Wars and forms of violence in the contemporary world. With the end of the blocs and the implosion of the Soviet Union (1989-91), war once again appeared on the international scene as an instrument for resolving interstate conflicts and power politics in the competition for international hegemony. In this context, new forms of violence - typical of civil war, ethnic wars, colonial wars - manifested themselves and reappeared on a massive scale, leading scholars to speak of 'new wars'. The working hypothesis rests on a long-term historical perspective that, on the one hand, intends to retrace the evolution of the forms of warfare from the end of the 18th century (wars of revolutionary and Napoleonic France) to the end of the Second World War, and on the other hand, proposes to reconstruct the changing typologies of armed conflicts and violence between 1945 and the first decades of the 21st century. The focus is fixed in particular on the cultures of war and the practices of violence, on the evolution and mutation of the concept of war and civil war, on the attempt of law to contain and govern violence (through the intertwining of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, between international law and humanitarian law, and through the policies of punishing war crime between criminal and military law).
In addition to individual research, this line of research is part of a collaboration in an international project at the University of Barcelona (Prof. Javier Rodrigo) on 'post-civil wars' (the experiences of and ways out of widespread violence in conflicts in countries that have experienced civil wars) and the politics of memory in Europe.
Political justice and transitional justice, ordinary justice and extraordinary justice. Starting from the examination of a series of trials carried out by military tribunals and civil courts in the immediate post-World War II period, the research project, originated in line with the work experiences gained in the studies on the civil war and on the war against civilians, intends to proceed to the elaboration of a profile of the legal cultures that confront each other in the different forms of concrete application and interpretation of the codes, to the reconstruction of the public and political debate that accompanies the trial season, to the analysis of the relations between the political class and the judiciary, to the identification of the links that bind national trial policies and the dynamics of international relations, to the tormented and changing relationship between law and politics. It is also intended to trace the conceptual and cultural roots of the application practices of extraordinary justice and the state of exception back to the original experiences of revolutionary justice in Jacobin France.
For a Dictionary of Nomadic Concepts: following the publication in France of the Dictionnaire des concepts nomades en Sciences Humaines (edited by Olivier Christin, ed. Metaillé), an international working group was set up (coordinated together with O. Christin, Université de Neuchâtel-CEDRE Centre européen des études républicaines, Paris) with the aim of creating an Italian edition of the Dictionary, not to be intended as a translation of the French one, but as a separate work, albeit in relation to the former. The aim is to produce a Dictionary of the Humanities and History that, in addition to a historicisation of concepts, produces a reflection on the birth, circulation and appropriation of concepts within the different national cultural spaces as part of the broader European and Western cultural space. The aim is to trace the conceptual abstraction back to the original historical object of reference and to retrace the routes and different uses and applications of the concept across the borders of the different national cultures.
