Research Articles and Book Chapters
Mazziotti di Celso (2026). Military Policing in Advanced Democracies. Italy in Comparative Perspective. Routledge
Abstract
This book investigates when and why governments in advanced democracies deploy armed forces for domestic security. It develops a theoretical framework conceptualising military policing as a policy instrument and identifies circumstances that lead governing parties to choose military over police for law-and-order agendas. The analysis reveals that armed forces are often favoured because they can be deployed more rapidly and at lower cost, arguing that military deployments frequently respond to economic convenience and become particularly attractive under fiscal constraint.
The framework is tested on Italy, Europe’s heaviest user of armed forces for domestic security, drawing on extensive empirical evidence, including over 50 interviews with military officers, politicians, and police officials, as well as parliamentary debates and press sources. The book includes exploratory analysis assessing the framework’s applicability to other European states.
Unlike existing studies focusing largely on Latin America, this work offers one of the first comprehensive analyses of causal factors driving military policing in advanced European democracies, making a significant contribution to civil–military relations scholarship. This volume will interest scholars, students, and practitioners of military studies, civil–military relations, policing, and security studies, as well as think tanks and policymakers seeking to understand the political dynamics behind domestic military deployments.
Coticchia, F. (2025). Populism and the Use of Force. In Routledge Handbook of Populism and Foreign Policy (pp. 457-473). Routledge.
Abstract
What is the impact of populist parties on the use of force by governments? Are there recurring patterns in the populists’ stances concerning military operations? The chapter aims to answer these questions, illustrating the main findings of the recent debate on (populist) parties and defence policy, with specific attention to military interventions. Discourses, votes, and behaviour of populist parties on missions changed according to national peculiarities, strategic culture and the role played by thick (left/right) ideology. Yet, in conformity with the literature on populism and foreign policy, the scholarly debate has developed and tested specific expectations on populist parties and military operations, highlighting some patterns. A brief look at selected qualitative cases is helpful to evaluate the outcomes derived from analyses with larger samples. Finally, the case of Italy – a country that has been highly active in military deployments and it has been constantly shaped by the presence of various populist actors in government – is presented and discussed.
Coticchia, F., Joachim, J., Nijhuis, C., Verbeek, B., & Zaslove, A. (2025). The foreign policy of populist governed Middle powers: Italy and the Russia-Ukraine war. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 1–21.
Abstract
Before 2022, many populist politicians had a relatively positive view of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. They welcomed meetings with him, posed for photographs, and even wore T-shirts bearing his face. This changed with Russia’s direct invasion of Ukraine, to which populists have reacted in different ways. While some leaders condemned the invasion, others have continued to support Russia, and again others adopted more ambivalent stances. In this paper, we argue that how populists respond to the war may be particularly consequential for the foreign policies of ‘middle powers’, whose actions can significantly impact international relations. Populist leaders, in particular, often leverage foreign policy for domestic political gain and are therefore likely to prioritise their domestic constituencies in shaping foreign policy. Using Italy as an illustrative case, we show that this dynamic is driven by a cost-benefit analysis of political risks and shaped by the domestic political context. During the period analysed here, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the present, Italy exhibits a unique political landscape. It was first governed by a coalition that included populist parties (the Draghi government), after which an administration led primarily by populist parties (the Meloni government) followed.
Mazziotti di Celso, M., Coticchia, F., Reure, J.M. (2025). Italy’s Foreign Military Deployments: Theories, Gaps,and Future Research. International Peacekeeping.
Abstract
In the past thirty years, Italy has adopted a highly active foreign militarydeployment (FMD) policy, sending thousands of soldiers abroad in hundredsof operations. From different theoretical perspectives, Italy’s FMD policy overthe past thirty years can be seen as a deviant or outlier case, as somedefense policy decisions do not align with what certain theories wouldpredict. For this reason, the study of this case is highly important for thedevelopment of theory on foreign military interventions. To contribute to theunderstanding of the motivations behind Italy’s decision to send troopsabroad, this article reviews and systematizes the academic literature on Italy’sFMD policy, identifies its main issues and shortcomings, and discusses theirrelevance and underlying causes. The article’s main contribution is not tointroduce new explanations but to identify the theoretical gaps that limit acomplete understanding of the existing research and propose a researchagenda to bridge them.
Natalizia, G., & Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2025). The structural roots of Italy’s expanding foreign military deployments. Contemporary Italian Politics
Abstract
Over the last decade, Italy’s foreign military deployment (FMD) policy has shifted, increasing the country’s commitments, expanding its scope of action, and extending its presence into regions where it was previously absent. What explains this change? We argue that Italy’s renewed military activism has structural roots. Washington’s retrenchment strategy amidst great power competition is driving Rome into closer alignment with the US. Thus, Italy’s FMD changes can be interpreted as a reaction to its major ally’s shifting grand strategy. A structural framework is crucial for making sense of this transformation and understanding its implications and inherent risks.
