Mattia Ravano, Ph.D.

Mattia Ravano is an international historian whose research examines the political economy of European integration, the evolution of Euro-American relations, and the governance of capitalism in the late twentieth century. He holds a PhD in International History and Politics from the Geneva Graduate Institute. He has been postdoctoral fellow at Bocconi University, where he has contributed to the PRIN-funded project PRIVIT: The Politics of Italian Privatisations. His work has appeared in journals such as Relations Internationales and Rivista Italiana di Storia Internazionale.

Research project

Inventing the 'West', The G7 and the Construction of a Universalist Narrative

His research examines how the Group of Seven (G7) constructed and projected a universalist narrative of the West from the first summit in 1975 through the 1990s. It argues that the West did not simply reflect shared civilisational values, but emerged as a political discourse forged by governments who sought to manage intra Western tensions and legitimise their structural power in a changing global order. G7 summitry linked economic coordination with broader claims about democracy, human rights and global responsibility, and rebranded the postwar US sphere of influence as an inclusive Western community. The research analyses summit communiqués, evidence from US, and Western European archives, combined with contemporary press coverage. It traces how governments reconciled divergent national interests while presenting them as common Western purposes. It particularly focuses on European agency in this process, analyzing how it contributed to the evolution of US geopolitical hegemony. Uncovering this processes will show how a new universalist language anticipated, and even planted the seed, of later contests with rival projects such as the Global South.