LIBORG aims at exploring, from the perspective of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in migration-related activities, the reconfiguration of the Libyan migration and border regime since Gadhafi’s fall in 2011. Libya is a point of departure of migrants heading for Europe on makeshift boats. Italy (as the landing country) and the EU have long been trying to include Libya in the process of externalization, which aims to support countries of origin and transit in their efforts to stem unwanted migration. A crucial role in this process is played by international organizations (IOs) and other non-state actors, which: a) directly carry out activities in countries of origin and transit (e.g. refugee protection, repatriations, assistance to detained people, livelihood projects and information campaigns aimed at reducing migration); b) provide local state authorities with know-how and technical support. While a growing body of research has started analyzing this process, scant attention has been paid to Libya (as opposed to other countries) and to the role played by NGOs (as opposed to that played by IOs). Gadhafi’s fall allowed for many international NGOs to start activities in Libya, and for many Libyan NGOs to be established. Despite Libya’s political instability, their activities have increased sharply, along with the increase in funding from EU and Italy, since 2017. In 2017 and 2018, extraordinary funding was made available by EU and Italy to IOs, which typically subcontract part of their activities to NGOs. In 2018, six Italian NGOs started working in Libyan detention centres under a scheme funded by the Italian government. LIBORG will, first, map the different NGOs operating in this field. Then, it will analyze their mandates and activities, as well as the relevant funding sources, and the relations they have to one another as well as to state authorities and IOs. Finally, it will assess the relationship between externalization, NGOs and human rights.

Many organisms, including humans, group together and perform collective actions such as birds forming coordinated flocks to evade predators, forage or roost. Some, as social insects, have evolved complex societies in which the unit of selection is not the individual, as in most vertebrates, but the colony. Yet, in both there is evidence of consistent behavioural variability among both individuals and groups. The study of collective behaviour - coordinated actions resulting in emergent properties at the group level - and the study of animal personality - between individual differences that are consistent over time and contexts - have progressed tremendously in the last two decades and are converging in their search for the link between individuality and collectivity, a fundamental and timely issue in biology. The GROUPIND project aims to investigate the relationship between individual personality and group personality by using ants and starlings as study organisms, both of which showing distinct collective behaviour and marked individual behavioural variability. The project will use a comparative approach to address the following objectives: (1) To characterize, also upon experimental manipulation, the composition of personalities in the group and understand how this relates to personality at the group level. Are group personalities an average of individual personalities within the group? Do they result from different distributions of individual personalities? Are there keystone individuals that exert a disproportionate influence on the group personality? (2) To understand how diversity of individual personalities contributes to decision making and to the ecological success at the group level, and how this would feed back at the individual level. By bridging two major fields of study, this project will shed new light on the ability of groups to function effectively, unravelling the consequences that personality differences can exert on social life and its evolution.

This research proposal is in mathematics, its content is part of algebraic topology and homotopy theory. It aims at deepening our understanding of the homotopy theory of cosimplicial unstable (co-)algebras over the Steenrod algebra and its relation to the homotopy theory of cosimplicial spaces. This is achieved by new methods developed recently by the ER (Dr. Biedermann) and coauthors and by methods from Goodwillie calculus. Specifically, there are three closely related parts/work packages: 1. Prove a general vanishing theorem of higher obstructions for realizing a map on homology as a map of spaces. The theorem is known to hold in rational homotopy and in the mod p Massey-Peterson case. 2. Find an algebraic description of the first obstruction living in Andre-Quillen cohomology (AQC) to the existence of a realization of unstable coalgebras. 3. Define natural operations on AQC of unstable coalgebras with general coefficients. As part of the risk management we describe two further fallback projects: 4. Study the Goodwillie tower of the identity functor of simplicial unstable algebras and relate its layers to AQC. 5. Describe the algebra of homotopy operations on simplicial commutative algebras for odd primes p. These projects are parts of a program of the ER to investigate realization problems and rigidity results associated to singular (co-)homology. A longterm goal (beyond the time frame of the fellowship) is to develop a deformation theory of unstable (co-)algebras over the Steenrod algebra and their realizing homotopy types in the mod p case.