La "bomba demografica" vista dall'Italia: ambiente, riproduzione e genere tra anni Sessanta e Ottanta

This dissertation examines how the problem of global overpopulation was received, reinterpreted, and politicized in Italy from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, a period in which demographic growth emerged as a central concern within international debates on development, environmental limits, and social stability. While the analysis occasionally gestures toward later transformations, its primary focus lies on the decades in which the “population bomb” entered public discourse and became a significant category of political interpretation. The study situates itself at the crossroads of three historiographical fields—population control, environmental history, and the history of feminism—seeking to identify points of intersection among actors, discourses, and practices often examined separately. Particular attention is devoted to the dialectic between the national and international dimensions, especially the role played by United Nations conferences as arenas in which scientific knowledge, geopolitical tensions, and competing visions of development contributed to redefining global problems. Methodologically, the research addresses the challenge of holding together a highly transversal topic without reducing the analysis to a narrow circulation of explicitly neo-Malthusian ideas. To navigate this tension, it focuses on specific conjunctures in which demographic arguments acquired political salience, including debates on contraception and abortion, the rise of environmental concerns, and the growing institutionalization of population policies. The dissertation also reconstructs the formation of a “sub-public sphere” in which recurring individuals created networks that cut across disciplinary fields, professional roles, and political affiliations, facilitating the circulation of demographic knowledge within the Italian context. The thesis argues that demographic issues in postwar Italy were characterized by a profound ambivalence. On the one hand, the legacy of fascist pronatalism contributed to delegitimizing explicit state intervention in matters of population; on the other, concerns about overpopulation resurfaced in fragmented yet persistent ways within political and public debates. Over the course of the 1970s, neo-Malthusian interpretations and population control policies became the object of intense criticism—from Catholic, feminist, Marxist, and Third World perspectives—revealing the deeply contested nature of demographic governance. Drawing on a wide range of scientific literature, institutional documents, and archival sources, the dissertation ultimately interprets the Italian reception of the “population bomb” not as a linear diffusion of expert knowledge but as a historically situated process shaped by negotiation, conflict, and reinterpretation, in which global frameworks were selectively appropriated and transformed within national political cultures