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Western responses to 1989 : launching the EU’s eastward enlargement amidst inner complexity and outer fragmentation
No full textPublished: 31 December 2025This chapter examines the impact that the changes of 1989 had on policy-making processes that the European Community (EC) had already set in motion, and that directly intertwined with the ways in which the eastward enlargement process was implemented. The contribution addresses the EC’s relations with the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), and sheds light on the EC’s newly developed institutional media and perception management guidelines. It then delves into the Community’s deepening priorities and counteracts them with its views on widening membership, revealing how both left a lasting trace in the evolving sociopolitical dynamics of our continent
International human rights law and the legal regulation of disinformation
No full textPublished online: 10 January 2026Looking at the disinformation problem through the lens of international law, and in particular international human rights law, presents a complex picture also in light of the absence of an internationally agreed definition of disinformation. At the same time, mis/disinformation content, actors and behaviours are increasingly at the centre of transnational governance initiatives, as well as regional and national legal regulation, and the policies of global social media platforms and search engines. The current chapter aims to shed light on the dangers for international human rights standards resulting from the legal regulation of disinformation, while providing a roadmap across different areas of regulation of false content which may be harmful to specific human rights, in compliance with international human rights law. The current chapter aims to provide an overview of the different legal categories of disinformation content, actors and behaviour, which may be regulated under international and national law in compliance with international human rights standards
Race and transitional justice
No full textPublished: 20 January 2026The discourse, scholarship, and practice of transitional justice have become pivotal to addressing historical systematic injustices. However, until recently, the field has largely overlooked some of the most enduring and pervasive injustices of human history: racism and the colonialism and slave-trade that both reflected and fuelled it. Race and Transitional Justice examines how race and racism interact with transitional justice mechanisms and institutions to question why this is the case, and how it could be different. Bringing together diverse perspectives to examine the historical and socio-political contexts of transitional justice, this book argues that the field remains largely inattentive to the role of race. As a result, transitional justice institutions may be sustaining the very racialization that they are expected to remedy. The contributions offer a range of responses. Some call to abandon the whole field, citing its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony. Others consider transitional justice an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order. The result is a sensitive reflection into emancipatory transitional justice futures.-- Foreword: Reclaiming Racial Justice, Barney Afako
-- 1: Race and Transitional Justice, Neha Jain and Sarah M.H. Nouwen
-- 2: Mapping Critiques of the Treatment of Race and Racism in Transitional Justice, Colleen Murphy
-- 3: Haunting Justice: Racing and De-racing through Transitional Justice, Zinaida Miller
-- 4: Human Rights, Human Wrongs: "A More Demanding Relationship to History", Vasuki Nesiah
-- 5: Clumsy Ethnography: How Genocide Lawyers Re-Racialized Darfur, Edward Thomas
-- 6: Racialized Exclusion through Universal Jurisdiction Trials: Thinking with and against Transitional Justice, Nicola Palmer
-- 7: Transitional Justice as Epistemicide: On Steve Biko's Pluralist Co-existence 'after' Conflict, Tshepo Madlingoz
The rise and fall of Lauterpacht's 'function of law'
No full textPublished online: 16 January 2026Review product: The Function of Law in the International Community. By Hersch Lauterpacht. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1933. Pp. xxiv, 469. Index.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025
Complex, changeable, or just complicated : a relational approach to EU actorness in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue
No full textFor thirty years, the European Union (EU) has positioned itself as an indispensable actor in the Western Balkans; providing financial aid, investment, and policy guidance to the region. In particular, the EU has taken an active role in seeking to mediate a “normalization of relations” between Serbia and Kosovo, launching the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue in 2011. However, with only 22 out of 27 EU member states recognizing the independence of Kosovo, the EU has adopted an “ambiguous” position on what said “normalization” would look like. While much has been written on the EU’s level of actorness in the region, both as an external actor in the Dialogue and through its capacity building operations in Kosovo, there has not yet been a relational study of EU’s actorness in the Western Balkans. This paper seeks to do just that, using the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue as an exploratory case study to propose a relational approach to EU actorness. To this end, this paper identifies conditions under which EU actorness may emerge from specific configurations of relations from the literature on relational approaches to international relations. It then tests the applicability of these conditions to EU actorness in the Western Balkans over three time periods: pre-2010, 2010-20, and 2020-present. In doing so, the paper demonstrates that a relational approach to EU actorness provides a robust explanation for observed variation in EU actorness regarding the Western Balkans in general, and in the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue specifically
Commodifying the world : Carletti’s global cargoes
