logo

Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

logo

Shifting Forms of Political Violence: a Socio-Spatial Relational Approach

TEAM

Lorenzo Bosi and Sanjin Uležić

START YEAR 2016

END YEAR 2018

Starting from the observation that armed groups shift in their forms of political violence across time and space, the project rather than falling into the trap of creating a rigid and deterministic vision of development sequences, will seek to identify the continuous shifts and investigate those socio-spatial relations between armed groups and their constituencies that drive these trajectories from one type of violence to the other. In doing so it will develop an analytical framework based on the notion of socio-spatial relation, which integrates sociological and geographical dimensions. This is done through a comparison of the cycles of political violence perpetrated by the Red Brigades in Italy and the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. Approaching a hitherto largely unexplored field, the empirical trajectories that this sead project will qualitatively investigate will be neither exhaustive nor universal, but they will serve for hypothesis bulding and eventually merit future empirical testing via systematic comparative analysis in a larger scale project.

 

*Project banner adapted from Ines Morigi, su disegno di Giuseppe Capogrossi, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

                                  

FUNDING

Scuola Normale Superiore

 

News

Publications

Edited Volume - 2026

Conspiracism and Political Conflict

Manuela Caiani, Marco Solinas, Hans-Jorg Trenz

Monograph - 2025

Free download for "Contentious Politics of Global Health Movements"

Donatella Della Porta, Stella Christou

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy

Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

Journal Article - 2025

Power resources, territory and labour conflicts in the logistic sector

Donatella Della Porta, Marco Antonelli