Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge (ISSN 2499-930X)

War economy: the contribution of Eritrea in the imperial framework from the Commissione annonaria of Asmara to the Azienda Speciale Approvvigionamenti (1934-1941)

Matteo Nardozi — 2023-01-30

The war was a factor constantly present in the colonial history of Italy, as it is possible to appreciate especially in the Thirties, also about the economic contribution of Eritrea in the framework of the Italian imperial system and to the problem of supplies and tools created to meet the shortcomings of the indigenous production system. Through the study of sources from the Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, the Archivio Storico della Banca d’Italia and the Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare, this article intends to deepen the theme of the war economy, analysing not only the role of Eritrea as a whole, but also deepening the contribution of institutions such as the Commissione annonaria of Asmara and the Azienda Speciale Approvvigionamenti, created by the authorities colonial to provide for the supply of consumer goods for the civilian population.

The First Mafia War. When the narcotics changed Palermo’s mobs (1962-1969)

Vincenzo Cassarà — 2023-02-01

The first conviction of Cosa Nostra, as is well known, took place at the Maxi Trial (1986-1987). However, not everyone knows that many bosses had already been arrested twenty years earlier following the “First Mafia War” (1962-1963), a feud between clans culminated in the Ciaculli massacre (June 30, 1963). The martyrdom of seven soldiers was followed by the police first reaction, which in Palermo, in that summer, arrested two thousand people. This first anti-Mafia season fade so soon that, at the end of the legislature, the chairman of the parliamentary commission of inquiry delivered to Parliament a report of just three pages. In the wake of the failure to reach political conclusions, in the two trials in Catanzaro (Dec. 22, 1968) and Bari (June 10, 1969) nearly all the defendants, including Totò Riina, were acquitted for insufficient evidence. The author reconstructs in detail the internal conflict witihin the cosche to the point of outlining their political and judicial failures.

The Estallido Social as a source of creation of collective representativeness: the laboratory of the Mandato Ciudadano in Barranquilla (Colombia)

Lucia Picarella — 2023-02-01

In recent years, Latin America has been crossed by a new strong wave of social conflicts characterized by significant transversality and heterogeneity which, on the one hand, have highlighted the unsolved systemic debts in terms of social justice of evidently dysfunctional democracies, on the other hand they are leading the region towards a new cycle of political and institutional redefinitions. This article, being part of traditional socio-political studies relating to the problematization of the relationships and dynamics that arise between social movements and social conflict, analyses - with a qualitative methodology- the case of the Estallido Social (Social Outbreak) that was registered in Colombia over the last year and, in particular, focuses on the Mandato Ciudadano (Citizen Mandate) social movement experiment that materialized in the city of Barranquilla following the social revolts, where the demands for democracy, pluralism and bottom-up democratic participation, as well as social justice and respect for human rights, took shape. The objective of this article is to study the movement's possibilities for impact and pressure at the political-institutional level, a possibility that will be fundamental for a country that has just started an epochal change, with the victory of the forces of the left in the presidential elections, and which, therefore, will have to deal with the structuring of a new socio-economic and political-institutional model that is capable of realizing the voice that has come from the street.

New Conflicts in the Global City: the “Decorum Battle”

Luca Alteri — 2023-02-01

Nowadays Urban Transformations are went back to the center of the sociological and historical investigation, after a long interruption in which the study of urban society had been downsized. Within the cities, population have often been differentiated according to social, economic, political and ethnical characters, which generated a mutual hostility extended to rioting and other forms of overt conflict. The article analyses the case study of San Lorenzo, a Roman neighborhood where urban transformations have fostered a conflict between residents and “city users”, attracted by the district’s bohemian atmosphere. The theoretical framework deals with the scientific hypothesis that the dismantling of the “Public City” also occurs through smart labels such as ‘urban regeneration’ and ‘promotion of decorum’. Then, the article critically investigates a plurality of large and tiny events in which the goals of decorum-related groups have been challenged – not helped – by residents’ activism and claims, designing a sort of “short circuit” between the urban vision of a “Clean and Polite City” and the social strategy of a “Slow and Resilient City”.

Economic networks and social interactions in the Byzantine koinè: settlement pattern in the Adriatic Sea between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (ca. 600-ca. 900 CE.)

Luca Zavagno — 2023-02-01

The aim of the paper is to compare the unfolding of urban trajectories in some coastal urban centers located in the so-called Byzantine koinè during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (i.e., between ca. 600 and ca. 900). In this light, the contribution will focus on a few important harbors and/or coastal sites located in Dalmatia (Zadar), southern Adriatic (Butrint), and the so-called Adriatic crescent (Comacchio and Civitas Nova Heracliana) as famously described by Michael McCormick. [1]

Indeed, the increased focus on the coins, seals, and ceramics as yielded in stratigraphically-aware excavations allows us to sketch commonalities in the social, administrative, political, and military functions of urban and urban-like settlements located in coastal (like the Adriatic itself) or insular areas too often regarded as peripheral to the so-called Byzantine heartland (the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau) in the period under scrutiny. In fact, these areas were part a geographically scattered but economically and administrative inclusive and socially coherent set of spaces (the Byzantine koinè) also having a common importance as vectors for regional and trans-Mediterranean commerce and social movements.

Therefore, the paper takes its cue from the fragmentation of the Mediterranean as an economically disjointed, socio-politically conflictual, religiously divided, and culturally disputed space at the turn of the eighth century; nevertheless, it summons the scanty literary and documentary sources for the period (as paired with archaeology) to highlight the role played by major harbor-urban sites on the Adriatic coasts as they boasted a good level of socio-economic activity, as predicated upon resilient trade links, shipping routes, and social movements between the western and eastern half on the Mediterranean.

[1] M.McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900 (Cambridge Mass., 2001), pp. 523-43.

Education and Islamic identity in contemporary society

Martina Crescenti — 2023-02-01

This essay analyzes educational and socializing modes to Islam in contemporary society, particularly focusing on two traditional socializing agencies, the family and the Quranic school, and two "innovative" agencies for Islam, namely association and social networks. Beginning with the conception of the "good Muslim" as defined in the reference texts, the Quran and the Sunna, it analyzes how the believer educates and self-socializes to Islam in a society that is highly complex, differentiated, and traversed by continuous social and cultural phenomena of destabilization. Not only do associations and social networks propose and constitute particularly flexible and multifunctional spaces of socialization, but also the most "stable and secure" agencies in the definition and construction of Muslim identity, including the family, find themselves reworking, modifying, and constructing unique and original educational processes in order to live daily according to Quranic precepts.