Histories of Sicilian Rebellions Against Extractivism, Militarization, and Border Regimes

Up until now, Sicily had been absent from our pages. Thanks to the relationship established by Shivangi Mariam Raj with the island, we can remedy this with a text by Giuseppe Procida about the history and, crucially, the present of Sicilian resistance against the Italian state’s extractivist policies, as well as its complicities with atlanticist militarism and Fortress Europe’s border enforcement.

The history of Sicily is a chronicle of resistance: a land that has never accepted domination without fighting. From ancient times to the present, the island has been a furnace of rebellion, where the longing for freedom and justice has erupted in waves of uprisings and revolutions like the lava of Mount Etna. The first major insurrection, the First Servile War (135–132 BCE), saw slave armies led by Eunos and Cleon rise against the cruelty of Roman imperialism, inspired by a rebellious spirit that has echoed through the millennia. In the Middle Ages, the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 marked a watershed revolutionary moment, as Sicilians expelled the brutal French tyranny of Charles d’Anjou. From this event, though, four centuries of another foreign domination ensued, with the island annexed into the Spanish Empire’s Indias de por acá, treated as a Mediterranean colonial outpost along with the rest of Mezzogiorno.

Nonetheless, the 18th and 19th centuries represented a boiling cauldron of unstoppable rebellious feelings: popular insurrections in 1718, 1769, 1820, 1848-49, 1860, and 1866 challenged Bourbon oppression and the betrayal of Italian unification promises. Sicily, under the new Italian state, became a land of military occupation, where dreams of justice were always met with repression. The Fasci Siciliani of the 1890s fought for “land and freedom”, only to be brutally crushed by the recently created Italian state. In the 20th century, anti-fascist resistance, popular land struggles, and armed independence movements continued the fight, with martyrs like Placido Rizzotto and Accursio Miraglia as symbols of those heroic years still remembered today. As postwar capitalism spread globally, new forms of resistance emerged locally: environmental justice, militant antimafia, and anti-militarist protests like those in the town of Comiso in the 1980s. Today, movements like NO MUOS, NO PONTE and NO CPR prove that Sicily’s rebel spirit endures.