Topic of thesis:
“At the Water’s Edge?”: Italian Political Parties and Military Operations Abroad
Abstract:
When it comes to foreign policy, political parties are commonly supposed to overcome their divisions in the name of national interest. Relying on this assumption, scholars in International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), a subfield that specifically focuses on the policymaking process to explain a state’s external behaviour, have long neglected the role of partisan politics. Only in recent times, political parties have started to be considered as a relevant variable to interpret foreign policy. This PhD research aims to provide a substantial contribution to the studies on this issue, exploring how the main Italian political parties have acted and interacted in the context of the several Military Operations Abroad (MOA) in which the country has embarked on since the end of the cold war. Due to the consensual nature of the political system and a traditional lack of well-defined foreign policy goals, Italy’s parties, both at the government and at the opposition, hold considerable margin of manoeuvre on security and defence policy. For this reason, I concentrate my attention on this particular country. In order to assess how parties have behaved on MOAs, I plan to analyse their positions on this issue through manifestos and parliamentary speeches and investigate their strategies at the institutional level through interviews, documents and voting records.
Research interests:
foreign policy analysis, International Relations, comparative politics, party politics, Italian foreign policy, British foreign policy
Graduated from: University of Bologna
Degrees obtained: Bachelor in International Studies, Master in International Relations
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