This article argues that antifascism began to acquire a new meaning in the early 1990s, making a vital contribution to the emergence of a national antiracism movement in Italy and the spread of an antiracist culture built on new foundations. This thesis is based on observations of Italian society. The first section reconstructs the operations of the association Senzaconfine and analyses the contents of its publication of the same name. The middle section describes an exhibition entitled La menzogna della razza, its connection to the ‘Pantera’ student protest movement and its continued travels around Italy until recent years. The final section is dedicated to the reaction of several segments of the youth population and political community to the neofascist Luca Traini’s attempted racial massacre in Macerata in 2018. The article concludes that although the new focus on antiracism is not the only way the Italian antifascist tradition is being remoulded, it remains one of the most important, given the issues we face in a globalised, postcolonial world.

In the new millennium, amidst a crisis of antifascism as a source of political legitimacy, there has been a revival of antifascism in a more accessible and popular form, integrated into collective imagination and everyday practices. Events and themes of the Resistance have been revisited in venues and contexts beyond the traditional, utilising new approaches and languages outside conventional frameworks. This brief overview highlights the activities of five distinct organisations, spread across the country and all established between 1999 and 2009. Despite their differing methods and objectives, they have all played a significant role in promoting the Resistance through the lens of public history. Their work involves the collection and preservation of sources, the publication of studies and research, dissemination and educational activities. These organisations engage with local memories while addressing major international issues, and they promote original and innovative projects, either digital or conducted in open-air settings. This Contexts and Debates article aims to serve as a tool for those approaching the study of the Italian Resistance, helping them discover new research opportunities, particularly in the form of archival content, as well as alternative outlets to promote their findings.

This article offers a critical rereading of the historiography on the role of women in the Italian Resistance. It starts with the postwar period, marked by a general silence and the prevailing image of women as mothers and staffette. In the 1970s, the first historical elaboration of women’s experiences began in all northern regions, leading to the now iconic concept of the ‘silent Resistance’. In the 1990s, a dialogue developed with other historiographical categories, such as the concept of ‘civil resistance’ developed by Jacques Sémelin and the ‘war on civilians’, but this approach ran the risk of reducing women’s contribution to ‘powerless’ acts. Although today women’s history is fully integrated into the narrative canon of the Resistance, it faces new challenges, such as the confrontation with ‘other’ (mainly non-European) resistances and new public uses of history. The article suggests that women’s history has been, if not the only, then certainly the most important means by which new dimensions of the partisan movement and the Second World War have been brought to the fore, shedding light on the specificities of the conflict experienced by women, but also shaping the very notion of resistance by overcoming a purely militarist vision.

This article reviews the evolution of the representation of Italy’s ‘Catholic partisan’. In essence, this involved adaptation of the model of the Catholic soldier, who was able to kill out of love and ‘without hatred’, to the context of a civil war. With particular reference to the case of the central Veneto, this examination looks back to earlier Italian experiences during wartime to help explain how Catholic activists and the partisan groups linked to the Catholic world addressed the key issues of the legitimation of Resistance violence and the control of its use. It emphasises the disparity between the rhetoric directed at containing the violence and the realities of guerrilla warfare. The article goes on to analyse the different models of the ‘Catholic partisan’ put forward in the immediate postwar period (1945–1950): the ‘Catholic soldier’, with his military bearing; the ‘pure martyr’, who never initiated violence; and the ‘devout partisan’, who managed to restrict his use of violence, assessing its costs and benefits, and was characterised by his inclination to forgive and, especially, to kill as little as possible. The conclusions consider how a particular rhetoric helped to shape the narrative of the active involvement of Catholics in the Italian Resistance.

It has been shown in the literature that the preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, found in a number of languages (especially verb-/head-final ones), can result from different syntactic configurations. In some languages (e.g., in Hungarian), immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement). In others (e.g., in Turkish), preverbal foci remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement), to allow for the focus–verb adjacency. We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in situ ones, based on their prosodic requirements. Specifically, we show that both types of foci require alignment with an edge of a prosodic constituent but differ in the directionality of alignment (right or left). Our analysis rests on bringing together two independent existing proposals, Focus-as-Alignment and flexible Intonational Phrase (ɩ)-mapping. We show that this approach makes correct predictions for a number of unrelated Eurasian languages and discuss some further implications of this approach.