Coticchia, F., & Di Giulio, M. (2024). What makes paradigms last? A study of defense policy change in Germany and Italy (1989–2022). Journal of European Public Policy, 1–30
Abstract
Policy ideas are often crafted in international fora, such as international organisations, multilateral institutions, and high-level summits. However, whether and how ideas will eventually inform policymakers at the domestic level remains an understudied subject. This paper contributes to this debate by tracing the domestic consolidation and eventual erosion of ‘Crisis Management’, a policy paradigm that emerged after the end of the Cold War and became dominant among NATO members in the 2010s. We investigate Germany and Italy as two case studies that followed two distinct trajectories. Policy elites suddenly adopted the paradigm in Italy and built a broad consensus on it. In Germany, crisis management has emerged lately and remains contested, as the territorial defense has maintained legitimacy among elites. Understanding the mechanisms underpinning such trajectories is the key to uncovering whether a consensus on a new version of territorial defense as a dominant paradigm will consolidate.
Vignoli, V., & Coticchia, F. (2024). The politics of military assistance: Italian parties’ positions on the war in Ukraine. South European Society and Politics, 1–25.
Abstract
In recent years, a research agenda on the party politics of military interventions has flourished. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to analysing party positions on the decision to provide military assistance to an actor involved in the conflict. This article focuses on Italy’s support for Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, we examine party positions and how they evolved from the Draghi to the Meloni government. We find that moderate parties have generally been more supportive than extreme parties except Brothers of Italy, whose stance is still coherent with its own peculiar core values.
Coticchia, F., & Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2024). Still on the same path? Italian foreign and defence policy in the Enlarged Mediterranean. Mediterranean Politics, 1–10
Abstract
What is the vital strategic area for Italian foreign and defence policy? As a G-7 member and prominent contributor to international security with leading roles in NATO, UN and EU missions, Italy’s regional and global outlook deserves specific attention. For years, Italian governments have attributed relevance to the ‘Enlarged Mediterranean’ (EM) as a crucial region for protecting and promoting national interests. Yet, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the rising strategic competition in Asia, some authors have observed a significant expansion of Italy’s foreign and defence policy towards Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thus, one might question whether the strategic significance of the EM for Italy has diminished due to the growing political, economic, and military engagement in other regions. Despite the above-mentioned novelties, this paper argues that ‘Enlarged Mediterranean’ still represents the most relevant ‘path’ for Italian foreign and defence policy. Relying on secondary and primary sources (interviews with Ministers, Undersecretaries, MPs, Generals, and experts; official documents; etc.), the manuscript assesses our claim, paving the way for further broader reflection on the future of Italian (and European) foreign policy.
Op-eds and others
Natalizia, G., Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2026). NATO Is Thinking About Defense Spending Wrong. Foreign Policy.
Mazziotti di Celso, M. (15 gennaio 2026). Strade Sicure e il perdurante deficit di cultura della difesa in Italia. Formiche.
Coticchia, F., Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2025). Italy: Transatlantic Loyalty First. Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Policy Brief 13/2025.
Mazziotti di Celso, M. (29 ottobre 2025). A Washington tre giorni di discussioni sui rapporti tra civili e militari. Tante lezioni per l’Italia. Formiche.
Mazziotti di Celso, M. (11 ottobre 2025). Il Dpp racconta la difesa che verrà. La spesa militare italiana letta da Mazziotti di Celso. Formiche.
Coticchia, F. (2025). Riarmo europeo: quale paradigma di difesa? ISPI.
Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2025). L’Italia rifletta bene prima di aumentare le spese militari. Geopolitica.info
Natalizia, G., Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2024). Beyond NATO’s 2 percent threshold: How can Italy meet the challenge? Atlantic Council.
Coticchia, F., & Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2024). Ricette (utili) internazionali. Formiche, 208, 28-31
Vignoli, V., & Coticchia, F., (2024, December 6). Come si muovono i partiti italiani sugli aiuti militari a Kyiv. L’analisi di Vignoli e Coticchia. Formiche.
Mazziotti di Celso, M. (2024, February 19). Is Italy needed in the Indo-Pacific? War on the Rocks.
Mazziotti di Celso, M., & Natalizia, G. (2024, February 2). Cosa c’è dietro la tentazione dell’Italia di proiettarsi in Oriente. Formiche.
