Perspectivas – Journal of Political Science calls for papers for its Special Issue titled “Nature Under Fascist Regimes: Environmental Histories of 20th Century Mediterranean Transformations.”
This special issue has as Guest Editors Professor Marco Armiero (Director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory), the research engineer Roberta Biasillo (KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory) and Professor Paulo Guimarães (Senior Lecturer at University of Évora and researcher of the Research Center in Political Science – CICP).
This special issue aims to address these under-researched themes bringing environmental history in conversation with political history and other historical subfields. In particular, we identify three main themes as entry points for understanding the environmental history of Fascism:
- Reclamation: Changing the land, regimes aimed at changing or, better still, regenerating people. What was the celebration of the rural world against the urban one if not a political narrative blending nature and people?
- Modernity: Science and technology served political agendas and allowed the remaking of rural and urban spaces and the whole sphere of production but they act also as fascist tools to control people through a new level of institutionalization.
- Colonization: inner and proper colonial project represented forms of material appropriation and forced acculturation. Fascist projects took over marginal regions and transformed them into laboratories of the regime. Here were to plant and develop loyal societies and tamed environments.
Geographically, this special issue will focus on the Mediterranean Fascist and pseudo-Fascist regimes and their colonies and empires. Selected papers will illustrate relevant aspects of the relationship between nature and fascist regimes based on different national and cultural contexts. This special issue aims to draw comparisons between different countries but also offer unique trans-national historical dynamics connecting the different fascist regimes under study.
For more information download our Call for Papers or visit the journal’s website.
