The research aims to conduct the first comprehensive study of Italian foreign fighters’ return to the peninsula in the 1860-1970 period. During these decades, even if military mobilisation was mostly driven by national conscription and the nation-state, transnational war mobilisation did not disappear. “Returning Foreign Fighters. The Demobilisation of Italian Transnational War Volunteers, 1860s-1970s” discusses the trajectories, fates and legacies of Italian foreign fighters who had moved to a state other than their own with the intent to perpetrate, plan and participate in, or support acts of war, or to give or receive military training. This issue, which has been neglected by historians and has seen an initial interest from political scientists is articulated in three main research objectives:
1) investigate the national, transnational, international players that contributed defining an exit strategy from the conflict, as well as foreign fighters’ different experiences before returning home;
2) analyse foreign fighter returnees’ actions in their country of origin in order to understand whether they demobilised or chose new forms of political mobilisation;
3) analyse what Italian and international authorities did to oversee and, eventually, contain and repress their actions.