Mission

Nowadays, crises are rarely confined within national borders. When an economic, health, migration or humanitarian crisis occurs, State and non-State actors, public and private stakeholders are involved on a global scale.
While exploring the phenomenological dimension of crises, different approaches require different perspectives. Beyond the traditional geo-temporal approach, it is possible to grasp the tendency towards 'transnational' aggregation and interconnection. In some cases, new analytical categories have been developed, influenced by national and international events, social, economic, political and legal transformations connected to the globalisation process and the regulation and adaptation strategies of the actors involved.

The phenomenon of the crisis - meaning an extraordinary condition of particular difficulty or disturbance of a socio-economic system obstructing the institutional machinery and highlighting its internal contradictions, but also capable of triggering unprecedented negotiations and mediations and bringing with it practical and planning innovations - is at the center of a renewed scientific interest , since the beginning of the new millennium. 

The concept of crisis has already been explored in all disciplines studying human behaviour: from economics (K. Marx, J. M. Keynes, T. B. Veblen, H. Minsky) to psychology (L. Sander, G. Bateson), from philosophy (E. Morin, G. Bocchi, M. Ceruti) to political science (M. Castells) and sociology (H. Maturana, F. Varela, L von Bertalanffy, T. Parsons) to law (N. Luhmann). More recently, this theme has been explored from the perspective of its evolving complex networks and the dynamics of its evolution (A.L. Barabási; S.N. Dorogovtsev; J.F.F. Mendes; M. Newman).

Taking advantage of this rich and heterogeneous literature, the project aims to investigate how the knowledge and practices elaborated by political institutions, specialised agencies, non-governmental organisations, economic actors, interest groups, and academics have contributed to the representation of the transnational crisis over time, shaping its causes and consequences, its severity, its perpetrators, and identifying the "lessons" that can be drawn from it. We aim to study how crises have progressively shaped historical memory, economic debate, social policies, and international law.

The first area of the research explores representations adopted by political and social actors in order to define and manage concerns and controversies arising from the "transnational" nature of the crises. In other words, it enquires how the pursue of national goals by national-state, the need to give a voice to demands promoted by civil society or by the international community, the memory of 'past emergencies' have been decisive for the cultural, scientific and political legitimisation-processes of the 'transnational' crisis.

In the context of the economic field, the project enquire recent crises conceived as phenomena inherent to the capitalist system. With particular reference to the 2007-2008 crisis, the project will investigate the effects of the financialisation process on the corporate and banking sectors. In the context of the 2020 pandemic crisis, the project explores the need to review the role of the State in re-directing supply through appropriate economic policies (especially public investment and industrial policies).

The third area of the research rethinks the notion of 'transnational crisis' in the light of the most recent developments in international and EU law. Within this framework, it investigates the ways the international community has originally deals with and addressed crisis-related forms and phenomena; secondly, it investigates to what extent the law of international cooperation contributes to a re-definition of transnational crisis and produces useful tools for its prevention and management.

The research is based on an innovative and interdisciplinary approach open to the different paradigms of interpretation of the "crisis" in order to identify its factors, investigate its correlations and envisage new and effective lines of intervention.​The project takes advantages from a cooperative experience already started in the framework of the Departmental Research Plan 2016-2018 (concerning the analysis of solidarity instruments typically operating in the international community in crisis situations) and involves professors, researchers, PhDs in legal history, political economy, international law and EU law.