Under many respects, state partitions in modern times are about borders, belonging, transnational movements, and power politics. In my view, these aspects are particularly affecting the European stability since the industrial and French revolutions. With this assertion, however, I do not deny that the phenomenon of partitions had previously occurred, and still is occurring, all over the world. Historically, it has been justified by a variety of reasons, from religious attractions (or hatred) to the desire of conquests, from commercial interests to beliefs of civilization expansions. All these are matter of fact. Nevertheless, when I approached this field of studies, twenty years ago, I was surprised to observe that the category “partitions” is rarely used by European scholars and in the international literature, when focusing on the processes of state fragmentation in modern Europe. By contrast, the notion is widely applied in other world contexts, particularly in South Asia (and British India especially), despite plenty of similar examples are offered by European events (Mohanram and Raychaudhuri, 2019).
Furthermore, modern times are marked by an intense process of liquidity and precarity. Their role is deeply related to the perceptions of nationhood and statehood, as these interpretative categories manifest such a high flexibility to impact, both diachronically and synchronically, on the understanding of politics, culture, memories, and economic perspectives of groups and individuals (Bauman and Donskis, 2013). The atlas of nation-state metamorphosis described in the first part of my book is aimed, at least in my hopes, to offer a metaphor of the liquidity of partition processes. It refers, in fact, on how borders, belonging, transnational relations, and power melt and solidify constantly, reshaping maps and empathies, with unpredictable effects on the everyday life of individuals and groups, as correctly grasped by my commentators.