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Paper short abstract:

The paper reconstructs the complex historical processes of constitution, dissolution and reconstitution of agrarian commons around the Italian-Slovenian border, with the aim to reflect on the concepts of commonisation and decommonisation in time and space through specific case studies.

Paper long abstract:

The forms of collective management of resources need to be observed through the lens of historical discontinuity, and not only because the continuous administrative and institutional shifts (particularly dense in the area under examination between Italy and Slovenia) require a non-linear trajectory of analysis, but also, and above all, because if we use categories that are too compact we might fail to grasp the movements of non-formalised social groups that nevertheless acted in a collective sense, building de facto social relations around access to and use of natural resources. The commons are dynamic realities, whose history is often little known. A two-year interdisciplinary research project attempted to reconstruct (through historical research on archive documents and ethnographic research conducted through interviews and fieldwork), the complex processes of constitution, dissolution and reconstitution of agrarian communities around the Italian-Slovenian border. The same social groups that in the mid-nineteenth century divided shares for the management of forests and pastures, at the end of the twentieth century, after the end of the socialist experience in Slovenia, were trying, and are still trying with difficulty, to reconstitute themselves out of the need for social re-aggregation and environmental protection. Tracing these deep historical dynamics, which play out at different scales, from local to national to supranational, allows us to reflect on the concepts of commonisation and decommonisation, seeing them act in time and space.