Italy’s conflict history begins with the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century struggle that united a peninsula of rival states and foreign dominions into a single kingdom. Its defining historical process has been national unification: the new state converted shared language, culture, and military campaigns into Italian nationhood, but left deep divides between north and south, centre and periphery. Italy’s wider influence followed from this unfinished nation-building. Seeking the status of a great power, it pursued empire and entered the First World War; fascism then offered an authoritarian answer to national weakness and social conflict, with disastrous results. Defeat in the Second World War and the anti-fascist Resistance produced the republican constitution. Yet the Years of Lead, when far-left and far-right violence unsettled the Cold War republic, exposed how fragile Italy’s political settlement remained.
In 2025, UCDP recorded no conflict-related deaths in Italy: no wars, no fighting between armed groups, and no organized attacks on civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Italy’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Italy occupies a boot-shaped peninsula running deep into the central Mediterranean, flanked by two large islands, Sicily and Sardinia, and sealed off from continental Europe by the Alpine arc in the north. For most of its history after the fall of Rome, this shape held not one country but many: city-states, kingdoms, and papal territories that shared a language family and a classical inheritance and little else in the way of common government. The mainstream account treats Italy’s modern identity as a nineteenth-century achievement rather than an ancient inheritance: a movement of intellectuals, exiled patriots, and pragmatic statesmen who convinced enough Italians, city by city, that a single kingdom running the length of the peninsula was both possible and desirable. That movement, remembered as the Risorgimento (literally “the resurgence”), succeeded within a single generation, between 1848 and 1871 — an unusually compressed timeline for a project of this scale.
Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (2009).
Four thresholds carry the standard account. The revolutions of 1848, though militarily defeated across the peninsula, first tested the idea of a unified Italian state and left behind a durable constitutional monarchy in Piedmont-Sardinia, the one Italian state to survive the crackdown that followed. The wars of 1859–61, fought by Piedmont alongside France against Austria and completed by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteer conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, fused most of the peninsula into a single kingdom in 1861 under the House of Savoy. Rome’s annexation in 1870, achieved only once France withdrew the garrison protecting the Pope during the Franco-Prussian War, completed the territorial project and installed a capital in direct rivalry with papal authority. Finally, the catastrophic losses and social crisis after the First World War opened the door to fascism in 1922, exposing how incompletely the earlier unification had settled the new state’s institutions. Each threshold changed not just the map but the balance between crown, church, and an emerging national public.
Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 (2007).
In the standard telling, the state arrived first and the nation had to be built afterward. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 by treaty, conquest, and plebiscite before most of its new subjects thought of themselves primarily as Italian rather than Piedmontese, Neapolitan, or Sicilian. Massimo d’Azeglio’s often-quoted remark that Italy had been made and Italians still needed making captures the consensus view precisely: unification was a political and military accomplishment first, a cultural and linguistic one only slowly and partially afterward, through conscript armies, a national school system, and, much later, television. The new government’s principal instrument for closing this gap was Piedmont’s own constitution, the Statuto Albertino of 1848, extended wholesale to the rest of the peninsula rather than renegotiated — a choice that gave the new kingdom legal continuity and administrative simplicity but left the newly annexed regions little voice in the terms of their incorporation, a grievance the mainstream account registers even as it treats unification as the correct historical outcome.
Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (2009).
The single force that best explains modern Italy, in this reading, is incomplete state-building following a rapid, externally assisted unification. Because the kingdom was assembled quickly, through diplomacy and conquest rather than slow internal consolidation, it inherited enormous regional disparities in law, language, literacy, and economic development that a single generation of government could not erase. This process explains a recurring Italian pattern: strong local and civic identity coexisting uneasily with a national state citizens often experience as distant or borrowed from Piedmont rather than built collectively. It also explains the persistence of the so-called “Southern Question” — the enduring economic and social gap between Italy’s north and south — as an unintended consequence of how unification was carried out, rather than a separate historical problem. Successive governments’ repeated attempts to close this gap, through infrastructure spending, land reform, and regional development funds across the twentieth century, are read here as continuations of the same original, unfinished project of nation-building, not new undertakings.
Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny (2007); Lucy Riall, Risorgimento (2009).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist current, associated with historians of the South such as Marta Petrusewicz, tells a substantially different origin story. In this account, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies before 1860 was not simply a backward territory awaiting rescue by a more advanced North, as the standard narrative can imply, but a functioning state with its own industry, including one of the peninsula’s first railways and a significant merchant fleet. What unification brought south of Rome, on this reading, was less a shared national awakening than a rapid, largely unconsented absorption into a state built on Piedmontese law, currency, and administration. This does not deny that unification happened, or that many southerners welcomed it; it challenges the assumption, embedded in the standard account, that absorption on Piedmont’s terms was the only route unification could sensibly have taken, rather than one option among several then on the table, including a federal kingdom that preserved regional government.
Marta Petrusewicz, Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery (1996).
The revisionist account keeps the same sequence of events the mainstream uses — 1848, the wars of 1859–61, Garibaldi’s southern campaign, Rome in 1870 — but reweights what each one meant. Garibaldi’s celebrated “liberation” of the South in 1860 is read here as the opening act of a conquest completed by the regular Piedmontese army, which then fought a six-year internal war, officially labelled the suppression of “brigandage” (brigantaggio), against southern resistance that revisionist historians increasingly describe as closer to a civil war than mere banditry: tens of thousands of southern soldiers, priests, and peasants were killed, imprisoned, or deported in the process. The extension of Piedmont’s Statuto Albertino to the new territories, treated in the mainstream account as an efficient act of legal unification, is read here as the imposition of one region’s laws and tax system on the rest of the country without negotiation. This reweighting does not invent new events; it insists that the human and institutional cost of unification, absorbed almost entirely in the South, deserves a central place in the story rather than a footnote.
Marta Petrusewicz, Latifundium (1996); John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (2006), for the region’s pre-unification institutional strength.
Where the mainstream account treats “state before nation” as a technical sequencing problem later solved by schools and conscription, this lens treats it as the story’s central wound. On this reading, Italian nationhood was not so much built after the state as asserted to justify a state whose legitimacy in half the country was thin from the outset. Post-unification emigration is cited as evidence: within a few decades, millions of southern Italians left for the Americas, a scale of displacement this lens reads as a verdict on how the new arrangement served the South, not simply as an economic sideline to an otherwise successful nation-building project. On this view, the persistent strength of regional identity that the mainstream account attributes to slow cultural assimilation is better explained as a rational, still-unresolved response to how unification was actually carried out, and by whom, rather than a temporary lag on the way to full national feeling — a response the empirical wage evidence below suggests had real material grounds.
Vittorio Daniele & Paolo Malanima, “The Origins of the Italian Regional Divide: Evidence from Real Wages, 1861–1913,” Journal of Economic History (2019).
The process this lens foregrounds is internal economic peripheralisation: the incorporation of the South into a state whose institutions, capital, and administrative class were drawn overwhelmingly from the North, with the Mezzogiorno relegated to a supplier of grain, taxes, and later, emigrant labour and remittances. This does not claim Italy’s economic geography was invented in 1861 — pre-unification differences between North and South were real — but it disputes the mainstream inference that unification simply revealed a pre-existing gap rather than actively widening one. Because this reweighs accepted economic and political events rather than inventing new ones, it stands as serious history; mainstream scholars nonetheless continue to dispute how much of the North-South gap is attributable to unification-era policy choices, such as free-trade exposure of southern industry and Piedmontese tax structures, as against older, pre-unification disparities in geography, land tenure, and human capital that predate the kingdom altogether.
Vittorio Daniele & Paolo Malanima, “The Origins of the Italian Regional Divide” (2019) — an active, unsettled area of economic-history research, not a fixed second consensus.
