Within a century, between 1890 and 1981, the missionary press introduced a renewed language towards African peoples. This happened during the Holy See's rapprochement process with Africa and the Third World in the XX Century. It was decided to compare three publications related to the liberation of slaves and to the anti-slavery efforts made by Catholic missionaries, an activity considered fundamental by the Church in defining the meaning of its presence in Africa. Firstly, a novel entitled Avorio Nero (Black Ivory) was examined, first published in 1959 and reprinted for the second time in 1981, twenty-two years later. The comparison between the two editions was useful to show how the missionary literary genre was transformed during the second half of the 20th century to keep up with the political and doctrinal changes that swept through Catholic institutions. Next, the analysis of the two editions was compared with a letter published in 1890 in the magazine Le Missioni Cattoliche by French missionaries in Senegambia, in which an episode of the liberation of a slave girl is described. The comparison is decisive because it shows continuity and discontinuity over a long period in missionary publications.

The present work is an analysis of the function of conflict in Spinoza's ethical-political thought, starting from the way indignatio is defined and evaluated in the third and fourth part of the Ethics and the role of the hate motions of the multitudo in the Political Treaty. We will highlight a tension in the passage from the ethical-metaphysical work to the more distinctly political one, where the author takes on all the consequences of assuming as unavoidable and constitutive the presence, in the state, of inadequate desires marked by contrary, we will define what value - of usefulness and harmfulness - Spinoza assigns to indignation in the sphere of interhuman relations and in the political forum. This path helps us to identify two ways of the conflict ascribed to his political theory: on one hand, regulating conflict of the institution’s activities and of the sovereignty; on the other hand, given in the event of deep corruption, constituent conflict as capable of radical transformations in a deeply corrupted situation. More specifically, we will try to emphasize the combinatorial status of affective life to look at the constitution of a new state. To do so, we will avoid reducing it to isolated affects of opposition and, at the same time, the absolute exclusion of a contribution of indignation and of discord in the transition from one political and institutional organization to another.

Starting from the famous sentence by pope Paul VI (1967): “Development is the new name for peace”, the paper argues that a credible and effective strategy to achieve peace in the Ukraine war as well as in the other 168 wars being fighted in the world, today, is to build up new institutions of peace, both in the political and in the economic arenas. Meanwhile, the paper advances a concrete proposal to arrive, in a short time, at a peace negotiation that is credible and enforceable. The spirit of the paper is the same as the one crystallized in the Erasmus’s sentence: “It is better an unfair peace to a fair war”.

An extensive debate on the determinants of people's support for globalization concluded that it is necessary to leverage on welfare schemes to compensate those who lose from globalization. Yet, this solution is not universally accepted and it may not be viable in times of budget constraints. We test the hypothesis that confidence in institutions improves people's acceptance of globalization. We use micro data from the Eurobarometer, the European Social Survey and the European Quality of Life Survey to study the case of Luxembourg, a small and open economy, highly integrated in international markets and in which immigrants are more than half of the total residents. Figures indicate that confidence in institutions, and in particular in international ones, increases people's acceptance of globalization. However, when globalization is considered as free movement of people across borders, confidence in international institutions plays a major role. These results are robust to reverse causality.

A direct strike on an operative nuclear power plant during military operations has become a possible dramatic scenario in the present Ukrainian crisis. Plausible accidents in such a scenario could be divided into criticality and conventional accidents. The former could occur if auxiliary and safety power plant systems are hit simultaneously, reaching the reactor criticality in an uncontrolled way. The latter could involve the release of radioactivity into the environment as a result of detonations and fires at power plant sites containing radioactive material. Often and incorrectly in recent months, commenting on events at the Zaporizhzhia power plant started on March 2022, the media have compared the consequences of such attacks to that of using a tactical nuclear weapon. From the standpoint of lethality to the population, radionuclides involved, and the extent of contamination of the environment, the two events are deeply different. This explanatory paper aims to study the impact on humans and on the environment of an attack’s consequences on the Zaporizhzhia power plant and those of the detonation of a tactical nuclear warhead of 10 kt (kiloton).

This paper is aimed to analyse if the armed interventions of regional and sub-regional organizations in the territory of a Member State comply with international law from an overall point of view. The treaties of the regional and sub-regional organizations - which have performed armed interventions in the territory of a Member State until today – have been surveyed, in order to assess whether and how far they include such kind of armed interventions. The conducts more often performed by regional and sub-regional organizations on this matter have been then analysed, in order to appraise their compliance with international law. Lastly, the element of the consent from the Member State target of the armed intervention has been surveyed.

The paper deals with the attribution of international responsibility for wrongful acts committed by UN peacekeepers. First, it analyses the case law applying the criterion of the “degree of effective control” as decisive to the attribution of that conduct to the UN or to the contributing State. Then, it suggests that the criterion of the “degree of effective control” includes operational, jurisdictional, and disciplinary powers, so that dual attribution of conduct cannot be excluded and usually occurs in UN peacekeeping operations. The dual attribution of the same conduct (to UN and States) is also useful to victims, as it overtakes the immunity from jurisdiction granted to UN under international law, providing a judicial remedy in national and international courts against the contributing State.

This paper deals with the encyclical Fratres omnes (2020) not from the perspective of theology and its strictly religious implications, but in order to grasp those aspects uniting believers and non-believers. The focus is on those elements which, in order to oppose the global nihilistic drift of the homo oeconomicus, may support the development of new ways of relating human beings to each other and to the world. Within this frame, a special attention will be devoted to the concepts of ‘solidarity’ and ‘brotherhood’ which, aimed at overcoming the individualistic logic of profit, can contribute to an alternative cultural paradigm oriented to ‘existential’ peace.