The Diplomacy of Terror. European States and Arab-Palestinian Terrorism during the Cold War CSTPV Seminar with Prof. Valentine Lomellini, University of Padua (Italy)

In the late 1960s, a new political actor appeared on the European stage: armed organisations from the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin export terrorism to the Old Continent to influence the international scene.
France, West Germany, Great Britain and Italy – countries simultaneously affected by domestic terrorism – found themselves facing a new challenge. This globalised terrorist threat was, to some extent, the result of a desire to influence the foreign policy of targeted countries.
But does terrorism work? What are its implications on the international system?
The lecture, which reconstructs and analyses how Western European States responded to international terrorism and their relations in the domain of collective security from the 1960s to the late 1980s, sets itself an ambitious goal: to gain greater insight on whether exported terrorism, characterised by a transnational DNA, has played a role in influencing the world scenario as marked by the Cold War.
Starting from the first Black September hijacking of the Israeli El Al flight in 1968 to the attacks by Arab-Palestinian organisations in Germany, Italy and France and Great Britain in the 1980s, the paper analyses single countries' international policies, intergovernmental cooperation efforts among European countries in the domain of public security, and their interplay with the Cold War scenario.

Valentine Lomellini (1981) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Law Sciences, and International Studies at the University of Padua-Italy). She has been Visiting Fellow at the Georgetown University, the London School of Economics, Visiting Professor at the Humboldt Universität, at the Wien Universität, at the St. Cyr Military Institute, at the University of Budapest and Visiting Scholar at the Université La Sorbonne. Valentine is also the Scientific Director of the international academic network IPSe — International Politics & Security which brings together around 15 Universities in Europe and the USA including Stanford, Georgetown, La Sorbonne, St. Andrews, and the European University Institute.

Valentine earned a Ph.D in Political Systems and Institutional Change at the Institute of Advanced Studies IMT (2009) and she was awarded the Medal of the President of the Italian Republic and the Simon Veil Award (2009). She has published around 70 contributions in Italian, English and French in volumes and international scientific reviews such as Modern Italian History, European Contemporary History, Zeitgeschichte.