Security Praxis

After the War on Terror? What NIJAR Learned About Talking to Jihadi Armed Groups

After more than two years of research, the NIJAR project—Negotiating with Islamist and jihadi armed groups: practices, discourses and mechanisms across Asia and Africa—funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research has formally come to an end. Implemented between November 2023 and February 2026 by researchers at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, NIJAR set out to examine a politically uncomfortable but empirically unavoidable issue: ⋙

Africa, jihad, transnational jihad, Sahel, Middle East, peace negotiations

Research Highlights

Democracy on the Brink: Democratic crises, Authoritarian threats and Collective resistance

Join us on Monday, 17 November, at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) for Democracy on the Brink, ⋙

SHUT-MED Prin project final conference, 5-6/06, SSSA Pisa

Conference “The Changing Governance of Migration in the Mediterranean and Beyond”, in the framework of the PRIN project ⋙

Workshop Digital Reconfigurations, University of Padova 3-4/06

Digital Reconfigurations. Exploring the interplay between data, infrastructures and social processes, University of Padova, June 3-4, 2025 ⋙

Four years of wartime governance in Ukraine

Organised within the framework of the Horizon Europe RE-ENGAGE project, the meeting will bring together scholars from political sociology, political economy, international law, and international relations to examine how four ⋙

Conflict, Governance and Dialogue with Islamist and Jihadi Armed Groups in the Global South: NIJAR final conference

On 3 February 2026, the research team of the NIJAR project hosted a final conference at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, presenting the project’s findings and building cross-institutional ⋙

Ash Wednesday: A chronicle on the unfolding of political tensions three days after the killing of El Mencho and the narcobloqueos.

After the flames of the narcobloqueos and the eerie silence, Mexico is coming back to life. From the capital, television stations are no longer showing amateur videos filmed from a ⋙

Africa

Africa’s Cyber Future: Between Digital Agency and External Power Competition

In the past decade, the African continent has gained a renewed centrality in the international arena, with key global actors strengthening their diplomatic ties with African States. Areas such as ⋙

academic freedom

Academic activism in contentious politics and democratic crises

On 17 November 2025, Professor Francesco Strazzari and Dr. Sophie Gueudet, within the framework of the Horizon Europe research project RE-ENGAGE, organised a workshop at the Sant’Anna School of ⋙

Palestine

The women of Umm al-khair on hunger strike against the occupation of death.

In July, amid the most intense heatwave in decades in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, the women of the community of Umm al-Khair, a village in the Southern Hills of ⋙

Palestine

Solidarity Across Struggles: Narratives on the South African Identity and Pro-Palestinian Activism

In December of 2023, the Republic of South Africa filed an extensive application to the International Court of Justice, detailing the acts of the genocidal violence brought on by the ⋙

Egypt

Checkpoints in Egypt: Core Mechanisms of a Police State and Their Social Implications

This brief article analyzes Egyptian checkpoints as central mechanisms of the police state, a legacy of the Mubarak era (1981–2011) and core feature of today’s political economy of ⋙

RE-ENGAGE

Drifting Further Away? Authoritarian Consolidation and Civic Resistance in Georgia

The EU’s credibility in promoting democratic norms in the Western Balkans and Eastern Neighbourhood has been severely undermined by its notorious tolerance of autocratic leaders such as Vučić and ⋙

NIJAR

Negotiating with Jihadist Groups: NIJAR’s Preliminary Findings Presented at EUI Workshop

On Friday, May 16, 2025, the research team of the NIJAR project was invited to present its preliminary findings at a workshop organized by the Muslim World Working Group of ⋙