Margins in Revolt. Extractive Rule and Social Struggles in Southern Italy

Margins in Revolt offers a theoretically grounded and empirically rich account of how global extractive capitalism reshapes local territories, daily life, and political agency. Focusing on Southern Italy between 2007 and 2017, the book explores a cycle of social conflicts triggered by austerity, deindustrialisation, and the erosion of political mediation. Far from being peripheral or exceptional, the South is reframed as a paradigmatic site—a condensed expression of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions. Here, neoliberal restructuring and EU-led integration have deepened spatial inequalities, producing landscapes of abandonment, precarity, and environmental degradation. Yet these margins also become spaces of insurgency, where new solidarities and political subjectivities arise. Combining critical political sociology with insights from racial capitalism, postcolonial governance, and critical geography, the book examines labour struggles after factory closures, migrant workers’ strikes in agri-food chains, and environmental resistance to toxic industrial projects. These are not isolated events, but symptoms of broader systemic violence—where profit is extracted from land, bodies, and futures, with scant concern for social or ecological sustainability. Margins in Revolt challenges developmentalist narratives by framing the South not as a policy problem but as an active site of critique and collective imagination. It foregrounds ethical and political questions about conflict, development, and resistance, showing how marginalised groups respond not only with grievance but by cultivating autonomous spaces of care, mutual aid, and defiance. Ultimately, the book urges us to rethink the South as a strategic vantage point from which to interrogate neoliberalism—and envision alternative futures of emancipation. Margins in Revolt is the first volume in the Ethics Press Critical Horizons in the Social Sciences series.