There have been strong proponents and opponents in academic debates about the use of social science in legal practice. However, in such academic discussions, little attention has been paid to what legal practitioners think about social science and its use in law. The present study shows that legal practitioners have complex views about social science. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it shows that there are five ideal-types of ‘social science consciousness’: enthusiast, pragmatist, indifferent, critical optimist and opponent. The paper shows what the implications are for law and social science, as well as a new research agenda on social science consciousness.

This paper examines a series of consonantal alternations conveying ‘affective’ meanings in the South American language Mapudungun (Catrileo 1986, 2010, 2022). The processes target the rich four-place coronal inventory of the language by shifting consonants in root morphemes to palatal or dental articulations. The palatalisations are cross-linguistically common in implying small size, tenderness, closeness, and politeness (e.g. [naʐki] ‘cat’ [ɲaʃki] ‘kitty’); however, the effects of dentalisation are more unexpected, implying distance, abruptness, sarcasm, and rudeness (e.g. [naʐki] ‘cat’ [n̪aθki] ‘damned cat’). While speakers evidently seem to assign sound symbolic value to the alternations, the patterns do not align neatly with cross-linguistically expected ‘synaesthetic’ correspondences, particularly to do with size symbolism and acoustic frequency (Ohala 1984, 1994). Based on historical metalinguistic commentary and corpus data, I argue that the Mapudungun alternations are long-established in the language, showing a variety of lexicalised forms, and being deeply grammatically entrenched both in their semantico-pragmatic implications and their morpho-phonological structure. As such, any sound-symbolic patterns are fundamentally subordinate to the grammatical architecture. I propose that a more parsimonious analysis of the patterns is an autosegmental one, where floating evaluative morphemes (diminutives and augmentatives) spread [distributed] and [anterior] feature nodes to the target coronal consonants, along with their language-specific pragmatics.

This article examines the role of British imperial constitutional law in the Zionist campaign against establishing a Legislative Council in Palestine during the early 1930s. At the time, the British government sought to introduce limited self-government in Palestine through a parliamentary institution that would include both locals and British officials. However, the Zionist leadership opposed this initiative, fearing that a representative institution reflecting the country’s demographics would threaten the development of the Jewish National Home. This article explores the Zionist engagement with the British imperial constitutional experience within its campaign against the Legislative Council, emphasizing the strategic application of British constitutional law by two Zionist officials, Leo Kohn and Chaim Arlosoroff. Through this case, the article highlights the influence of British constitutional law on interactions between national movements and the British Empire. It argues that the British imperial system offered an adaptable and flexible political framework. The Zionists’ attentiveness to this flexibility not only sheds light on the interplay between Zionism and the British Empire during the mandatory period but also underscores the place of constitutional flexibility in political debates within the British Empire.

This article analyses the development of Arthur C. Clarke’s (1918–2008) persona as the ‘prophet of the Space Age’, focusing on its relation with his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. Unlike many space personas, Clarke was not an astronaut or a political leader, but a writer and advocate for space technology who developed a global reputation as an authority on the future. In 1956, Clarke relocated from his native England to the former British colony of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This article examines how both Clarke himself and a wide range of organizations, nations and individuals, including many from Sri Lanka, contributed to the creation of a global ‘prophet’ persona. This includes Clarke’s public life in Sri Lanka, which came to embody the earthbound, satellite-focused space future he promoted. This persona was in turn used to project commercial and moral justifications for space technologies, especially through Western lenses and for Western audiences, but in numerous ways gave Sri Lanka an active role in the global Space Age.

