Italy’s foreign policy and the search for a global role: South, East, and Up

On the heels of the scholarly debate raised within role theory scholarship on the United Kingdom’s global role in the aftermath of Brexit and China’s renewed centrality in global affairs, this introductory article asks whether conceptualizing Italy within the theoretical framework of global roles can offer a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of its foreign policy – and, by extension, enrich the broader field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Despite being within the core countries of the West, this perspective appears particularly well-suited to the analysis of the Italian case in the current context of remilitarization and the growing polarization of the international system – two symptoms of the increasingly fragmenting globalization into distinct geopolitical spheres, internally cohesive and externally distrustful. In this context, the pursuit of a global role aligns with the epistemic quest for playing an Italian role within global knowledge structures, and particularly within FPA scholarship. While Italy remains firmly embedded within the “partial” Western world, and the study of Italian foreign policy continues to be largely guided by the traditional IR frameworks, we argue that a significant global turn is emerging in Italian foreign policy and Italian FPA.