This project proposes an interdisciplinary analysis of the processes through which some of the ancient great empires negotiated and reevaluated their own past histories in the context of regional peacebuilding: Roman Empire, early modern Christendom from Europe to the Americas and Asia, Iberian Empires, Mughal empire, and the Tibetan Kingdoms of the Tibetosphere. The project will focus mainly on the concept of border and conflicts of identity across the boundaries and on the role of historical narratives in conflicts and their resolution. The approach is interdisciplinary, rooted in the discursive approach to conflict and reconciliation through the language of myth, theology, philosophy, law, and arts. During the project, we will become acquainted with concepts and theories of peacebuilding and conciliation, as well as social, political, and cultural issues related to the position of minorities in the empires of Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, and the long Renaissance, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. We will also explore the repercussions that certain narratives of the past continue to cast on the contemporary images of minority group in the socio-cultural and political scenarios of the present.
This project aims to go beyond the current juridical and political approaches to the study on peace processes and proposes to study the peace as a discourse advocating a forced cohabitation in the name of societal or divine value, but that presupposes a de facto cohabitation in order to be secured in the long term. We have evidence in peace processes of the past, where the normative action produced formal conditions for cohabitation among religions as long as the boundaries were maintained by economic and legal structures. Many old peace treatises suggest that peace was not a victorious peace, rather a process of long negotiations that secured the assurance of mutual support between the sides. While discourses about peace focus on human and extra-human action and forge the idea of peace as a value or a mythical event, history tells much about the collective efforts to ensure the conciliation in the long term and to put in practice forms of peaceful cohabitation that are the result of established interactions.
This project will provide a contribution in dealing with the narratives through which the manufacturing (philosophical, theological, mythical, artistical) of peace reproduces it as a value (political, social, religious, finally, universal), and establishes peace as a guarantee for a long-term peaceful cohabitation on the border of shared spaces. Compared to the traditional political studies dedicated to religious peacebuilding, this project does not stop with the identification of the religious factors that promote an abstract notion of peace, but rather it intends to explore the historical conditions in which peace strategies and narratives on peace have been produced, forging a lexicon and an alter ego for peace. It aims to examine, historically connect, and compare the greatest empires of the past (from Asia to the Americas via Europe), linked by having achieved an overextension of the geographical borders over a period of time, embracing a wide religious diversity and marking new boundaries and soliciting new border stories of cohabitation.
The historical-comparative approach offers significant advantages: (a) it produces data for a new conceptual and theoretical framework that considers the relationship and interaction between religions, pacification processes and peace theorisation; (b) it explores a wide intellectual production (mythical narratives, literary sources, images, philosophical and theological speculations) about peace, keeping into account fluidity and positionality in between religious identities. This approach is meant (c) to elaborate a pragmatics of peace, in the attempt to describe and classify the strategies of mythmaking, disguise, invention or removal of peace.
Another strong innovation factor concerns methodologies to explore the border stories through overextended empires. In particular, the widening of the geographical spaces from the mid-15th century, the conquest that led to the building of European and Asian empires in the modern times and the religious wars are all essential chronological and methodological references for this research (Te Brake 2016). As Y.Kaplan (2007) shows, the social practices that regulated the coexistence of people of a different faith (tolerance) in modern Europe have nothing to do with the theorisation of principles of mutual acceptance or positive visions of otherness. The Enlightenment definitions of tolerance, and therefore of peace between religions, which have entered the contemporary lexicon and which refer to a path of teleological progress, were preceded by experiments in the field. The breaking of the religious unity within the Christianity during and after the Reformation, the contact with every kind of confessional otherness (Jewish, Islamic, "heretical" and indigenous peoples) forced Europeans to find daily ways for an inevitable cohabitation. Having 'the other' at home was the rule and the needs of everyday life prevailed, waiting for the perfect society of the 'saved persons' to be built (Schwartz 2011). The inevitability of coexistence, that forced the one to trust the other, built new and complex societies in a time of turmoil. The paradigmatic studies of S. Subrahmanyam (2011) on the many ways of being 'alien' provide a crucial perspective to rethink how the search for the Unum impacted the understanding of religious diversity. This project will focus on the economic structures of the relationship of trust in the world of the first globalisation (Trivellato 2008;2019) and the difficult and never resolved interactions with the Jewish world (Ruderman, Guetta, Caffiero), and with the Ottoman Empire (Durtsteler, Rothman). This was true also in South and East Asia, with the Mughals ruling over an extensive empire populated by various religious groups, and the Dalai Lamas' Tibetan territory nestled in between South and East Asia in need of securing peace and stability (Megoran et al.2014).