The article concentrates on the massive project of popularizing the court system and penal practice in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1960s. From then on, the GDR transferred a considerable amount of jurisdiction to collectives, which were further assigned the task of adjudicating “close to the people” within and alongside the existing legal system. We will analyze how the government, with this project, managed to translate the ideological task of sanctioning the inner-state enemy into existing legal concepts and how it used law as a means to advance its political aims. By focusing on the judicialization of politics in the GDR, the article examines the legal history of the GDR as an important example in the broader and pressing phenomenon of the relationship between law and authoritarian politics.

Recent changes in the Turkish healthcare system aim to enhance efficiency by implementing various feedback systems, performance-based wages, and new auditing mechanisms to monitor resource and time use and cycle of motions in medical settings. This paper aims to answer the following question: how do nurses respond to changes that place them in a subordinate position, where supervisors and administrators dictate control over time and the nature of labor? In the literature on labor and neoliberalization, resistance by workers to control over work is mostly concluded as part of the reproduction of workers’ subordination. However, this paper challenges such a conclusion by presenting an alternative perspective. In-depth interviews with twenty-one nurses conducted in İstanbul revealed that nurses disrupt control mechanisms by refusing to conform to behaviors dictated by managerial principles, manipulating information about medication and equipment usage, and concealing beds and patients through their authoritative control over them. This study unveils new dimensions of contemporary nursing in Turkey through which covert solidarities between nurses enable efforts to maintain “good care” often shaped by gendered expectations. These efforts mostly resist the “hotelization” of hospitals and aim to remake the moral boundaries of care work.

The great technological and typological variability identified among the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) assemblages previously assigned to the Zagros Mousterian in the Zagros suggests that this industry is not a homogeneous cultural unit. The archaeological record from the Caucasus and Armenian highlands contributes important data to understand the variability of the Zagros Mousterian. The authors show that the long stratigraphic sequences of the caves of Taglar in the Lesser Caucasus and Yerevan-1 in the Armenian highlands provide a line of development (the ‘Yerevan–Taglar tradition’) of the Zagros Mousterian variant in this region at least from 60/55 to 40 kya. The earliest manifestations of the Zagros Mousterian in the regions may be dated to the early MIS 5 or earlier. The MP assemblages from the cave of Saradj-Chuko and two other MP sites in the Terek river basin represent the northern Caucasian variant of the Zagros Mousterian, which existed in the region from MIS 5 to MIS 3. The remains of Neanderthals associated with the Zagros Mousterian assemblages in the Zagros and Caucasus clearly indicate that the makers of this cultural tradition were Neanderthals.

The Journal of Law and Religion began publishing as part of the larger revival and reimagination of the academic encounter with religion. More specifically, it sought from the start to examine an entire panoply of issues: secular law regarding religion, religious views of secular law and the state, political philosophy, political theology, religious law, and legal and religious pluralism as overarching ideas. What was at stake to the journal’s founders was not just intellectual curiosity but their conviction that this kaleidoscope of concerns was essential to reconstituting a healthy polity, to play a role in responding to a crisis of values that afflicted both religion and the secular state. The journal has also sought to consider questions across the full range of world religions, including non-Western religions. Again, this is not expanding the canon for its own sake. The larger story of legal systems and religions in all their specificity and complex interactions, as revealed by rigorous and imaginative analysis, could ideally help establish a counter-narrative to the simple pieties of modernity. The challenges today, especially our current state of political polarization, which envelops religion in its wake, are different, but they demand the same careful, expansive, scholarly agenda.

Since its inception in 1831, the French Foreign Legion, a specialised unit within the ranks of the French military, has played a prominent role in the wars of both colonisation and decolonisation. This article seeks to trace the origins, development and eventual decline of an Italian and international ‘Legionary issue’ regarding the recruitment and employment of Italian volunteers in a foreign military force deployed in the French decolonisation war in Indochina. Through the examination of archival sources as well as autobiographical narratives by Italian legionnaires, this study offers a novel perspective on the interplay between Italy’s political, economic and sociocultural trends, the enlistment of Italian volunteers into the French Foreign Legion, and the evolution of Italo-French relations in the postwar period.