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through religion and political culture, Italy’s defining tension is not North against South but state against church. For over a thousand years the Pope had ruled central Italy as a temporal sovereign as well as spiritual head of the world’s largest Christian denomination; the new Kingdom of Italy could only complete itself by seizing Rome from that same Pope in 1870, ending papal temporal rule and prompting Pius IX to declare himself a “prisoner in the Vatican” rather than recognise the new state. This lens reads modern Italian identity as shaped, from the outset, by a population that remained overwhelmingly Catholic while its government was born in direct confrontation with the Catholic Church’s temporal authority — an unresolved tension the mainstream account tends to treat as a settled institutional footnote rather than a live cultural fault line running through Italian public life for the following sixty years, until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 formally reconciled church and state under Mussolini’s fascist government: a telling detail, since it took an authoritarian regime, not a liberal one, to finally settle the dispute.
John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861 (2008).
Four moments carry this lens’s story. The 1870 capture of Rome and the Pope’s refusal to accept the loss of his temporal domain created the “Roman Question”, which for six decades left devout Catholics formally discouraged by the Vatican from participating in the new state’s elections — weakening liberal Italy’s political base precisely when it needed broad legitimacy. The rise of Catholic mass politics once this discouragement eased, culminating in the Italian Popular Party of 1919, showed how quickly organised Catholicism could reassert itself once permitted back into public life. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, negotiated between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI, created the sovereign Vatican City state and formally ended the Roman Question, trading the Church’s political independence for fascism’s claim to have healed a national wound liberal governments had failed to close. Christian Democracy’s dominance of Italian politics for nearly fifty years after the Second World War then completed the cycle, turning a once-excluded Catholic political tradition into the axis of the entire postwar republic.
David Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State (2004).
Through this lens, Italian nationhood was not simply proclaimed by the state in 1861; it was contested, clause by clause, with a rival claimant to the loyalty of ordinary Italians: the Catholic Church, which for decades urged the faithful not to recognise the new kingdom’s legitimacy at all. National formation here is a negotiated settlement between two institutions competing for the same population’s primary allegiance, resolved only when each conceded something. The Church accepted the loss of temporal power over central Italy in exchange for guaranteed independence within Vatican City and a formal concordat governing marriage, education, and clergy; the state accepted a permanently and visibly Catholic public culture, symbols, and calendar in exchange for the Church’s political acquiescence. Italian identity, on this reading, was formed less by a single unifying idea than by this durable compromise between a secular state and a religious institution that never fully receded from public life, and Italy’s political parties down to the present day still carry, in weakened form, that founding division between Catholic and secular currents.
John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy (2008); David Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican (2004).
The process this lens foregrounds is the slow negotiation of religious authority into a shared, if uneasy, partnership with the modern state, rather than the state’s clean secular triumph the mainstream narrative can seem to imply. From the “Roman Question” in 1870 to the Lateran Treaty in 1929 to Christian Democracy’s near-uninterrupted governance from 1946 to 1994 (the party dissolved amid corruption scandals that year), Italian political life repeatedly reorganised itself around how much public authority the Catholic Church should retain. This process explains features of Italian public life a purely economic or constitutional account would miss: the persistence of religiously inflected political movements long after industrialisation, the continued constitutional recognition of the Lateran Pacts within the postwar republic, and a political culture in which questions of family law, education, and public morality have repeatedly become national flashpoints precisely because they touch the unresolved boundary this lens identifies between church and state authority.
John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy (2008).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Geography divides Italy before any government does. The Apennine mountains run down the peninsula’s spine, historically making north-south overland movement slow and difficult, while the wide, fertile Po valley in the far north has always sat closer, in trade and climate, to central Europe than to the arid, mountainous South and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. This lens reads Italian history primarily through this terrain: a peninsula naturally organised into disconnected regional economies before it was ever organised into disconnected regional states, with the Alps sealing the North from easy invasion while leaving it open to trade with France, Switzerland, and Austria, and a long, exposed coastline making the South and the islands perennially vulnerable to raiding, foreign rule, and, eventually, mass emigration by sea once industrial jobs failed to appear at home.
Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990 (1993).
Four material turning points carry this account. Northern Italy’s early industrialisation from the 1880s onward, concentrated in the “industrial triangle” of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, was made possible by proximity to European capital, coal imports through northern ports, and hydroelectric power from the Alps — none of which the South possessed in comparable quantity. Mass emigration, which removed an estimated nine million Italians, disproportionately southern, to the Americas between 1880 and 1915, functioned as a safety valve that reduced rural unrest but also drained the South of exactly the working-age population an industrialising economy needed. The postwar “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 60s, driven by Fiat, chemicals, and consumer manufacturing clustered almost entirely in the North, widened rather than closed the earlier gap even as national income rose sharply. Finally, Italy’s adoption of the euro in 1999 removed currency devaluation as a tool less competitive regions had long relied on informally to stay price-competitive, exposing structural weaknesses the old currency had previously masked.
Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990 (1993).
Through this lens, the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 did not create one national economy so much as place several distinct regional economies under a single tariff and currency regime, with predictable winners and losers. Northern industry, still fragile in 1861, gained a large protected domestic market including the South’s agricultural exports and consumers; southern manufacturing, where it existed, was more often exposed to competition it could not survive once Piedmont’s more free-trade-oriented policies applied across the whole kingdom. National formation, in this reading, was as much a customs union and currency unification as a political or cultural project, and its winners and losers were largely set by which region’s producers could compete once internal tariffs disappeared. The “Southern Question” that later governments spent a century trying to solve is read here not as a cultural or administrative failure but as the foreseeable economic consequence of unifying, in one stroke, regions at very different points of industrial development.
Vittorio Daniele & Paolo Malanima, “The Origins of the Italian Regional Divide: Evidence from Real Wages, 1861–1913,” Journal of Economic History (2019).
The process this lens foregrounds is uneven regional development, locked in early and never fully corrected. Geography gave northern Italy the resources, transport links, and market access to industrialise first; unification then converted that head start into permanent structural advantage by removing the tariff walls that might otherwise have let southern industries mature at their own pace, and later state investment programmes, though large in absolute terms, consistently arrived too late or too diffusely to close a gap that widened for over a century before narrowing only partially from the 1990s onward. This process explains persistent modern patterns an institutional account alone would not: the continued concentration of Italy’s economic and financial power in the North, ongoing net emigration from southern regions, and the recurring appearance of southern development funding as a national political issue, since the underlying regional imbalance this lens identifies as geographic and economic in origin has never been fully resolved by policy.
Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990 (1993); Vittorio Daniele & Paolo Malanima, “The Origins of the Italian Regional Divide” (2019).
This is not a fifth lens — it is a guide to where the four genuinely disagree.
The sharpest dispute is over the meaning of unification’s cost in the South. The mainstream account treats the suppression of post-unification banditry as a policing problem, regrettable but incidental to an overwhelmingly successful national project; the revisionist account treats the same events as closer to a civil war whose scale and character have been minimised, and treats the resulting emigration and economic gap as direct unification-era consequences rather than a separate later problem.
The economic and geographic lens supplies the mechanism the revisionist account needs, showing empirically that regional wage and industrial divergence widened after 1861 rather than merely persisting from before it, while the mainstream account is more inclined to treat pre-existing differences in geography and human capital as doing most of the explanatory work.
The cultural and religious lens runs on a largely separate axis: the church-state dispute it foregrounds barely appears in the others’ accounts, which treat the Roman Question as a diplomatic detail rather than the central story. All four agree that unification was accomplished quickly, by a small elite, and left a country far less culturally and economically uniform than the new kingdom’s borders implied; they part company sharply over whether that unevenness is best explained as an inheritance unification failed to erase, or an injury unification actively inflicted.
