Conflicting Representations of Political Violence in Italy, 1969 and After

In this paper, I present Italy as a case study to better understand the mechanisms that govern the emergence and development of collective memories of politically relevant episodes of the past within democratic contexts. I focus on how Italy has come to terms with the decade 1969-1980 known as the “years of lead”, which was an intense season of political violence from the right and left including failed coups d’état, terrorist attacks, and violent deaths during protests. Literature shows that traumatic events such as these enter the national memory and can be mobilized as a resource by those who hold power and status to serve their present concerns. They can also impact, as has been argued in the case of Italy, on the political polarization of public opinion. My paper engages with this literature by focusing on the production of national memories by the State in the form of narratives. Theoretically, I reject the notion of the State as a monolithic actor with a clearly defined and stable memory agenda, and conceptualize it as a multi-dimensional and multi-vocal institution populated by competing goals from a variety of actors. In this paper, I develop this concept mainly from a methodological standpoint by showing the mechanisms of cooperation/competition of multiple actors and narratives. Whereas most memory studies embrace a fully qualitative research approach, I use textual data (archival documents) in a novel way combining qualitative analysis, with text mining techniques and network analysis. I analyze the narratives promoted by different State actors from 1987 to 2001, using data from a Parliamentary Commission instituted ad hoc to investigate the “years of lead”. This Commission, composed of 40 members, worked for 15 years, meeting about three times each month, collecting and producing material estimated in thousands of documents, which has only been sporadically explored by scholars. I collected a sample of about 12.000 documents from the Commission’s archives in Rome, selecting them to include judicial materials, police reports, depositions, official and unofficial political reports, newspaper articles. My data analysis develops as a three steps process. First, using quantitative text analysis, specifically text mining which allows for the processing of large documents collections, I identify the memory accounts produced by different State actors (officials from the executive and the judicial brunches) over time. I inductively parse all documents to detect novel patterns of meanings: I count recurrent actors’ names and ideas, and identify topics that “go together” (frequently linked to each other). Second, I refine, label, and interpret these patterns with a deep reading of a sample of the documents. Third, using network analysis, I visualize and measure the pre-processed data: using two-mode networks I show the link between actors and ideas (topics), and by treating each topic as a network node I visualize how different topic relate to each other. This approach compares distant and close readings of textual data to maximize the analysis and contribute to our understanding of the production of representations of the past in novel ways.