Selective law enforcement at the intersection of ethnicity and entrepreneurship

This paper discusses the inconsistent law enforcement which only targets Chinese manufacturing firms active in the Italian fashion industry. Theory building is deeply embedded in rich empirical data and in a dialogue with concepts and theories developed in a wide range of fields and subfields such as urban studies, development studies, studies on local governance, and migration studies. While focusing on dynamics unfolding at the local scale, the paper positions selective law enforcement measures into a wider, multi-layered context which encompasses shifts in the global division of labour, processes of capital investment and disinvestment putting pressure on territories, local policies of migrant inclusion/exclusion, and the trajectory of local production systems. I analyse non-enforcement of the law as an ethnicised battle over economic accumulation, with significant redistributive consequences. At the same time, I point at the role of ethnically selective forced compliance as a tool used by the stakeholders in the territory to counter the potential loss of political authority engendered by the impact of crucial global shifts on the locality. In short, the paper proposes a political economy perspective: it teases out the underlying logic of selective law enforcement disentangling its economic, social, axiological, ethnical, and ultimately political dimensions.