Reference status: all sources were verified against publisher, library, and journal records at the time of writing (August 2026). Lucy Riall, Risorgimento (2009) and Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny (2007) anchor Scholarly Consensus. Marta Petrusewicz, Latifundium (1996) and Daniele & Malanima’s 2019 Journal of Economic History article anchor Revisionist Scholarship — note the empirical “regional divide” literature is an active, unsettled research area, not a fixed second consensus. John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy (2008) and David Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican (2004) anchor Cultural/Religious/Political. Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990 (1993) anchors Economic/Geographic. No endpoint coda: Italy’s national-formation history is settled, not open (UCDP recorded zero conflict-related deaths in Italy in 2025).
Below is a curated selection of documentary films that complement the content on this page
Italy became a single nation-state in 1861, when several regional states on the peninsula were united under King Victor Emmanuel II. Parliamentary politics later collapsed in the early 1920s as Benito Mussolini built a Fascist dictatorship. After Italy’s defeat in World War II, the monarchy ended and a democratic republic was created in 1946. Italy then rebuilt its economy and joined NATO and European integration projects.
According to UCDP, Italy experienced periods of state-based violence—fighting involving government forces and organized opponents—mainly during 1946–1974 and to some extent 1975–1988, though this narrative does not detail the actors or events. Broader pressures described by the CIA include organized crime, corruption, and long-running economic gaps between the poorer south and the more prosperous north, alongside unemployment and slow growth.
Italy is a stable democratic republic and a central member of the EU and NATO, so its security and politics can affect wider European cooperation. While large-scale violence is not described in the provided UCDP summary, ongoing challenges—such as organized crime, corruption, and uneven development—can weaken trust in institutions and strain communities. Economic problems, including high youth and female unemployment, also shape public debates and policy choices.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Italy under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has maintained firm alignment with EU consensus on Ukraine, supporting all sanctions against Russia and endorsing political, military, and financial aid to Kyiv. Rome hosted the Ukraine Recovery Conference in July 2025, emphasizing long-term reconstruction. However, Italy adopts a cautious stance, providing modest bilateral aid (0.14% of GDP from 2022-2025 vs. EU average 0.75%) and opposing direct military guarantees or troop deployments outside UN frameworks. This reflects internal coalition divisions and a strategy to preserve Euro-Atlantic unity amid US-EU strains from renewed US unilateralism, prioritizing leader-to-leader ties with Washington.
Sources: Istituto Affari Internazionali, DGAP
Italy prioritizes the ‘enlarged Mediterranean’ and Africa through the Piano Mattei, a Meloni-led initiative emphasizing mutual-benefit partnerships over traditional aid. It addresses migration roots, energy security, and market access, leveraging Italy’s geographic proximity and historical ties. Rome collaborates with the EU on the Pact on Migration and Asylum, pushing for effective returns and partnerships with origin/transit countries. The Albania migrant centres agreement serves as a test case aligned with EU norms, framing migration as a shared European responsibility to enhance solidarity mechanisms amid southern flank instabilities.
Sources: Istituto Affari Internazionali, ITSS Verona, Decode39
Post-Ukraine invasion, Italy shifted from Russian gas, with Algeria becoming its primary supplier since September 2022, consolidating its role as a Southern European energy hub. Rome strengthens ties with North Africa and Eastern Mediterranean partners via deals promoting gas diversification, renewables, and infrastructure. Integrated with the Mattei Plan, this diplomacy links energy to security, migration management, and economic growth, countering regional instability from Gaza and broader tensions. Italy advocates EU support for southern investments to protect trade, energy interests, and mitigate irregular migration from the ‘arc of crisis’.
