Living the Second-Best: Diasporic Practices at Margins

This chapter examines Turkish and Kurdish diasporic life in Italy through the concept of diasporic marginality, a condition shaped less by small numbers than by the specific social dynamics that demographic marginality and institutional fragility generate. Unlike the consolidated diasporas of Germany or the Netherlands, the Italian diaspora remains geographically dispersed and organizationally thin; however, it is deeply connected through digital infrastructures and transnational networks. The chapter argues that peripherality produces its own distinctive forms of social organization, including heightened moral visibility, compensatory reliance on digital connectivity, and collective improvisation in moments of crisis. The chapter proceeds in four analytical movements. It first examines how demographic scale and geographic dispersion shape social life, showing how small and dispersed co-ethnic presence generates a paradoxical form of moral visibility, one sustained by the anticipation of scrutiny circulating through translocal networks connecting Italy to Turkey and Northern Europe. It then turns to religious and associational infrastructure, documenting how religious organizations developed under conditions of resource scarcity and transnational dependency, producing institutional forms that diverge substantially from those found in core migration destinations. A third movement analyzes digital infrastructures as structural necessities, tracing how connectivity compensates for the absence of formal institutions. The chapter’s fourth movement uses the February 2023 Maraş-Hatay earthquake as a revelatory moment, showing how diaspora mobilizes across transnational circuits, and how Italy’s belated humanitarian response created informal bureaucratic openings that migrants navigated through strategic improvisation. The chapter concludes by examining intra-diasporic encounters between long-settled migrants, second-generation youth, and newly arrived students, showing how class, generation, and mobility trajectory produce both competing and coexisting forms of belonging.