Workshop: “Trame di Pace: Italian Peace Advocacy and the Decolonizing World”
How did Italian peace movements navigate colonialism and decolonization?
From the First World War until the height of the Cold War, activists from the decolonizing world sought to build connections with international peace movements, creating new networks and practices of solidarity while also exposing tensions over the centrality of decolonization in global struggles for peace. Anti-nuclear movements globalized as concerns over nuclear imperialism and fears of atomic annihilation rose to prominence, spreading far beyond national borders and transcending allegiances to Cold War blocs. At the same time, such new coalitions also experienced moments of friction around the question of (potential) violence in decolonization struggles. Simply put, was the pursuit of sovereignty a prerequisite for world peace, or did the pursuit of world peace supersede the struggle for sovereignty?
Italian peace advocacy provides an especially productive lens through which to view efforts to build broad international coalitions for peace that had to navigate different understandings and practices of peace advocacy. Italy’s long-standing networks of religiously inflected peace organizations on the one hand, and the prominence of the Italian Left in organizations like the World Peace Council on the other, made for a diverse landscape in which a broad spectrum of traditions of peace advocacy co-existed, overlapped, and occasionally diverged.
To what extent were Italian peace movements privileged interlocutors for actors in the decolonizing world in their intertwined struggles for independence and peace? How did Italian peace movements, organizations, and individuals connect to the decolonizing world? How did different strands of Italian peace advocacy approach the question of decolonization, and with what methods and outcomes? When did they join forces, and when did they act separately?
In this workshop, papers on the engagements of Italian peace activist(s) from any political or religious orientation, with any region of the decolonizing world, will be presented. Papers will be pre-circulated two weeks before the workshop, on May 12th. After the workshop, we intend to submit the revised papers as a special issue to an international journal.
Conveners: dr. Carolien Stolte and dr. Daniele Paolini