Research Articles and Book Chapters
Irrera, D, (2025). Limits and potential of European strategic autonomy, in L. Termine, M. Mazziotti di Celso, A. Ercolani, J. Di Cicco (eds.) Handbook of European Strategic Autonomy, McGraw Hill, Milano, pp. 7-16.
Book Chapter
Irrera, D. (2026). The Impact of Non-State Actors on Security: Insights from the War in Ukraine, Perpetual Conflict: Russia and the Struggle for European Security, RUSCONF 2026, Tartu Univ. Press, pp. 205-213.
Irrera, D. (2025). How have Terrorists Adopted Tactics from the Russia-Ukraine War? The Crime-Terror-Tech Nexus, in Sadık, Giray (ed.), The Effects Of The Russia-Ukraine War On Countering Terrorism, Centre of Excellence Defence Against Terrorism, pp. 67-78.
Abstract
The war in Ukraine, that began in 2014 and militarily intensified in 2022, has demonstrated modern warfare tactics, many of which have been observed and could potentially be adopted by terrorist groups. The nexus between terrorism and organised crime is seen as a strategic alliance between two non-state actors able to exploit illicit markets and influence policymaking at the global level. The ability of criminals and terrorists to progressively develop their capabilities on a global scale, to establish themselves in failed and fragile states, and to interact with other violent non-state actors such as insurgents, paramilitaries and contractors, has largely benefited from the war and has been strengthened, particularly through the use of
technology and the cyber environment.
Irrera, D. (2025). Mercenaries and Private Military Companies, in Van den Bosch, J.J.J. and Lindstaedt, N. (eds.), Encyclopedia Tyrannica: A Research Guide to Authoritarianism, Ibidem Verlag.
Abstract
Private military companies and mercenaries have long been intertwined with the dynamics of modern conflicts, offering a unique blend of military and security services to a diverse array of clients, including governments, multinational corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Their relations to dictatorships remain understudied.
Baroncelli, E., & Irrera, D. (2024). The Triple Nexus and the Future of Multilateral Governance: Rethinking Coordination between Humanitarian, Development and Peacebuilding Efforts. The International Spectator, 59(3), 1–20.
Abstract
The UN-orchestrated Triple Nexus – a multilateral endeavour to provide humanitarian-development-peace responses in fragile and conflict-affected contexts – embodies several features of the emerging trend towards governance through regime complexity. Praised for its multi-actorness inclusivity and cross-policy experimentalism, the Nexus approach has been criticised as an attempt to replicate top-down, neo-liberal templates to govern crises in the peripheries. We analyse the new evidence provided in this Special Issue, connecting it to the debate on the future of multilateral governance, against the decline of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Guarding against naïve expectations of the Nexus as a panacea to bridge cross-policy gaps and bring about inter-agency cooperation amidst increased geopolitical tensions, we discuss its potential to become a venue for an enlarged conversation among traditional and new players. While also compatible with pluralist scenarios, a progressive variety of the Nexus may well emerge in the UN context, between Western and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) players. Their shared understandings of civil and political rights offer a promising avenue to advance some forward-looking Nexus components, supportive of individual and nature-based rights, to govern the increased complexity of the current multiplex order.
Op-eds and others
Irrera, D. (2024). The (ab)use of PMSCs in managing migration flows and the contradictions of the EU. Private Military Conversation.
Irrera, D., Rinaldi, S. (2024). The influence of Private Military Companies on global security. The Loop.
Research Articles and Book Chapters
Knapp, A., Vignoli, V., Salvati, F., & Maina, F. (2026). The Alliance Is Talking: Introducing the NATO Secretary General Document (NATO-SGD) Corpus. International Interactions, 1-21
Abstract
While text-as-data has gained prominence in the study of International Organizations (IOs) over the past decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has remained absent from this research wave. We present the NATO Secretary General Documents (NATO-SGD) corpus. It features over 3,000 speeches and statements for the 1996-2024 period, covering the tenures of six NATO Secretaries General. The corpus offers a comparable body of texts that captures the Alliance’s discourse and evolving priorities across three decades of geopolitical transformation. Focusing on the Secretary General—who is NATO’s primary administrative officer, spokesperson, and authoritative voice—we present a valuable resource for scholars interested in international security, IO leadership, and public diplomacy. Beyond outlining future applications, this article showcases the analytical value of the data through temporal and cross-sectional descriptives.
Vignoli, V., Onderco, M., & Kalhousová, I. (2025). Who cares: Why the Israeli–Palestinian conflict matters (more) to some EU member states. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies.
