Scienza e Pace
Science and Peace
Contemporary war tends to destruct everything and everyone. Among civilian causalities women, including young girls and children, are often the most exposed and vulnerable. This paper explores how, during some wars, the body of women become the field of strong for a group or a nation, and how the enemies are targeting exactly this identity in order to affirm their superiority. Women are identified with their bodies and become the symbolic territory of a border crossing and the exercise of power. So the dehumanisation of peoples, such as in the former Yugoslavia or in Ruanda, starts on women's body. What is at stake here is not sexual violence per se, but rather its use as war strategy, resting on specific social meanings. On the one hand, atrocities perpetrated on women, also in public, are the metaphor of the permanent destruction of the rival society, and express therefore ethnic hatred rather than misogyny. On the other hand, the identification of women with the “property of the male enemy” to be destructed, is grounded in a contestable patriarchal conception of society.
What is left today of the Obama's Cairo speech entitled "A New Beginning", as a large region of the Middle East became a field of battle, and entire new generations seeking social change were traumatised by misleading ideologies and years of combats? I will answer to this question by contesting the dominant views on the ongoing conflicts, in particular the Syrian civil war, as being grounded in unsuitable categories and unilateral perspectives. Having this in mind, my personal contribution consists in exposing the misunderstandings of the well-known Gramscian dilemma between being partisan or indifferent. I will discuss the “neutrality” claimed by the population of Yarmouk, the Palestinian Damascus district now gone to the ground, as a valid alternative to this dilemma. In the Middle East, and particularly in Syria, where global forces clash for their opposed geopolitical and economic interests, taking side often means becoming pawns in the game of others. If this is true, neutrality may offer a starting point for changing paradigm.
Many relevant episodes of the past show the role played by malaria over the centuries. Among those episodes we find the battle of Walcheren, where Napoleon might have used malaria as a biological weapon, the American Civil War and the two World Wars. As for the Second World War, much emphasis has been given to the so called “other battle of Cassino”, namely the battle fought against the mosquitoes, the vectors of the malaria infection, at the end of the war. The article also focuses on the part taken by malaria in the Korea and Vietnam Wars. As far as the latter is concerned, a positive side effect was represented by the tremendous efforts given by the government of the People’s Republic of China to the studies on new anti-malaria drugs, like the artemisinin derivatives. At present, artesunate is, among them, the best available drug against Plasmodium, although the emergence of drug resistance is now threatening the real effectiveness of malaria control measures. The relationship between malaria and contemporary wars, such as the one in Afghanistan, and the impact of the disease on the length of civil wars are also discussed.
Cancer is a traumatic life event that breaks into individual existence, threatening and destabilising all identity dimensions of sick people. Therefore, it is necessary to propose an elaboration of this negative experience, shifting the focus from a vision centred exclusively on the disease towards processes that promote resilience and create chances for a positive development and personal growth. Using Narrative Medicine in oncology allows a building process with the patient, based on shared meanings of health and disease, which can itself be therapeutic and contribute to the improvement or the acceptance of the disease and the treatments. The narrative, developed with the technique of the diary, is not simply a “container of events” but assists the patient in the process of adaptation to the disease, creating a space in which (s)he can express, develop, integrate, build and finally mentalise meanings and experiences related to the oncological disease, recognised as a critical event within his/her autobiographical memory.
Call for papers
Conflict theories and philosophies of peace. 100 years after Georg Simmel’s Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur
Georg Simmel is one of the founding fathers of the modern theory of conflict, thanks to sociological researches strongly inspired by his Lebenphilosophie ("philosophy of life") and the related dual conceptualization of ego and culture (the tragic opposition between Life and Form). Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur (1918) seals this original path.
“The conflict is not there to be solved” can be considered the aphorism which summarizes Simmel's idea of a not conciliatory dialectics where each pole, including the negative one (Alter, the different, the excluded, the marginal, etc.), plays a role only reserved to him, namely that of dialoguing with the other one in a state of complementarity. There is no starting unity – a good original nature or a romantic peace stability that at some point would be broken so that, once settled, the conflict could be restored. On the contrary, it is the becoming of ever-conflicting opposites that produces a common reality. Individuals, groups and institutions are built within a dense "web of conflicts" that produces "unity among differences", which will be questioned in turn. Hence the theoretical proposal: what is common, peace, is not only gained by eliminating the negative component (the evil, selfishness, diversity, etc.), nor by increasing the positive component (the good, charity, altruism, material and/or economic subsidies, etc.); it results instead from the management of forces that are both constructive and destructive, cooperative and selfish. Conflict flows in the tiniest spheres, giving matter to both individual and collective life ("conflict is the school of the ego"). Simmelian method implicitly calls for a non-violent rationality, aimed at reaching a 'modest amount of conflict' or intolerance, in order to preserve a relatively 'sufficient' degree of peace or social integration.
