31/03/2015
Giulio Terzi di Sant'Agata
Since the very beginning of this century the cyber age has been raising unexpected challenges for governments and planners. Foreign and security policy is increasingly influenced by the
pervasiveness of networked systems in financial, military, social areas. Vast opportunities are opening up for making good value of the new technologies in institution building, by expanding
freedom and human rights, reinforcing democratic institution and public accountability. At the same time new and ubiquitous vulnerabilities are emerging. They outpace many of the existing
assumptions.
Mauro Lucentini
In a United States – the leader nation – that finds itself in a state of permanent conflict which its own president has indirectly acknowledged can be seen as a religious war, a series of disparate
events is causing a deterioration of the democratic system. These events include: a decline in the balance of powers, cornerstone of that system; the contamination of the electoral process by
financial interests; and the attempts at interfering in its weightiest political decisions by a foreign nation, Israel, under aggressively right-wing rule for the past 15 years. How and whether these
events are connected is hard to establish, but one is not even allowed to hypothesize about it without violating politically correct orthodoxy.
Liliana Mosca
On 13 July 1977, following years of intermittent clashes, the Democratic Republic of Somalia invaded Ethiopia to annex the Ogaden, the first step toward the creation of a Greater Somalia. The Ethiopia-Somalia armed conflict was one of the biggest wars between African States in contemporary times and its repercussions in many respects were both regional and global. It was regional because it was driven mostly by forces embedded in the very nature of those two States, created as they were by external forces, but it acquired a global dimension because of the high level of involvement of external actors, particularly the two superpowers, that transformed it into a platform of East-West competition.
Massimo Castaldo
The Soviet Union’s death in 1991 is the result of attempts to reform a stagnant system by the young party’s official Michael Gorbachev, who, after the disappearance of the old and inept collective directorate, was appointed party’s secretary general. The reforms, known by the name of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency) have a short life, they start in 1985 with glasnost, which sets up freedoms of speech, of press, of association and generates a democratic movement; Boris Yeltsin, another young party’s official co-opted into the directorate becomes the leader of the democrats; the course of the reforms ends abruptly in 1991, when it becomes clear that the perestroika is not improving the system, as party and bureaucracy believed at the beginning,
but it is changing the system.
Mercè Sales Jardì
From the beginning, the case law of the Commission and the European Court of Human Rights (Echr) considered the best interests of the child to be a determining factor in all the cases involving minors. The prevalence of the best interests of the child in the decisions of the Echr regarding alternative families is a fact and a constant reality that has opened up considerable options for protection, albeit taking into account their specific characteristics.
Renato Federici
The work deals with relationships among anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and law and, in particular, the relationships among law, religion and languages. The general assumption of
the Author is that States may be religious, secular or atheistic, and he investigates the origin of secular States. In the book Guerra o diritto? he made some specific claims, which are here reasserted
and extended.
