Posted by The Law School
5 February 2024On 23 September 2023, Stephen Skinner took part in a virtual workshop entitled ‘Towards a Siege Mentality? Crisis, Authoritarianism and Emergency Powers in the Long Twentieth Century’ organised by the Ghent Institute of Legal History and the George Bariţiu History Institute of the Romanian Academy, Cluj Napoca.
Stephen’s paper, ‘The Crisis Within: Criminalizing Subversion as a Threat to the State’ was part of a panel on ‘Time Out of Joint: Emergency Powers in the Age of Extremes’ and explored the ways in which forms of crisis are connected with the criminalization of politically motivated activity in the name of security, and what this can reveal about the relationship between law and the state. The paper focused on the prohibition of subversive associations under Fascism in Italy and the offence’s survival into the post-war republic.