PRIN 2022 (2022E8XCBX) Swinging Peripheries And Centers in Europe (SPACE): Comparative Legal Dimensions of Territory

SPACE challenges the traditional, State-based legal approach to territory through the lens of the center/periphery cleavage by investigating the processes of configuration and reconfiguration of centers and peripheries in Europe over the past decades. A robust COMPARATIVE METHODOLOGY, characterized as well by openness, inclusiveness, gender balance and internationalization will be applied to all dimensions. SPACE’s innovative, comprehensive and critical assessment of the legal dimensions of territory requires a comparative and multidimensional approach, relying on 3 research streams. First, the EUROPEAN DIMENSION: INTEGRATION AND DISINTEGRATION will contribute to the debate on the transformations of centers and peripheries in the recent EU integration crises, contrasting the analysis of new legal patterns of differentiation with the traditional (political and economic) classifications of cleavages such as “creditor/debtor” or “frugal-solidarity open” member states. Second, the COOPERATIVE RELATIONAL DIMENSION will be addressed through a trans-scalar approach to investigate how cooperative mechanisms, at the domestic level (in decentralized Member States) and at the EU level (with respect to cross-border and macro-regional strategies), redefine the legal concept of territory as a “fuzzy space” which can be adapted according to concrete interests, regardless of national borders. Third, the discussion of the SPATIAL DIMENSION OF RIGHTS will unveil how space defines and is defined by the way rights are constructed, contested and implemented, creating variable geometries of centers and peripheries. Political rights; disability rights; and the right to education, in their diverse scope, justiciability and enforcement, will allow to discuss the impact of rights on the center/periphery divide. SPACE will be developed by 5 research units: UNIBO (University of Bologna), UNIVR (University of Verona), UNICAL (University of Calabria), UNIFI (University of Florence) and LUM (LUM University De Gennaro, Casamassima–Bari).