Hate and Enemy in History, Numero monografico della rivista “Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea” (guest editor: F. D. Ragno)

In the collection of essays entitled “Inventing the enemy” Umberto Eco proposed a “phenomenology” of hatred, highlighting how, in different periods and places, it had represented a cement to build the unity of a group or of a nation, and how it had been instrumental in the construction of specific categories of “enemies” through the centuries (Eco 2012). In the course of history, the process of creating the image of the “enemy”, has often taken place among people of the same nationality, but strategies aimed at the construction of external enemies were equally widespread. If anti-soviet rhetoric, for instance, occupied a central place in Western countries’ public debates, anti-American sentiments have manifested in different shapes and variants in several geographical areas. Practices aimed at creating terror and fear in the population for political purposes, repressive policies based on discriminatory assumptions, propaganda strategies aimed at identify enemy – whether internal or external to the community of concern –, have spanned centuries and continents, but reached unprecedented levels during the Twentieth century. The articulation of these strategies cannot be considered exclusively the purview of governments, but also of political parties, movements and even prominent intellectuals. This monographic issue intends to contribute to the creation of a space of historiographical debate on “hatred and enemy”, inevitably wide and complex, through the reconstruction of specific case studies that analyze the different shapes and forms taken by these phenomena in different times and places. Although the geographical reference horizon adopted will be quite broad, the analysis will mainly focus on Africa, Latin America and south-east Asia, regions that were transversally crossed by extreme forms of enemy-construction processes during the twentieth century. Specifically, the monographic issue will analyze the period between the end of the World War I and the end of the Cold War.