Sources: Istituto Affari Internazionali, DGAP, BRPI Journal of International Relations
Italy became a nation-state in 1861 when the regional states of the peninsula, along with Sardinia and Sicily, were united under King Victor EMMANUEL II. An era of parliamentary government came to a close in the early 1920s when Benito MUSSOLINI established a Fascist dictatorship. His alliance with Nazi Germany led to Italy’s defeat in World War II. A democratic republic replaced the monarchy in 1946, and economic revival followed. Italy is a charter member of NATO, as well as the European Economic Community (EEC) and its successors, the EC and the EU. It has been at the forefront of European economic and political unification, joining the Economic and Monetary Union in 1999. Persistent problems include sluggish economic growth, high youth and female unemployment, organized crime, corruption, and economic disparities between southern Italy and the more prosperous north.
A referendum abolished the monarchy and created the Italian Republic, followed by a new constitution in 1948. This foundational reordering, under Allied influence, set Italy on a democratic, Western-aligned path that made large-scale internal armed conflict less likely thereafter.
Italy became a founding member of NATO, committing to collective defense with the United States and Western Europe. This anchored Italy’s security inside an alliance framework, reducing incentives for unilateral military action and shaping its later focus on diplomacy and peacekeeping.
Italy signed the Treaties of Rome, helping create the European Economic Community and Euratom. Integration into European political and economic structures encouraged peaceful dispute resolution, economic interdependence, and democratic consolidation, all contributing to the long absence of state-based armed conflict on Italian territory.
Mass student and worker protests challenged Italy’s political order, polarizing politics. While protests sometimes became violent, they did not evolve into full-scale civil war. Instead, they set the stage for the later Years of Lead, testing but not breaking state stability.
Italy experienced prolonged left- and right-wing terrorism, including bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations. The state responded with policing, intelligence, and legal reforms rather than large-scale military campaigns, reinforcing a pattern of managing internal violence without escalating to civil war.
Red Brigades militants kidnapped Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, later killing him. The crisis marked the peak of domestic terrorism but also hardened political consensus against armed struggle, undermining extremist support and helping Italy avoid a broader insurgency against state institutions.
Italy and the Holy See revised the 1929 Lateran Pacts, reducing Catholicism’s formal state role. By modernizing church–state relations through negotiation, Italy defused a potential source of ideological conflict and confirmed that major societal disputes would be resolved institutionally, not violently.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and domestic corruption scandals destroyed Italy’s First Republic party system. Despite political turmoil, the transition remained peaceful, demonstrating institutional resilience and reinforcing nonviolent competition as the accepted route for power changes.
Cosa Nostra bombings killed judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and targeted cultural sites. The state responded with tougher laws and mass arrests. Confrontation stayed within a policing framework, showing that even intense criminal violence did not turn into organized civil conflict.
Italy contributed troops and bases to NATO and UN operations in the Balkans. Acting mainly as a logistics hub and peacekeeper, Italy reinforced its role as a security provider in Europe, while its own territory remained untouched by state-based armed conflict.
Following the 11 September attacks, Italy deployed forces to Afghanistan under NATO and coalition mandates. Combat occurred abroad, while at home policymakers strengthened counterterrorism and intelligence, maintaining internal peace despite global security pressures and engagement in foreign conflicts.
Italy provided bases and aircraft for NATO’s Libya operation while avoiding leading combat roles. The intervention destabilized its southern neighborhood and increased migration flows, but Italy still relied on diplomacy, border management, and cooperation rather than military conflict on its own soil.
Large numbers of migrants and refugees crossed the central Mediterranean, prompting Italian naval search-and-rescue and border control missions. Tensions rose domestically, but disputes played out through politics and EU negotiations, not armed clashes, maintaining Italy’s non-conflict status.
Italy backed EU and NATO sanctions on Russia and supported Ukraine with aid and limited military supplies, while avoiding direct combat. The crisis reaffirmed reliance on alliances and deterrence, and Italy’s territory has remained free of state-based armed conflict through 2024.
