshops that never lead migrants to actual integration into the local job markets of such transit countries. In this section, we have addressed diverse forms of collaborations and activism in the realm of education where we consider border externalization is filtered insidiously. In the next section of the essay, we turn our attention to forms of grassroots resistance to a policy discourse that emphasizes a far-right ideology for the creation of a white, Eurocentric nation state.

5. Spaces of Resistance

The essay will now focus on Afro-Italian activism to fight against racism, discrimination and all the manifestations of the borderland regime. It will also explore forms of resistance to the discrimination of Western and Central African migrants in Tunisia.

5.1. Resistance and Intersectional Inclusion in Italy

In a social and political context where migrants are seen as ‘monstrous bodies’ invading Western civilization, many Afro-Italians, other multiply marginalized communities, and Italians have organized to fight against racism, discrimination and the borderland regime, as expressed in the education policy analyzed above. When institutions, especially educational institutions, and political parties co-opt ideas of equity, actively opposing the status quo is crucial to achieve transformative justice and intersectional inclusive education (Migliarini and Elder 2023; Migliarini et al. 2021). Razzismo è una Brutta Storia is an organization based in Milan since 2018. It was created by Giacomo Feltrinelli, a book editor, and the Feltrinelli bookshops with the aim of disrupting racism and discrimination. The organization is made up of scholars, activists, teachers and educators, Italian, Afro-Italian, and from other backgrounds, committed to implement radical inclusive work in Italy. The organization has been committed to shift Italian teachers’ attitude to race and migrant inclusion in education, through training, workshops and the implementation of intersectional and person-centered pedagogical strategies (see Migliarini et al. 2021). Many teachers in the city of Milan benefitted from these workshops, and consequently they felt more confident and prepared to support the needs of migrant and forced migrant students, living at the intersections of race, language, and disability.

In 2022, Razzismo è una Brutta Storia participated in the project CHAMPS, Champions against Afrophobia,16 financed by the European Union. Several young Afro-Italians, raised in Italy and excluded from the right to be citizens, share their lived experiences about racism and ableism in public schools. As part of this project, they explored possible strategies to reframe the curriculum and shift the professional development of white Italian teachers, towards more radical and intersectional forms of inclusive education. The strategies draw significantly on theoretical frameworks such as the Disability Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit) (Annamma et al. 2013), and they have been published as a toolkit, distributed in schools and educational institutions in Milan and the Lombardia region. All these projects led by Black activists are a testimony of the active work of many young people who want to change the Italian education system, by centering the views of those who have been intentionally marginalized.

There are also other organizations, like Festival DiverCity and Italiani Senza Cittadinanza, promoting diversity in Italian education and society, and advocating to change the citizenship law. In a context like Italy, where antiracist work has been historically cast as a “white solidarity movement” (i.e., with both Marxist and Catholic undercurrents) (Hawthorne and Piccolo 2016, p. 2), the presence of grassroots movements led by Afro-Italians can be seen as a way of disrupting the maneuvering of the borderland regime. Festival DiverCity was created in Milan in 2018 thanks to the vision of Cameroonian doctor Andi Nganso of facilitating open and safe urban space to talk about differences.

These organizations, particularly Italiani Senza Cittadinanza, have been mobilizing for years to reform Italian citizenship law to include immigrants and their children (Hawthorne and Pesarini 2025)17. Recently a national referendum was held in June 2025. It was introduced to Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation by popular petition, earning over 600,000 signatures in about a month. The referendum served to shorten the time required for Italian naturalization from ten to five years. The referendum was intended to simplify the pathway to citizenship for the children of immigrants, who would then be able to apply for Italian citizenship through their naturalized parents. Unfortunately, the referendum was declared invalid, as the 50% threshold required to make the vote binding was not reached. This seems to confirm how rooted the far-right ideology is among Italians, who fear that an expansion of citizenship rights would lead to uncontrolled migration, especially from Africa18.

5.2. Rebels in Transit: A Call to Action

Amid increased border control and concomitant acts of violence against racialized migrant populations in Tunisia, academic and public concern remains focused on ever-expanding flanks of Fortress Europe. Yet little has been said about acts of migrant solidarity and resistance in the wake of the authoritarian rule of Kais Saied and its EU-backed 150 million Euro agreement to offshore the management of ‘undesired’ black migrants. Sweeping campaigns of arrestation and deportation to the Sahara Desert followed the ethno-nationalist, far-right discourse of changing the country’s demographic makeup. In this section, I (author 2) argue that migrant resistance to the Tunisian border regime belies the narrative of inclusion. For one thing, most migrant protests resist acts of expulsion and protraction of their migrant plans to Europe. This is morbidly exemplified in the death of Matyla Dosso and her six-year-old daughter Marie Dosso, both forcibly expelled and dumped into the desert.