This original conceptualization of conflicts, ranging from everyday life to the whole society up to inter-state relations, reflects the historical consciousness of the transition from the era of great certainty to the current one of unfounded certainties. Such an approach inaugurates a third path with respect to pivot theories of Positive and Negative Peace, allowing to assess their explanatory power. According to Negative Peace Theories conflict has to be eliminated, finding turn-by-turn mediation, rights or social reforms, charity or empathy as suitable means. Here we find all the Theories of Peace as absence of war and violence, and those spiritualistic philosophies of peace adopting harmony-stability as the primary principle to be re-built or re-discovered: by fighting the evil, in the end, the evil will have to reunite with the good, as in the ideas of 'just' war, purification or redemption. According to Positive Peace Theory, instead, conflict is beneficial and must break out, harmony is to be constructed and struggles are essential means for social change. The final aim of those conflictive theories and spiritualistic philosophies of peace is to create a harmony to come, a new order (within couples and groups, in social and industrial relations, in political communities, and so forth) which is utopian and thus not clearly defined.
Having this in mind, Scienza e Pace / Science and Peace invites scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds to send papers which:
- address the dissemination and overcoming of the “web of conflict” theory, with a special reference to new conflicts (in everyday life, within and between groups, intercultural, political, environmental, international, ethical, religious, etc.) and the individualization/society relationship;
- reconstruct the genealogy of Simmel's theory of conflicts within its historical, political, economic and cultural context.
Instructions for authors
In order to respond to the call, please send to the Editorial Committee by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. a manuscript in Italian, Spanish or English, in compliance with the Editorial guidelines of the journal, by 30 April 2018. The manuscript will undergo thorough a double-blind peer review process. For any further queries, please contact the Guest Editor of the monographic issue, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
SOS Rosarno was launched in Winter 2011 as a campaign by a group of small farmers, activists and migrants based in the Gioia Tauro Plain. It evolved in 2012 into a formal association, which supported in 2015 the creation of a social cooperative, called Mani e terra. The idea of the campaign, conceived after the tumult of African orange-pickers exploded in January 2010, was to sell organic citrus fruits through short supply chains, essentially based on Solidarity Purchase Groups, in order to allow producers to pay migrant workers according to the law, to receive a fair remuneration, to guarantee healthy and affordable food to consumers, to protect the integrity of the environment. This paper aims to reconstruct genealogy and evolution of SOS Rosarno, with a special focus on ideology, organization and practices. It will draw mainly on political documents produced by the association and in-depth interviews with its members. On one side, the paper shows how the new social alliances implemented by SOS Rosarno might challenge the dominant food supply chain, which impoverishes small producers and lets migrant farmworkers be exploited. On the other side, it clarifies how principles of food sovereignty, self-management and democratic economic planning have been developed by SOS Rosarno within a new peasant civilization, which offers a viable alternative to the current economic crisis. The full text of this paper is available in Italian.
Rural worlds are about experiencing global changes impulsed by new forms of agrarian capitalism. The new agenda for Latin America development sees the interaction between old and new trends, which produces new conflicts. This paper takes the socio-economic doctrine of so-called neo-structuralism as a starting point for analysing policies on family farming under different perspectives: the role of the State, agricultural development models, the role of the market, the relations between different actors in the public sphere in terms of discourses and debates. The working hypothesis of the paper is to analyse Argentina as a case study, not as much as an example but rather as a specific case, which is developing in political frames and trends common to America Latina as a whole. This allows me to detect new processes of inclusion of family farming in the economic model, as well as traditional logic of its exclusion and subordination to the mainstream. The full text of this paper is available in Italian.
Call for papers
Economic inequality: crises, conflicts and threats for peace
Over the past decades, and especially immediately after the fall of communism, the issue of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth has been almost ignored by economists and by social scientists in general, although inequalities have been increasing both in developing and in developed countries. Even the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals ignored this issue, which is addressed instead in the current Sustainable Development Goals.
This attitude resulted from the idea that a larger economic equality would reduce the incentives for people to produce the right effort to improve their condition and, as a result, would impair economic efficiency. Over the last few years, however, many scholars, including Atkinson, Bourguignon, Deaton, Krugman, Milanovic, Piketty, Stiglitz and Wade among many others, and international institutions, like the OECD and the IMF, together with some NGOs like OXFAM, have been devoting their specific attention to economic inequality (although, to be fair, it needs to be acknowledged that some of those authors and institutions had been dealing with this issue for a long time already).
