From Zoé to Bios: Acts of Citizenship and the Art of Organizing Hope in the 2025 Italian Citizenship Referendum

The contemporary global polycrisis has exacerbated struggles over democratic membership, transforming migration into a primary site for the politics of fear. Within this scenario, citizenship is increasingly weaponized to regulate inclusion and exclusion, effectively reducing migrants to zoé (bare life) rather than recognizing them as bios (politically qualified life). Bridging critical theory with the framework of ‘acts of citizenship’, this article argues that migrant subjectivity should not be represented as a passive condition but as an active transformative political force. The central question addresses how these acts allow migrants to experience themselves as concrete political subjects even when denied institutional recognition. Analyzing the 2025 Italian Citizenship Referendum as a laboratory of bottom-up counter-politics, the research maps the prefigurative practices enacted by ‘new citizens’ networks. Rather than merely requesting legal inclusion, these actors materially anticipated their desired citizenship, transforming the mobilization into a site of political subjectification where zoé actively prefigured itself as bios. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how reclaiming hope through concrete prefigurative practices can expand democratic membership, transforming marginalized subjects from objects of governance into agents of political hope.