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World cultural heritage is under systemic attack on several crisis fronts, most notably in Mesopotamia, where ISIS is practising a deliberate and highly sophisticated strategy of ‘cultural cleansing’. Through its newly established Task Force, Italy is leading the international community’s efforts to strengthen the protection regime by including a cultural component in the mandates of peacekeeping interventions. The Italian contribution distinguishes itself, thanks to its capacities and capabilities, in fulfilling the military, police and cultural tasks of ‘cultural peacekeeping’ and in meeting the needs of the international intervention in the crucial entry and exit phases. Moreover, Italy’s commitment to protecting cultural heritage fits perfectly with the distinctive features of Italy’s international identity and role while at the same time serving the country’s national interests by increasing its standing and visibility in world affairs.

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This article carries out a quantitative analysis of the military behaviour of Italy from 1946 to 2010 using neoclassical realism as the theoretical framework. By overcoming the limits of traditional explanations of Italian security and defence policies, neoclassical realism provides new insight into Italy's involvement in militarized interstate disputes by taking into account both systemic and domestic variables. The method used is a combination of dyad analysis introduced by Stuart Bremer in 1992 and the analysis of unit-level variables, which is distinctive of neoclassical realism. An analytical model is developed, and bivariate and multivariate analyses are performed to explain the impact of the variables. By empirically testing a set of hypotheses, the study argues that Italian military behaviour is a function of the country's relative power as well as the levels of elite instability and regime vulnerability, the extraction capacity of the state, and the degree of elite consensus. The study contributes to the existing scientific debate on the determinants of Italian international behaviour and to the literature on neoclassical realism by demonstrating that its main propositions apply to a case of middle power and that these propositions can be tested on a large scale through quantitative approaches.

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