Chair: Professor Richard English, Institute Director

Today it is well acknowledged in the social sciences that social networks can serve to facilitate or inhibit processes of collective action, given we are mainly focusing on the effects of network structures.  

This has for the most tacitly implied picturing collective actors as passive objects of mobilising influences exerted by pre-given and persistent social networks.

In this Lecture, by tracing the interaction of different collective actors and their struggles, we want to show that there are considerable amounts of strategic initiatives on the part of collective actors who consciously seek to shape socio-spatial relations to succeed in their projects.

We employ multiple primary sources to investigate the Red Brigade’s (henceforth, BR) pre-existing social networks and self- perception of the Italian context, and how it has consciously attempted to shape socio-spatial relations as a result of deliberate and goal-oriented actions of the BR itself, between 1970 and 1978.

By focusing on the BR, this Lecture strives to answer the following empirical research question:

How was the BR seeking to shape socio-spatial relations upon its pre-existing social networks and perception of the Italian context during the 1970s?

In answering to this question, it draws attention to how the repression of the Italian state at the same time has re-configured the socio-spatial context where the BR operated its armed campaign shaping in turn its strategy, shifting from “armed propaganda” to “strike the heart of the State”.

Lorenzo Bosi

Lorenzo Bosi is Associate Professor in Political Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, where he is part of the COSMOS (Centre on Social Movement Studies) research team.

He received his PhD in Politics from Queen’s University Belfast in 2005, and is the past recipient of the ESRC (University of Kent), Jean Monnet and Marie Curie (EUI) post-doctorate fellowships.

He is a political sociologist pursuing comparative analysis into the cross-disciplinary fields of social movements and political violence.  He has directed and collaborated on a number of national and international research projects on topics relating to social movements, political violence, and political participation.

Since 2019, he is Director’s delegate for SNS at the SAR Italia, RUNIPACE and UNHCR networks.