This special issue on violence, migration, and gender in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world brings together specialists on the Iberian colonies in Africa as well as scholars focusing on the domestic impacts of decolonisation in Spain and Portugal to this day. The articles in the issue focus on social change broadly understood, analysed through a historical and anthropological lens. For the first time, this endeavour brings together questions related to violence and gender, forced migration, and administrative internment, as well as current (European) migration regimes, in an “Iberian” perspective.

After Mussolini’s regime collapsed, Italy rebuilt itself as a nation and a democracy. The Republican Constitution approved in 1948 rejected the ideologies of both racism and racial discrimination, which had been strengthened and made harsher by Fascism since the mid-1930s. Yet, despite this, racism and racialisation continued in the post-Fascist years. The article analyses how the presence of former colonial subjects in Italy between the 1940s and 1960s was perceived, represented and managed, and demonstrates that the hegemonic discourse of the post-war period still considered Italy to be a white and ethnically homogeneous nation. It considers the stories of people from Libya and Eritrea who applied for Italian citizenship and the life in Italy of some Somali students in the 1960s. From different perspectives, these case studies show how in republican Italy inclusion and exclusion, as well as concepts of identity and otherness, were the consequence of processes of racialisation and ideas inherited from the previous period.