2015-2018: Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin/Center for War Studies (by Prof Robert Gerwarth) funded by Gerda Henkel Stiftung. From 2018 on: Habilitation project at the University of Bern/History Department (by Prof Christian Gerlach) funded by Swiss National Science Foundation/Ambizione
Programme of the Conference "Fascist Warfare: A Concept to Understand Fascism and Total War in th... more Programme of the Conference "Fascist Warfare: A Concept to Understand Fascism and Total War in the First Half of the Twentieth Century", that will be held in the Sala Plató, Pati Manning, Barcelona (Spain), on March, 16-17th of 2017.
This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis... more This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/Serbia and Albania/Greece to illustrate the complex interrelation between ethnic tensions and political imperatives, on a local, national and transnational scale. It discusses the Italian and German occupation policy towards national minorities and armed groups as a key contributing factor to civil war and pinpoints the similarities, differences and interdependencies between the different civil war parties and agents of violence.
Programme of the Conference "Fascist Warfare: A Concept to Understand Fascism and Total War in th... more Programme of the Conference "Fascist Warfare: A Concept to Understand Fascism and Total War in the First Half of the Twentieth Century", that will be held in the Sala Plató, Pati Manning, Barcelona (Spain), on March, 16-17th of 2017.
This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis... more This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/Serbia and Albania/Greece to illustrate the complex interrelation between ethnic tensions and political imperatives, on a local, national and transnational scale. It discusses the Italian and German occupation policy towards national minorities and armed groups as a key contributing factor to civil war and pinpoints the similarities, differences and interdependencies between the different civil war parties and agents of violence.
This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis... more This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/Serbia and Albania/Greece to illustrate the complex interrelation between ethnic tensions and political imperatives, on a local, national and transnational scale. It discusses the Italian and German occupation policy towards national minorities and armed groups as a key contributing factor to civil war and pinpoints the similarities, differences and interdependencies between the different civil war parties and agents of violence.
This groundbreaking book explores the interpretative potential and analytical capacity of the con... more This groundbreaking book explores the interpretative potential and analytical capacity of the concept ‘fascist warfare’. Was there a specific type of war waged by fascist states? The concept encompasses not only the practice of violence at the front, but also war culture, the relationship between war and the fascist project, and the construction of the national community. Starting with the legacy of the First World War and using a transnational approach, this collection presents case studies of fascist regimes at war, spanning Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Croatia, and Imperial Japan. Themes include the idea of rapid warfare as a symbol of fascism, total war, the role of modern technology, the transfer of war cultures between regimes, anti-partisan warfare as a key feature, and the contingent nature and limits of fascist warfare.
in R. Gildea and I. Tames (Eds.), Fighters across Frontiers: Transnational Resistance in Europe, 1936-1948, Manchester, MUP, p. 286-317. ISBN 978-1-526-15124-7., 2020
This final chapter explores how, when and where transnational experiences of resistance were ackn... more This final chapter explores how, when and where transnational experiences of resistance were acknowledged, whether in national, political or private communities, and how changed over time. This may help us understand why people with experiences in transnational resistance did not easily became part of the public understanding of the war. Two strands will be followed. The first traces the afterlives of resisters with transnational experiences, that is, what direction their lives took after the Second World War. Clearly the historical context changed very quickly, as national liberation and victory in Europe gave way to the Cold War and wars of decolonisation. Resisters clearly had to navigate these challenges, some reinventing themselves in order to do so and some falling foul of changing circumstances. The second strand explores how transnational resistance was remembered over the period from the war down to the present. These memories are found at three different levels: at the level of the individual’s own memory, articulated in memoirs or testimonies; at the level of the group or association to which he or she belonged and at some stage began again to remember their past as a group; and at the level of the collective memory of the society or country as a whole. This memory operated independently of the resisters themselves and may also be called the dominant narrative of the society or country. Such memories are in dialogue with each other but also in a power struggle. Group memories contest each other and seek to impose themselves as the dominant narrative of society, which then seeks to eclipse other memories. This struggle takes place over time, articulated by associations of resistance veterans, by resistance foundations that took over from them as they died out, by journalists, historians, publishers and filmmakers, by political activists and politicians themselves, all of them in turn shaped by new conflicts, new circumstances and new paradigms. Dominant narratives were forged by the national liberations of 1944–5, the onset of the Cold War and wars of decolonisation. These were challenged and modified by East-West détente after 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the events of 1968, the eruption of Holocaust memory in the 1970s and 1980s and by the end of the Cold War which accelerated both globalisation and the rise of populist nationalism in post-Cold War Europe. The memory of transnational resistance, which for a long while was buried by thse dominant narratives, gradually but unevenly broke once again into the public sphere.
This chapter studies transnational interplay in guerrilla movements on the Eastern Front and in t... more This chapter studies transnational interplay in guerrilla movements on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans, where the interwar state system was pulverised by war, occupation and partition. In its Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union made abundant use of ‘useful foreigners’, whether they were international communist exiles living in Moscow, Balts, Poles or Bessarabians who had claimed Soviet citizenship, local fighters on the ground in occupied areas or deserters from the Wehrmacht. After Italy crashed out of the war in September 1943 tens of thousands of Italians escaped to join the Yugoslav partisans for fear of being rounded up by the Germans, while German communists in Wehrmacht disciplinary battalions deserted to join the Greek resistance and recover their anti-Hitlerian identity. Meanwhile, in Italy itself, Allied, former International Brigaders and Yugoslav POWs escaped from camps to join the Italian resistance to the Germans, a resistance which, far from being purely Italian was, internationally speaking, said one British POW resister, was ‘a very mixed bunch’.
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