Assumpta Castillo Cañiz completed her PhD studies at the Università degli Studi di Padova between 2017 and 2021 in the ERC project “The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations for the First World War”. Her thesis, entitled «Ciudadanos en armas. Violencia política y construcción del Estado en España y Portugal (1867-1914)», is a study of the repertoires of violent practices perpetrated by armed groups that performed public order functions in parallel to police institutions in Spain and Portugal during the period 1867-1914. As part of this research, she carried out a research stay at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of the Universidade de Lisboa. Castillo obtained her PhD degree from the Università degli Studi di Padova in May 2021, with a qualification of excellent cum laude. Between 2021 and 2022 she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the same university, where she has carried out a study on arms control policies in Spain between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the importance of this legislation in relation, among others, to the rise of political violence in the period. She has recently been awarded a Juan de la Cierva Training Postdoctoral Fellowship by the University of Girona. She has participated in several international conferences and seminars as a speaker and guest lecturer and published several works on political violence from the late nineteenth and first third of the twentieth century, on the development of political cultures in their practical and cultural forms and on the discourse and weaving of collective alternatives in the Western capitalist model during the twentieth century, especially those proposed by the libertarian movement. His publications include an article in the International Journal of Iberian Studies, In Ayer (forthcoming) and a book chapter in Routledge, where he will soon publish a monograph based on his doctoral thesis.