Abstract
What drives the salience of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict amongst EU member states? This article employs domestic foreign policy theories to explain the factors underlying variation in salience, estimated analysing all country statements made at the United Nations General Assembly between 1993 and 2017. Our findings suggest that there is a U-shaped relationship between government ideology and attention for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: governments at ideological extremes tend to devote more attention than centrist ones. Moreover, we find that member states with higher trade exposure to the region demonstrate greater attention to the conflict. Additionally, we find that member states with larger Muslim populations tend to attach more salience to the topic. Through the use of such a relevant and divisive case, our study contributes to the understanding of foreign policy co-operation amongst EU member states and its impact on European integration.
Portela, C., Onderco, M., & Vignoli, V. (2025). Does CFSP co-ordination foster convergence? Voting behavior on nuclear weapons at the UN General Assembly. Contemporary Security Policy, 46(4), 1171-1196.
Abstract
Although the European Union (EU) has sought to promote the approximation of the foreign policy positions of member states since it established its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the impact of this intergovernmental forum has long been questioned. Recent developments putting the CFSP under strain such as the weakening transatlantic link, Russian attempts to undermine EU foreign policy unity, and the rise of Eurosceptic populist parties call for a reassessment of its convergence-fostering effect. We investigate convergence by looking at EU voting behavior on resolutions on nuclear weapons—a controversial area due to deep divisions among member states—at the United Nations General Assembly from 1979 to 2022. We show that while convergence among CFSP participants hardly increases, the level of consensus remains stable, in a departure from the theoretical expectations of mainstream accounts of EU foreign policy.
Martini, Sergio, and Francesco Olmastroni (2025). “Politics Through the Microscope: The Use of Experiments in European Political Science.” In Luca Verzichelli and Claudius Wagemann (eds) The Application of Political Science Methods in Europe. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham.
Sergio Martini, Francesco Olmastroni, and Pierangelo Isernia (2025). “Bound to the Audience: Foreign Policy Decision-Making and the Costs of Empty Threats and Unkept Promises in Successful and Unsuccessful War Scenarios”. In Marcin Grabowski and Luca Verzichelli (eds.), The International System in the Post-Pandemic World. Abingdon: Routledge.
Goretti, L., Simonelli, F. (2024) “La politica estera italiana verso il Mediterraneo allargato (2011-2024)“. In Fabio De Ninno e Federica Cavo (eds.), Il Mediterraneo allargato e l’Italia Dalla Guerra fredda al mondo post-bipolare. Roma: Viella
Carrieri L., Guidi M., Olmastroni F. (2023) “Politici vs. pubblico: posizionamento e congruenza sui temi in agenda”. In Isernia, Pierangelo, Martini, Sergio, Luca Verzichelli (eds.), La classe politica italiana: Struttura, atteggiamenti, sfide. Bologna: il Mulino.
Research ArticleIsernia P, Martini S, Olmastroni F, Verzichelli L. The Italian political class: two multilevel datasets on the profiles and opinions of elected politicians. Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica. Published online 2024:1-11. doi:10.1017/ipo.2024.17
Abstract
The datasets on the Italian political class provides two sets of information: (a) census data on a broad spectrum of individual-level variables on elected politicians, offering an updated mapping of the characteristics of more than 20,000 Italian representatives at all governmental levels; (b) survey data on politicians’ attitudes towards elections, participation, public opinion, several national and international policy issues, and their views of political representation. Between September 2020 and January 2021, 2134 elected politicians at the local (n = 1917), regional (n = 128), national (n = 75) and European (n = 14) levels were interviewed, making this one of the largest surveys of the Italian political elites ever conducted and a valuable resource for researchers interested in the study of democratic representation.
Research ArticleBorri R., Isernia P., Mingardi C., Olmastroni F. (2024). “European Public Opinion on the Challenges and Future of EU Foreign and Security Policy”, JOINT Research Papers No. 23, January.
Abstract
The present report illustrates the results of a survey conducted in six European countries (France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain) to assess public sentiments towards EU Foreign and Security Policy (EUFSP). Notably, the survey reveals a strong demand for more EUFSP, with a majority supporting a move away from the unanimity rule toward majority voting. Although there is support for greater defence capacities at the EU level, the majority remains unwilling to relinquish national armies for a unified force. The context of the Russia-Ukraine war introduces potential dissonance: majorities in most countries express
readiness to support Ukraine, but differences in support levels and approaches emerge, particularly in Greece and Italy. The survey suggests that while conditions for a more integrated EUFSP exist, political elites need to articulate a persuasive argument for rebalancing the relationship between member states and the EU in foreign and defence matters in favour of the Union. The study acknowledges the possibility of public opinion shifting in the face of politicisation, leaving open questions for future research efforts
Op-eds and others
Simonelli, F., Fantappiè, M.L., Goretti, L. (2024). The Italy-Africa Summit 2024 and the Mattei Plan: Towards Cooperation between Equals? IAI Commentaries