The President’s racist remarks in February 2023 catalyzed violence against migrants but also forms of resistance and solidarity among migrant groups. Less than a week after Saied’s racist remarks, black migrants began the construction of an informal camp in front of the UNHCR in Tunis, protesting the complicity of the UN agency and its silence over the brutality and violence perpetrated by the Tunisian law enforcement agents. By the end of March 2023, black migrants created the “Refugees in Tunisia” page on X19, inspired by the famous refugee protest movement in Libya20, to document and give visibility to their struggles on social media and mobilize shame. In the page bio, they write: “In Tunisia we suffer & die from Racism. We have been neglected by the UN agencies. Betrayed by the international community. But we will fight for our dignity”21.

During this period, most black migrants who have been stuck in Tunisia are refugees and asylum seekers from Sudan and South Sudan. After the macabre deaths of Sudanese refugees in Morocco in the Melilla Massacre and the subsequent closure of the Western Mediterranean Route, many migrants rerouted their journeys to the Central Mediterranean Route in Tunisia. On 24 June 2022, around two thousand refugees and asylum seekers stormed the fence that separated Nador and Melilla. To curb the fence crossing, the Moroccan and Spanish border patrol unleashed lethal violence that resulted in the death, disappearance and incarceration of many Sudanese migrants (Border Forensics 2024).

On 10 April 2023, tensions between refugees, UNHCR, and Tunisian police reached a flashpoint. Instead of easing the suffering of refugees, the UNHCR called on police forces to dismantle makeshift camps next to its headquarters and disperse migrant protestors. Migrant protests spread to include other concerned headquarters, such as the European Commission (2023) in Tunis22. By mid-2024, a large number of migrants were stranded in Tunisia, which has created a hostile environment and violent confrontations between migrants and locals. Hundreds of Tunisian locals staged anti-migrant protests, marching through the streets of Tunisian coastal towns where migrant boats depart.

What migrant protests demonstrate in the case of Tunisia is the immediacy for creating spaces of self-representation and self-expression, far removed from the humanitarian logic of redeeming the black souls of migrants. Such forms of representations are potent reminders of the unsustainable project of border externalization and its integration tropes. Tunisia offers an example of the failure of migrant integration in general, never mind the education of their children. The case of Matyla Dosso and her daughter being dumped and dead in the middle of the desert reveals the underbelly of the EU’s border externalization and its orchestration by the Tunisian authorities. Acts of migrant resistance we manifest here are not related to protests for better education of migrant children per se, but the lived reality of migrants and their children in transit. It is a reality that is fraught with daily violent and xenophobic attacks by Tunisian police and, at times, locals. As such, the project of migrant education, being an integral part of migrant education, is a virtual reality performed in official discourses, and far removed from the lived reality and the everyday lives of migrants and their children in transit in Tunisia. Acts of solidarity have turned to be crimes of solidarity with migrants, which also affect borderland activists (Bachelet and Hagan 2023). On 12 November 2024, Abdallah Said, activist and president of the Enfants de la Lune association in Médenine, was put in police custody by the Tunisian financial investigation unit. This is because of his solidarity work with migrants and mobilizing shame against the dehumanizing approach of Tunisian border patrols against black African migrants.

6. Conclusions

At a time when Governments in the global North engineer conflicts and invest in the continuation of genocides23 education is used to re-affirm white supremacy within nation-states. In this essay, we have analyzed far-right and anti-migrant rhetoric, alongside other discriminatory discourses, within education policies and initiatives in Italy and in Tunisia. Drawing from Dumas’ (2016) theorization of anti-Blackness the essay sheds light on how education policies at the edge of fortress Europe are co-opting notions of inclusion, to contain, push out and exclude Black African migrant students. Instead of delineating an educational future based on transformative justice to respond to current forms of oppression, these policies speak about authoritative control. They show us a certain degree of fear towards different bodies/minds, their affectivity, their capacity (or not) to fit within the host society. Racialized African students in Italy and in Tunisia are perceived with a mix of paternalism, fear and distrust, and so is freedom of teaching and learning and schools’ autonomy. The complexity of the global historicity of the racialized African student scares and irritates a white heteronormative national identity. However, the hope against such authoritarian discourses can be found in grassroots movements of Afro-descendants, pushing for a more equitable and intersectionality inclusive society.

We hope that the critical analysis that we presented here helps the readers to understand the pervasiveness of far-right ideologies in education and society to reinforce a monocultural/monolingual nation state. We know that a critical consciousness is growing globally, as we continue to organize and oppose genocide and colonial violence. Our possibilities will expand, while such authoritative perspectives will sway. Then we will see a clearer path to transformative justice and to a brighter future. This task is on us.