Short Abstract

The panel analyses the role of minorities shaping the environment and the State, highlighting their contribution to building economic and social networks and facilitating the circulation of knowledge—factors capable of shaping territories, institutions, and relations between Africa and Europe.

Long Abstract

The panel examines the ways in which minorities have contributed to shaping the environment, society, and state structures: far from being merely marginal or subordinate figures, minority groups, diasporic communities, and migrant populations have actively participated in transforming the spaces they inhabited, playing a role in building economic and social networks, facilitating the circulation of ideas and knowledge, and defining practices, institutions, and forms of belonging.

The idea is to show how minorities and states have mutually transformed one another within spaces characterised by the continuous circulation of people, expertise, institutional models, and social practices. From this perspective, the environment is not merely the setting in which these processes unfold, but a historical space produced and modified by the interactions among different communities, human mobility, private economic activities, and public policies.

Particular attention will be paid to the role played by minorities in building networks capable of transcending political, imperial, and national boundaries: through these networks, minorities contributed not only to the economic and social transformation of the territories they inhabited but also to the redefinition of relationships among local societies, colonial institutions, and states (relationships that sometimes persisted even after the end of the colonial system).

The panel, therefore, aims to examine minorities as a privileged lens through which to reconstruct Afro-European and intra-African connections during the twentieth century, demonstrating how their presence tangibly contributes to shaping conservation practices, territories, societies, and institutions—and, more broadly, the very processes of state-building.

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