Roberto Aliboni it was one of the cornerstones of the Istituto Affari Internazionali. He joined as an expert researcher on economic and development issues shortly after its foundation, at the end of the 1960s, but had long been a member of that group of young people who had gathered around Altiero Spinelli since the end of the 1950s, joining the Federalist Youth. From that small group Spinelli recruited the first researchers to be engaged in giving body to his newborn Institute, completing it with a few others of similar cultural and political background: Gerard Mombelli, Riccardo Perissich, Massimo Bonanni, Stefano Silvestri, Good Pozzoli and precisely Roberto Aliboni.
A pupil of the Montana College in Switzerland, and then a law student at La Sapienza University, Roberto, called Billi by colleagues and friends since his school days, was above all a scholar and a refined researcher. In fact, he never really loved the administrative workload of director of the IAI that he had to shoulder from 1979 to 1987, when he handed the job to Gianni Bonvicini.
Billi has always been a man of culture and extensive reading, but his scientific career has focused in particular on the Mediterranean, the true center of his professional interests. In connection in a first phase with Stefano Silvestri he promoted a research section on this geopolitical area at the Institute. Area of extraordinary interest for our country, even if never really exploited by the Italian political forces and governments. Precisely for this reason, being able to have a think tank with expertise in this sector represented a non-negligible value for those who had to study the economic and strategic issues of the area in depth.
From the outset, the idea was to put the IAI in contact with all the existing institutes on the two shores of the Mediterranean. Which is anything but easy for two reasons. The first was to find credible partners in countries governed mostly by authoritarian systems and with little or no interest in research. Therefore, the interlocutors were often individual researchers, journalists, senior officials, even some politicians, on the basis of primarily personal relationships, which Billi cultivated with great attention and delicacy. He was so good at identifying with local realities that he was sometimes, much to his amusement, mistaken for a local. A couple of votes, in meetings in the Arab world, his surname, Aliboni, was distorted into Al Banna, a well-known surname of Palestinian origin….
The second reason was to make the majority of the Arab partners “digest” the presence of an Israeli think tank. Despite all these difficulties, the Mediterranean Study Commission (MeSCo) was born in 1994, on the basis of the work carried out by the IAI since 1972, with the idea of deepening the project of a possible Conference for Security in the Mediterranean on the old model of the CSCE which had had some success in relations between the West and the USSR. Project that was sponsored by the Italian government, in particular when Gianni De Michelis was Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Along the way of this ambitious cultural and political commitment, Aliboni elaborated a few years later with Alvaro de Vasconcelos, director of the Portuguese Institute of International Strategic Studies (IEEI), a wider dimension of the network including EU institutes. EuroMeSCo was born with the aim of involving the entire Union in the dialogue, whose interests in the Mediterranean needed to be better addressed and made concrete. In this vast network, which still operates today, Aliboni’s work must not only be remembered, but also cultivated by the younger researchers of the IAI who Billi gradually introduced into the Euro-Mediterranean circuit, from Silvia Colombo a Andrea Dessi e Francesca Caruso.
With these last two young scholars Aliboni also in these last years of great physical suffering due to the disease wanted to share his passion for the Mediterranean by elaborating with them the ISMed chapters in the last three yearbooks of Mediterranean Economies, published by the Mill. Because one of the great qualities of this friend and colleague of ours with an apparently gruff look was precisely that of nurturing young researchers by directing them to the complexity of Mediterranean studies and thereby creating solid continuity at the IAI. We will all remember him with gratitude and nostalgia.