Daiki Kaba (Hitotsubashi University), Between Local Race and Global Fascism: The Second Italo-Ethiopian War and Interracial movements in Harlem, New York

When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the conflict instantly crossed the Atlantic to Harlem, New York. In this neighborhood, where Italian immigrants and African Americans lived in uneasy proximity, the war was not a distant foreign policy crisis but a visceral domestic upheaval. This paper explores how the war disrupted the traditional “Black versus White” racial binary, revealing instead a complex triangular conflict involving fascist-aligned Italians, anti-fascist Italian workers, and Black activists. While preexisting narratives often portray Italian Americans as unifying around ethnic pride and whiteness, this study highlights deep internal fractures. Fascist sympathizers in US coordinated with the Mussolini regime to assert an imperial identity, effectively claiming “whiteness” through support for colonial violence. In stark contrast, anti-fascist Italian radicals defied these ethnic boundaries. Drawing on multilingual archives, including Italian anarchist newspapers and African American press, I reconstruct how Black radicals and organizers seized this opening, forging pragmatic alliances with Italian anti-fascists. Crucially, this alliance fostered a shared geopolitical analysis: both anti-fascist Italians and Black radicals connected Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia with Japan’s invasion of China, viewing them as parallel manifestations of the same imperialist threat. This global perspective endowed the mobilization for Ethiopia with a distinctly transnational nature. By tracing these dynamics, the study demonstrates that the universalist language of imperialism was sharpened in the streets of Harlem, where activists linked their local fight against racial oppression to a worldwide struggle against fascist expansion. By grounding transnational history in the streets of Harlem, this study illustrates how global conflicts are metabolized at the local level, forging new alignments of race and class.

Ashkan Hashemipour (University of Oxford), Between Iran and the World: The transnational dimensions of the Iranian guerrilla movement (1963-1979)

The Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (IPFG) and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) built and maintained extensive transnational networks throughout the Middle East in the lead-up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, sending activists to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Turkey, Oman, and South Yemen. These guerrillas forged relationships with regional governments and liberation movements alike, through which they gained access to military training, created arms-smuggling channels, and established their own radio stations. This paper, thus, explores two questions: firstly, how Iranian guerrillas established these transnational relationships, and, secondly, how these relationships influenced both Iranian guerrilla activism and the evolution of the Iranian revolutionary movement as a whole. These relationships were formed largely through contingent processes, emerging from chance encounters or the personal decisions of rank-and-file activists rather than through organisational design or intent. Accordingly, this paper adopts a micro-level approach that foregrounds activists’ individual trajectories across borders, rather than the top-down, teleological perspectives that have characterised much of the scholarship on the Iranian Revolution. This focus on individual-level processes reveals the impactful nature of these relationships: they both enabled these activists to operationalise previously abstract revolutionary theory and prompted porousness and collaboration across political divides amongst Iranian revolutionaries based abroad. Further, these relationships, though initially pragmatic in origin, evolved into emotionally powerful bonds between Iranian activists and their foreign allies. These affective ties – rooted in a commitment to each other’s liberation – both facilitated the exchange of material support, crucial to sustaining the guerrilla struggle inside of Iran, and, conversely, led Iranians to participate in various regional conflicts alongside their non-Iranian counterparts. Given its focus on individual trajectories, this study relies on a wide range of sources, including memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival sources, such as organisational pamphlets and publications.