Tutor: Prof.ssa Ilenia Ruggiu

Keywords: Constitutional law and interculturalism; multiculturalism; cultural rights; local authorities; subsidiarity; public policies for immigrants.

Short bio:
She holds a Law degree, with a thesis focused on the interplay between constitutional and customary law in shaping the rights of South African women. She was a member of a multidisciplinary research team involved in drafting the Guidebook on Cultural Diversity (2024), coordinated by Prof. Ilenia Ruggiu. She has a keen interest in multicultural and intercultural issues and their interactions with constitutional law. Since 2023, she has been a Ph.D. candidate in Legal Sciences. Her research project focuses—also from a comparative perspective—on the capacity of local authorities to contribute to the development of intercultural societies.

Thesis abstract:

The research project originated from the idea that local authorities represent the optimal legal and social space for implementing intercultural societies.
While national policies in Global North states tend to respond to increasing migratory flows with institutional and cultural closure toward the “other” — invoking identity-based and security-oriented logics — from a bottom-up perspective, a contrasting trend emerges: a fabric of “intercultural” policies more or less consciously implemented by local authorities.
Indeed, these authorities, based on legislative and administrative decentralization, manage foreign nationals on the “front line,” providing primary services (such as civil registration, housing, healthcare, education) as well as more complex services aimed at facilitating individual integration into the new society (such as language and vocational training, legal assistance, socialization activities, etc.).
The aim of the project is to identify — also through a comparative lens — the legislative and administrative tools that Italian local authorities represent (Regions, Metropolitan Cities, Provinces, and Municipalities) and foreign territorial authorities represent adopt or could adopt to realize genuine interculturality. The project seeks to model these policies — which are currently varied and asymmetrically distributed across different territories — and to test their replicability within a broader, more rationalized network of entities.
Among the numerous factors, both domestic and comparative, that have drawn the attention of this investigation are: the analysis of legislative powers and administrative functions exercised by local entities in terms of reception and social assistance for foreigners; the concrete implementation of the principles of vertical and horizontal subsidiarity; the role of the third sector and civil society organizations; the reception systems in Italy and abroad; potential discretionary powers of “street-level bureaucrats” in delivering services to foreigners; the possible distortions of horizontal subsidiarity and the weakening of state responsibility in reception; forms of “social citizenship” more closely tied to the concept of residence and community belonging; the interplay between local policies of openness toward the “other” and claims for autonomy from central governments (as in the case of Scotland); and the many intercultural city networks, such as the Intercultural Cities Programme (ICC) launched by the Council of Europe in 2008 to promote cultural diversity in cities as a local asset.