Call for papers

War in Ukraine: analyzing the causes and exploring nonviolent solutions

At the sunrise of February 24, 2022 the military invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation has begun, surprising many observers (but not all of them) and opening scenarios that, after more than four months of war, still appear largely unpredictable, including a possible nuclear escalation.

Few recent wars have received more media coverage than the current one in Ukraine. Most Western media have given wide coverage to violence and violations of international law by the Russian army, the Ukrainian self-defence efforts symbolized by the President of the country, and the dramatic suffering of the Ukrainian civilian population, forced to flee on an unprecedented scale and speed in recent European history: during the first four months of war, more than 7,5 million people left the country, mainly women and children, although 2,4 million of people in the meanwhile came back to Ukraine. Casualties among Ukrainian civilians are at least 20.000, but those data are probably underestimated.

The political polarization caused by the war, although understandable, has made it difficult to develop a lucid analysis of the conflict and its multiple causes, which is a necessary precondition for an authentic and durable peace process between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, within a new European and international security system. Simplifications induced by a “war-driven state of mind” have instead, very often, tried to dismiss "complexity" as a rhetorical tool used by those refusing to take a position. Efforts to understand the causes of the conflict have been dismissed as an attempt to justify the Russian invasion. Diplomacy and forms of unarmed and nonviolent resistance have been ridiculed as unrealistic and misrepresented as a way to deny Ukraine's right to self-defence.

As a result, Western governments and part of Western public opinion have seen economic sanctions and the sending of weapons - more and more lethal and sophisticated - as the only way to support Ukraine and stop the conflict, aiming at the complete defeat of the Russian Federation without asking, for example, what consequences would be implied by such approach.

The decision of many European governments, starting with the German one, although after much hesitation, to significantly increase military spending even to the detriment of social spending, clearly indicates a tendency towards rearmament. This perspective appears hardly compatible with peace and well-being of people, especially at a time when poverty and inequality are increasing, and public resources should be invested as a priority in the ecological transition.

In such a critical historical phase, we believe that the world of research is called to question itself in order to offer in-depth and reasoned analyses of the ongoing war and, above all, to propose viable solutions of conflicts. These solutions should include unarmed and nonviolent strategies, in order to solve and prevent international disputes, starting with the current one opposing the Russian Federation on one side and Ukraine, supported by the United States, the European Union, and the NATO, on the other.

For these reasons, we invite experts from various disciplines to submit research papers to the journal that discuss and shed light in particular on the following aspects:

- proximate and ultimate causes of the ongoing war in Ukraine;

- theories, practices, historical examples, conditions for the effectiveness of unarmed defence, nonviolent resistance, and peaceful conflict resolution, generally applicable in today's world and particularly in the Ukrainian context, with the aim of creating the conditions for diplomatic solution of disputes;

- uses of different types of media in the ongoing war and responsibility of journalism for the resolution or the escalation of the conflict;

- phenomena of internal displacement and forced emigration of civilians, with particular attention to the policies adopted by the European Union as a whole and by member states;

- local and global effectiveness and effects of economic sanctions as a tool against military aggression or against violation of international law, in the Ukrainian war and in other cases;

- environmental damages and public health hazards associated with military operations in Ukraine;

- legality, legitimacy, and opportunity of military interventions in support of a country invaded or marked by serious violations of human rights;

- new perspectives for international peace and security, with a focus on the role of international and regional organizations, on the role of international jurisdictions (International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, etc.), and on issues of disarmament;

- medium and long-term geopolitical, economic, and social impacts of the ongoing war in Ukraine, in relation to the multiple crises (energy, climate, health, food, etc.) that world society is facing today.

Instruction for the authors

In order to participate to the call, please send a 300-word abstract to the editorial board of the journal (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). Abstract submission deadline: 31 August 2022. Acceptance will be communicated by 10 September 2022. The complete Research paper - in Italian, English or Spanish - should be submitted by 30 November 2022, and will be subjected to an anonymous peer-review procedure. We recommend the authors comply with the editorial guidelines of the journal by drafting the Research paper.

In Italy, the phenomenon of migration has reached the dimension of an emergency in the internal public debate (Carta 2018) with the Decree-Law on Immigration and Security (Law 1.12.2018, n.132) representing a major downturn in the architecture of the Italian system of protection. This paper is a tentative to explore the Salvini Security-Immigration Decree-Law and its regional socio-economic effects. The Salvini’s reform has been decried by civil society organisations for lowering protection standards, infringing constitutional and human rights guarantees and exacerbating social tension on migration (AIDA 2018). Composed by forty articles, fifteen of which are dedicated to immigration, international protection and citizenship, the so called ‘Salvini Decree-Law’ is leading, and it will lead, some relevant effects on Italian regional and local contexts. Indeed, even if an important role is played by national government in defining comprehensive solutions to migration phenomenon, in Italy activities and measures for migrants are planned and implemented through coordinated actions at national, regional and local level. On the grounds of this complex context, a conceptual framework is introduced to analyse the Salvini Decree-Law’s effects on regional contexts and to generate hypothesis on the strategies that local and regional policy makers (but also non-state actors) should follow. In particular, this tool analyses challenges the implementation of the new Law is leading in the two specific domains of reception and integration of asylum seekers and refugees. The case study of Tuscany Region has been chosen due to its well-known welfare model and strong social capital structure. The study results are reported and systematised in an ex-post SWOT analysis.

Amid the surge of populism across the globe, migration is very often politicized, and migrants accused of causing the loss of jobs and the underperformance of welfare and health services. Right-wing populists exacerbate these claims and capitalize on thriving racism and xenophobia. So far, the scholarship’s emphasis on global populism has tended to overlook the importance of local experiences in filtering these dynamics and shaping voters’ perceptions. This article examines Southern Italy, arguing that migration plays a relevant role in fostering the appeal of populist platforms, but in relation to socioeconomic inequalities and the history of the local area.

Although migration is usually approached at the macro level as a geopolitical phenomenon and catalyser of social-economic changes (e.g. impact on poverty in home and host countries, impact on economic growth, impact on human capital), the capability approach (Sen, 1987; 1995) suggests that being able to decide where to live is also a key element of human freedom. Starting from 2000, Italy had the highest relative growth of its migrant population (Caritas Italiana, 2019) in the European Union (EU). The number of asylum seekers, holders of international protection, and refugees hosted and assisted by the reception system has significantly increased between 2011 and 2017 (UNHCR, 2020). Consequently, a major challenge emerged: how to structure a reception system able to support migrants by fostering their integration within hosting communities and by promoting their autonomy at the end of the asylum procedure. The aim of this paper is to describe the evolution of the multidimensional well-being and capabilities of migrants along their migration experience with a particular focus on the role played by the reception system. The paper investigates three case studies which have been observed between 2015 and 2019 in two Italian regions, Tuscany and Piedmont. The research adopts innovative participatory methods, including structured focus group discussion and participatory mapping, with the aim to directly engage asylum seekers and holders of international protection.

In the last two decades, European countries, while working for the establishment of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS) to harmonise the legal frameworks of the member states and establish common minimum standards, have rather pursued domestic goals at times, imposing restrictive policies on forced migrants to deter inflows and deflect refugees to fellow countries. Within migration policies, integration programmes in EU countries might affect the well-being and the quality of life, inducing migrants to move from one country to another. We thus investigate the effect of integration policies from 2006 to 2018 on secondary movements of asylum seekers. We argue that integration policies show significant correlations with secondary movements in European countries, while more general migration policies may rather affect first entry flows into EU.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the economic features of Italy’s neo-racism. It contends that neo-racism is a mass phenomenon that emerged over the past twenty years as a result of the degraded quality of life determined by neoliberalism. Neo-racism results from in-group/outgroup dynamics whereby people seek scapegoats that may account for their dismal economic and social conditions. Contrary to extant economic theories, the paper tries to explain the insurgence of discrimination rather than assuming that racism existed from the very beginning. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes neo-racism in Italy and distinguishes it from past racism. The third section discusses existing theoretical outlooks and explains why their assumptions do not fit with the evidence about Italy. The fourth section discusses Italy’s shift to neoliberalism by describing both the change in the balance of power between business and unions and the policies that reinforced this change. The fifth section discusses how these institutional changes affected people’s categorical and relational identities. It stresses that neoliberalism reduces the opportunities both for individual and collective action, thereby increasing the scope for categorical identities at the expense of relational identities. The sixth section provides a few concluding remarks.

Does Europeanisation of borders and migration policies necessarily infringe national sovereignty? This paper proposes to question this commonplace by analysing the entanglement of three internal tactics of bordering promoted by national-populists in the wake of the 2015 “crisis” with the Dublin Regulation – namely, the EU legal framework governing the allocation of asylum seekers across EU Member States (MS). Not only does the biometric database related to Dublin Regulation (the EURODAC) enable national authorities to diminish the number of applicants for whom they are deemed responsible, but it may also be used in a variety of ways for setting administrative traps against other categories of third country nationals (TCN). Thus, against the widespread belief, this paper argues the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) might be, in some respect, highly needed for enacting national sovereignty in the Schengen context. Whereas the policies presented here were publicised in the name of “re-nationalising” the management of asylum flows against the EU leadership, they might have paradoxically relied on the wide usage of dataveillance instruments offered by the EU itself. Thus, this article will finally offer a better understanding of some ambivalences of Eurosceptical parties in their relation to the CEAS.