No full textPublished online: 23 January 2026Francesco Carletti (c. 1573-1639) was a Florentine trader who travelled around the world between 1592 and 1606. He was also a consumer, a user, a buyer (for instance for the Grand Duke of Tuscany), and occasionally a collector. He constructed his material world by experiencing, seeing, tasting, evaluating and ultimately describing things in his memoires entitled I Ragionamenti (published 1701). All of these actions are today understood as key to processes of commodification. The chapter starts by considering what was a commodity for Carletti and what commodification meant for early modern Europeans who came to deal with an expanding natural and artefactual world. Textiles – and most specifically cotton textiles – are here singled out as examples of “global commodities”: they were among the most widely traded goods across the globe and goods frequently mentioned by Carletti. The chapter concludes with a reflection on Carletti’s conceptualization of the economic systems that supported – and in turn were generated by – such commodification of the world
Self-organized social distancing
No full textPublished online: 09 February 2026During previous pandemics, social distancing was organized top-down, through the imposition of a minimum distance. An alternative approach toward social distancing asks individuals to try to maximize their distance to others. Here, we ask whether people can thus efficiently self-organize spatial arrangements. We studied 953 social distancing decisions made in 150 groups under controlled conditions. Results show that subject behavior approximates what optimal mathematical strategies achieve. At scale, the observed behavior produces greater distancing than the mere respecting of an externally imposed minimum distance. These findings suggest that the encouragement of maximal distancing may reduce the propagation of viruses that spread through close-range contact beyond what is achieved with minimum-distance policies alone
‘Un eroico traduttore’ : Pietro Antoniutti, translator and ‘cultural mediator’ between Venice and Europe (1780–1820)
No full textPublished online: 16 February 2026Over the last four decades, a large number of multidisciplinary studies have contributed to enhance our knowledge of the importance of translations as sources to investigate historical phenomena. These studies have shown the need to develop a research methodology capable of examining translations in all their richness and complexity, paying specific attention not just to the so-called material vectors (the forms taken by the new, translated versions), but also to all those actors who take part in the translation process, be they the publishers, the patrons of publishing projects, or – obviously – the translators themselves. This chapter aims at addressing this point by investigating the work of Pietro Antoniutti (1732–1827), a Friulian priest whose career as translator was entirely devoted to the realisation of Italian versions of eighteenth-century English and Scottish bestsellers. Educated in Gorizia, Venice, Vienna and Istanbul, Antoniutti translated more than thirty works of European – and American – historians, scientists, philosophers, with the ambitious aim of giving his Venetian readers editions of writings that provided them with the conceptual tools to understand the developments taking place in the society and political institutions of the Republic of Venice au tournant des Lumières
How does the education cleavage stack up against the classic cleavages of the past?
No full textPublished online: 06 February 2025This article conceptualises a political cleavage as the extent to which a group sharing a distinct social characteristic is over-represented in a political party. Using a robust measure, we find that (1) an education cleavage now structures voting for GAL and TAN parties in Western Europe; (2) these parties are far more cleavaged than contemporary centre-left and centre-right parties; (3) GAL and TAN parties are as socially structured as classically cleavaged social democratic parties in the 1950s; (4) the Republican and Democratic parties have also become strongly cleavaged on education. In neo-cleavage theory, the formation of cleavages is punctuated by periods of dealignment as prior divides lose their grip and new conflicts give rise to new political parties with distinctive social cores. There is plausible evidence that education now structures political parties in contemporary Western democracies
Paying the buyer : from one off defense offsets to strategic alliances
No full textDefence date: 21 January 2022Examining Board: Prof. Ulrich Krotz, (EUI) ; Prof. Stephanie Hoffman, (EUI) ; Prof. Fabrizio Coticchia, (University of Genova) ; Dr. Moritz Weiss, (LMU München)My dissertation addresses the understudied phenomenon of defense offsets - compensation to states for buying foreign weapons. Governments have long demanded compensation when procuring highly complex and expensive weapon systems from foreign suppliers. Through such additional benefits states typically seek to build, retain, or modernize their defense and/or civil technological and industrial base. Foreign suppliers, by contrast, use defense offsets to enrich their bid, and thus increase their chances of succeeding in a very competitive market. Although the IR and international security scholarship has hitherto ignored defense offsets, they often involve technology transfer and may sometimes evolve into strategic alliances or high-end and long-term technological collaborations between foreign and domestic defense companies. When doing so, I argue, defense offsets may significantly augment buyer states’ chances of climbing up the ladder of arms production capabilities, especially if foreign suppliers are willing to accept onerous or sub-optimal arrangements such as the transfer of cutting-edge technology.Tapping into new data sources and through cross-case analysis of 29 international fighter aircraft sales as well as 5 in-depth case studies from 1999 to 2019, I show that export reliant bidders are increasingly willing to enter sub-optimal strategic alliances with buyer states possessing good enough defense industrial bases, ultimately suggesting that arms production capabilities may redistribute from European to emerging powers. In the process, my findings demonstrate a number of points. Firstly, they show how state-led initiatives foster the globalization of production, thus casting doubts on received knowledge that emphasizes private entrepreneurialism. Secondly, that states and defense firms alike weaponize interdependence against weaker competitors. Thirdly, that under certain conditions states have the upper hand in negotiating investments with trans-national corporations. Fourthly that Washington plays a much bigger role in aircraft makers’ decisions than previously acknowledged, and finally, that offsets are yet another driver of arms collaboration