the purpose of the centre is to study issues, evolution, experiments have succeeded and failed, and cases related to federalism.

During the past ten years, the issue of federalism has increasingly been brought to the attention of researchers and politicians.
The changes undergone by modern society – both socio-economic (increasing global interdependency) and political (the end of the cold war) -  have brought about a crisis in the traditional structure of the nation state. Its authority has been eroded from the top down, in favour of new international power centres (International Monetary Fund, NATO, WTO, multinationals corporations, etc.), and from the bottom up, with increasingly insistent demands for decentralisation in favour of local government (regions, provinces, metropolitan districts, etc.).
In the process of decentralisation a number of countries, including Italy, have also initiated institutional reviews in the direction of federalism.
Nor should we forget the processes of regional aggregation (regionalism) taking place in various parts of the world, the most advanced of which, the European Union, must  
confront the difficult and complex task of institutional reform, where the issue of federalism is crucial.

The fact that some scholars maintain that these processes could even bring about the end of the nation state and herald a new Medieval era, with power scattered across an infinite number of indistinct centres, suggests that their study is a matter of urgency in order to create the tools needed to comprehend the historically significant transformations that contemporary democracies are undergoing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Federalism, with its proposal for State reform both at the top (the federal union of nation states) and at the bottom (sub-national federalism), represents the most adequate solution to such problems from a historial standpoint. Investigating the problems, examining historical evolution, evaluating successful experiments and failed attempts, identifying possible evolutions and adaptations to historical development and concrete examples would appear to be the defining scientific and civil objectives of a specific research centre dedicated to the study of federalism.