How has the opposition to military bases changed over time? Some evidences from the Sicilian case

The long-lasting pacifist and non-violent movements have often been intertwined with the opposition to military bases. Unlike pacifist and non-violent movements, the opposition to military bases has been poorly explored and analysed in literature, most of all by the one on social movements. The few and important contributions on the opposition to the military bases have mainly focused on those experiences deeply rooted into some ideological perspectives, returning the picture of a set of ideological movements, composed mainly by militants, that where also engaged in fighting military bases. Italy has a long-lasting history of movements that oppose to military sites, and most of them involve American ones. Given the connection between the opposition to military bases, pacifism and non-violence, some confusions arise when addressing this cases. In fact, not all anti-military bases protest campaigns can be labelled as pacifist and non-violent. Moreover, some recent Italian experiences have shown how not only political militants are involved in such protest campaigns. The aim of this contribution is to go deeper in the analysis of protest campaigns against the military bases, starting from the Sicilian case. In fact, Sicily after the Second World War became an important spot for USA and Atlantic alliance military and geopolitical interests, so many US and NATO military bases opened. Here, I will briefly reconstruct the important recent history of the opposition to military bases in the Mediterranean island, starting from the protest campaigns against the Cruise missiles in Comiso (during the Eighties), to the more recent protest campaigns against the military bases in Punta Izzo and Punta Bianca. How such protest campaigns evolved, in terms of claims, composition, forms of actions? How the pacifist and non-violent claims went through the different seasons of struggles in the island? What I expect is that, in the recent history, the opposition to military bases has been more affected by the experience of the LULU movements than the pacifist and non-violent one, changing the way and the reasons people mobilize against such infrastructures. This contribution is the first, and the explorative, step of an ongoing and wider project to develop. In order to carry on the analysis, some first insights will be drawn by a punctual literature review, by previous studies also conducted by the author, and the occasional participation to some recent protest events.