Research: In the Footsteps of Nonviolence in the Mediterranean: An Interpretation of a Theory-Practice within social movements between 1970 and 2025.
Virginia Fiume is a PhD Student in the National PhD in Peace Studies (Curriculum: Dynamics, Processes, and Actors in International Relations) at La Sapienza Università di Roma. Her research project, "On the footsteps of nonviolence in the Mediterranean" sits at the intersection of Political Science, Social Movements Studies, and Social History. Her work investigates how nonviolence develops as a theory-practice across various social movements between 1970 and 2025 in the Mediterranean region, utilizing a combination of archival research and narrative interviews. She aims to critically contribute a feminist approach to the theorization of nonviolence, bridging the gap between social movement studies and constructivist International Relations while highlighting the agency of social movements as non-state actors.
She has served as a research assistant for two projects involving social network analysis and dataset management: “The community of practice of the Ukraine Recovery Conference” (with Miranda Loli) and "UnLib - Understanding illiberal policy diffusion" (with Alexander Mesarovich).
Before commencing her PhD, she was a Visiting Fellow (2025) and Policy Leader Fellow (2023/2024) at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute, where she studied the relationship between nonviolent direct action and policy-making in the context of participatory democracy. In this role, she co-organised several seminars, including ‘Nonviolence as Democratic Innovation’ (UACES Grant for the European Nonviolent Network), ‘Understanding Palestinian Politics with Palestinian Voices’ (in collaboration with COSMOS – Scuola Normale Superiore) and the STG Talk ‘Trust, Care, and Power: Making Love with Democracy’.
For the past twenty years, Virginia has been an active participant and organizer in grassroots mobilizations and NGOs. In particular, as the co-founder and Co-President of EUMANS, a pan-European movement for popular initiative, she worked in Brussels between 2019 and 2023 coordinating European Citizens’ Initiatives, transnational campaigns, and participatory processes. In 2020, she was among the convenors of the self-organized Council on Participatory Democracy, and in 2022, she organized the "Open Congress of Citizens for Sustainable Peace, Freedom, and Democracy" in Warsaw, Poland, addressing the intersection of the rule of law and democratic backsliding.
She is currently involved in a landmark legal case before the Italian Constitutional Court following a civil disobedience action involving assisted suicide, as part of the broader mobilization led by the Associazione Luca Coscioni for the legalization of euthanasia in Italy. Her insights on these dynamics are featured in the forthcoming book, Dissensus over Liberal Democracy: Key Conversations with Leading Voices (Coman, R. et al., 2026).
With an MA in Anthropology of Media from SOAS, a BA in Critic and Theory of Literature at Università degli Studi di Milano and a background in journalism, she combines professional field expertise from North America and the UK with extensive experience in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where she explored the transnational dimensions of solidarity and popular resistance.