Occupying Island

Resisting Militarization in a No-War Zone

Aide Esu, Simone Maddanu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9783032004185
• eBook ISBN: 9783032004192
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers an analytical perspective of the unfolding militarization in the Italian island of Sardinia, grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork, and using in-depth documentation analysis. Since the late 1950s, the island, which is the second largest in the Mediterranean, has been one of the main hubs for weapons testing and interforce training for the Italian armed forces and NATO. The book retraces the extent and the significance of military bases in Sardinia, and the rise of local collective actions and resistance. This case study offers relevant insights to understand the strategic role of islands in the post-war military space control, more specifically on geo-strategic policy in the Mediterranean and its effects on military/civil relations.

The relevance of the militarization of islands shed a light on opaque institutional decision processes that reinforce the figure of subaltern subjects - relegated to peripheral spaces and subdued to extractivism, dependency, and exclusion. It will be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, sociology of environment and risk, globalization, social movement studies, postcolonial studies and political studies.

Table of contents

• Occupying Island
• Acknowledgment
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1. Occupying Island
• 2. Militarization, Modernization, and Consensus-Building Strategy
• 3. Island militarization: Beyond Colonialism
• 4. Environmental Risk and the Decline of the Military/Civil Relation
• 5. Collective Actions and Resistance
• 6. The Future of Resistance
• Index1