Border Conflicts and Tools for Stabilization. From Ancient Greece to Contemporary Europe

Funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the Department of Humanities at the University of Trento, the project FeBo-Federalism and Border Management in Greek Antiquity (ERC 2021 COG PR. Nr. 101043954)aims at exploring the multifaceted strategies applied by Greek federal states in order to help secure stability and inner cohesion by managing the different challenges posed by the leagues’ internal and external borders in a flexible manner. In order to shed new light on border management policies and cultures, we are especially interested in the role played by techniques of balance of power as well as networks of informal political actors who crossed borders on a regular basis and invigorated border spaces together with the things they carried. The first semester of the second year of the project (2023-2024) was dedicated both to the study of external, i.e. inter-federal border areas (WP1) and to the internal, i.e. intrafederal borders (WP2-4). With regard to the first point, the objective was the collection and analysis of evidence on economic, ethnic, cultural, and religious interactions on the borders of a koinon in its various phases (WP 1). The research actions undertaken were aimed at investigating phenomena of cross-border cooperation and the forms in which such cross-border cooperation made possible and even necessary a special legal definition of the areas in which this cooperation took place. The survey was also conducted comparatively with EU European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC). To this end, an ongoing exchange took place with two legal experts on cross-border cooperation CBC, Francesco Palermo (University of Verona)and Jens Woelk (University of Trento), respectively director of the Institute for Comparative Federalismwith which FeBo has a collaboration and EuregioProfessor. With regard to the second point, the aim was to catalogue all the border conflicts in the Peloponnese and in Central and Northern Greece by extrapolating them from a set of already existing corpora and integrating them in the light of recent epigraphic discoveries, with the purpose of setting a research agenda aimed at identifying recurrent dynamics in the management of these conflicts depending on whether they took place in a federal, formerly federal, or quasi-federal context, or in the context of other types of supra-state organisation of a political and/or military nature (WP 2-4)