Trento: transnational civilian intervention in conflict areas

On the 26^th and the 27^th of June 2015, the Bruno Kessler Foundation‘s Research Center on International Politics and Conflict Resolution (FBK-CERPIC) is hosting the annual Conference of the Italian Standing Group on International Relations (SGRI). The two-day session is an opportunity for scholars, researchers and PhD students to come together and discuss topics that are relevant to international relations, global politics, European Studies, foreign policy, regional dynamics and international theory. This year’s topic for the SGRI annual conference is “Disentangling Subsystem Dynamics. The Search for Peace and Cooperation”.

In the frame of this event, OBC will chair the panel Transnational civilian intervention in conflict areas: from global civil society to jihadism. The prosed panel aims at broadening the scope of the research project on civilians’ mobilization in conflicts during the Nineties, conducted by OBC during the last two years. Indeed, since the end of the cold war, transnational mobilization has been increasingly witnessed in conflict areas. During the Yugoslav dissolution as well as in the current war in Syria and Ukraine, a significant number of civilians from all over Europe decided to intervene by crossing national borders to support relief operation or to take part in military operations.

The phenomenon deserves attention as it involves large numbers of people and it has strong influence on the wider public opinion back home where it reinforces the perception of living in a globalized world and have an impact over minority and migrant communities. A renewed urgency to analyse these phenomena arises from recent reports about the involvement of foreign fighters in the on going conflicts.

With the aim to promote empirical research about these transnational social phenomena, OBC invites to submit papers that overcome widespread essentialist representation of humanitarian as well as fighters groups and that contribute to analyse their role in the international arena and their impact at domestic level.

People interested in presenting a paper at the 2015 SGRI Conference are invited to send a short abstract to sgri@fbk.eu by May 15, 2015. The complete list of the panels hosted at the 8^th SGRI annual conference and other relevant information are available here.