Toxic Diplomacy: The Waste Crisis and Italian-Nigerian Relations in the Late 1980s

In the summer of 1988, a waste crisis was the cause of some significant diplomatic tensions between Italy and Nigeria. This paper analyses the phenomenon of the maritime transport of Italian hazardous waste to Nigeria in the context of Italian foreign policy in the second half of the 1980s. What were the diplomatic relations between Italy and Nigeria before, during and after this waste crisis? The paper tries to answer this question by looking at unpublished historical and judicial sources. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .