The accommodation of the diversity brought by immigrants has become a central issue in the political agenda of receiving societies in the last decades. This is especially evident at the local level. However, reality shows that sometimes the interaction among peoples of different background can be a source of conflict in cities and towns. Against this backdrop, I ask to what extent peripheral cities include immigrants in the resolution of particular immigration-related conflicts. My question follows a two-fold argument: on the one hand, I defend that peripheral cities, like their larger counterparts, build governance arrangements where state and non-state actors negotiate the resolution of immigration-related conflicts. On the other, I argue that these arrangements include immigrants selectively, meaning that only institutionalized actors have access to them and differentially, meaning that the type of conflict will favour the inclusion of certain actors over others. I place the lens on the political governance of such challenges and the local characteristics that determine who is part of them and who is not. To do so, I study two peripheral cities in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB): Castelldefels and Santa Coloma de Gramenet between the years 2010-2018. Both are characterised by different political opportunities for the inclusion of immigrants as well as perceptions as to the level of conflict among neighbours since the arrival of large flows of migrants in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Key words: Immigration-related conflicts, Local governance, Peripheral cities

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Juan Carlos Triviño is a Juan de la Cierva post-doctoral fellow at IBEI, and in parallel to this position, he also works for the Horizon 2020 Transcrisis project at IBEI. His research engages in questions about public policy, political participation and inclusion, local politics and immigration and integration. He also collaborates with the research group GRITIM at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He has taught undergrad and master courses on public policy, international relations, comparative politics and immigration at UPF and IBEI. In January 2016, he defended his PhD thesis titled “Political parties and immigrant associations: alliances in the presence of politicized immigration conflicts. A comparative study”. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Catalan Government FI-AGAUR pre-doctoral fellow. He has done academic stays at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and another one at the FEGS in Caracas, Venezuela. He holds a Mundus-Mapp double degree master in public policy (IISS-The Hague and IBEI-Barcelona) funded by the Erasmus Mundus program and an MSc in European relations (Linköping University-Sweden).