The reasons for this renewed attention have to be found in the negative effects of the increased economic inequality and in the consequences that this trend may produce even more dramatically in the future, in terms of open conflicts, threats to peace and crises of different nature (social, financial, economic, and including the migratory one).
As a matter of fact, besides ethical reasons for reducing gaps in income and wealth, economic inequality, both among and within countries, reduces social capital, weakens the citizens’ attitude towards social participation and inclusion, risks to increase poverty and in the end reduces the economic development potential of the countries that would be mostly in need of it. Moreover, a higher economic inequality induces the accumulation of private debt that may produce quite negative effects, as the recent global financial crisis has clearly shown.
The increase in economic inequality has many different causes. Yet, most of them seem to be related to the effects on less skilled workers and on the low-income segments of the population: the process of real and financial globalization (that moves manual labor from one side to the other of the world, and increases the weight of rents), technological progress (that increases the role of machines and capital with respect to labor in the production process), but also the reduction, if not the abandonment, of redistributive income policies and of the protection of workers.
Several solutions have been proposed so far to reduce income inequality, including a global tax on capital movements or a (low) global tax on wealth, combined with a return to the progressivity of income taxation; a tax on the use of machines (and robots) replacing human work; an increase of women’s participation in the labor market (at the condition of not being discriminated with respect to male workers); a reduction of precarious labor and an increase in the investment in human capital and in the qualification of workers.
Against this background, Scienza e Pace/Science and Peace has decided to devote a thematic section of its next issue to economic inequality and to its economic and not economic effects on peace, conflicts, and social relations in general. Just to provide a few examples, inequality might affect economic growth, social mobility, internal and global migrations, social services, corruption, the respect of the environment, the functioning of democracy and determine financial and economic crises. Needless to say, this will encourage both the raising of protests at different levels and the formation of social movements proposing changes in the economic model.
The journal invites economists, jurists, political and social scientists to submit research papers devoted to the analysis of the causes and consequences of economic inequality, and proposals to address and reduce this problem, from all possible points of view, but especially focusing on all possible implications for peace, conflicts and crises of different nature.
Instruction for the authors
In order to participate to the call for papers, please send by e-mail to the Editorial Committee (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) a (max) 300 words long abstract and (possibly) a list of key references before October 15, 2017.
Scienza e Pace/Science and Peace organizes a one-day conference that will take place on December 1, 2017 with the authors who will have submitted the abstracts found suitable by the editorial committee and who are expected to have at least a first draft of the paper ready by then. See here for the Conference programme.
Notice to the authors will be given by November 1, 2017.
A special issue of Scienza e Pace/Science and Peace will be devoted to the theme of the conference/roundtable and will include the papers presented at the conference and those that will be submitted in their final form by January 6, 2018.
Il 15 maggio è una ricorrenza di particolare importanza per i palestinesi. È il giorno in cui celebrano la Nakba, ovvero la 'catastrofe': tramite questa giornata viene mantenuto vivo il ricordo della cacciata dalle proprie abitazioni di centinaia di migliaia di persone e la mancata fondazione di un proprio Stato autonomo. La data scelta per questa ricorrenza ha un elevato significato simbolico: il 15 maggio 1948 segna, infatti, l'inizio della prima guerra arabo-israeliana, che si concluderà all'inizio del 1949 con la vittoria del neocostituito Stato d'Israele. È anche l'inizio delle lunghe traversie del popolo palestinese che, in circa 70 anni, hanno portato alla drammatica situazione attuale caratterizzata da violazioni sistematiche dei diritti umani e delle risoluzioni delle Nazioni Unite, da un regime di occupazione militare particolarmente opprimente, da continui espropri e dalla colonizzazione abusiva delle terre, da espulsioni individuali e di massa che, nel corso dei decenni, hanno prodotto una quantità tale di profughi che, ad oggi, metà del popolo palestinese vive al di fuori dei cosiddetti "Territori occupati", acquisendo il poco invidiabile status di "popolo della diaspora".
Parlo cinese, sono toscano, studio l’inglese. Il diritto al plurilinguismo nelle scuole multietniche
After considering plurilingualism's current social, cultural and political significance, in the European and national contexts, and the need to guarantee the right to plurilingualism in multi-ethnic classes, also in the light of the recent migratory flow, the article presents the results of an ongoing didactic experimentation based on plurilingual teaching and dialogical techniques and aimed at enriching students’ linguistic repertoire, making more effective the assessment of their linguistic and communicative competence, through plurilingual tests, and giving visibility to all the languages present in the class, thereby facilitating intercultural communication. The full text of this paper is available in Italian.