In this short contribution, we look at the trajectory of the largest international trade union organization, today ITUC, from the central questions in this exercise; why labor movements have achieved certain successes?, Why they sometimes failed?, And what major failures we have seen?

Graffiti are often seen as providing a window into the emotions of ancient peoples. However, Byzantine graffiti has been viewed as an exception, with the formulaic Greek texts written between 300 and 1500 taken as evidence of communal identity, rather than individual expressiveness. However, variations in these texts can reveal much about an individual author and their personal experiences. In particular, certain formula suggest the dangerous situation an author survived, including incarceration and sea travel. This paper focuses on Corinth, Syros, and Tinos where individuals experienced danger, and how their fears and needs were manifested in the graffiti they left behind.

You can never really get tired of Italian politics. Over the last 30 years, we have seen many turning points, the most memorable of which was undoubtedly Silvio Berlusconi's unexpected ‘descent into the field’ in 1994. Nor have we been deprived of colourful characters, such as Matteo Renzi or Matteo Salvini, who, as their careers took off, ended up burning their wings. And after many unsuccessful attempts, imagination has finally come to power (as they used to say in the 1960s), although the 1968 generation has nothing to do with it. Indeed, all the credit goes to the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), whose activists were seen carrying their leader Beppe Grillo – sitting in a dinghy – through the streets of Bologna during a procession of sorts. The general elections of 25 September 2022 added an important chapter to recent Italian political history, which has sometimes taken on a dramatic tone but more often that of a comedy or even a farce. All in all, nothing out of the ordinary; in the society of the spectacle, this is how the Darwinian struggle for political survival can also be played out.

This essay analyses the Holy See's engagement in the postwar discourse surrounding displaced minors by focusing on the case of displaced Italian children from Libya. Separated from their families and evacuated to Italy at the onset of the Second World War, they were placed in Italian Youth of the Lictor (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio; GIL) camps. In the aftermath of the war, these displaced children petitioned to return to their families who had remained in territories no longer part of the Italian empire. This article shows how the Papal Aid Committee for Assisting Refugees took part in the relocation efforts and contributed to the conversation on family reunification. By navigating postwar aid and forming unexpected alliances, the Holy See not only contributed to reshaping Italy's geopolitical presence in the Mediterranean but also solidified conservative family norms within the international discussion on humanitarianism.

This article proposes an analysis of the Book of the Desert (Kitāb al-Bādiya), a nineteenth-century legal treatise composed by Muḥammad al-Māmī (d. 1282/1865), a Muslim scholar from the Tiris desert in present-day Mauritania. Al-Māmī’s text reflects on the adaptation of sharia—the religious law of Islam—to the needs of pastoral populations in the Saharan West. How to embrace a normative system seemingly incompatible with nomadic life, given that it presupposes a state governed by an Islamic ruler (imām) and considers the city the natural environment of legal institutions? Challenging the narratives of center-periphery and the so-called post-classical “decline” that continue to structure the field of Islamic intellectual history, the article explores the different contextual layers of al-Māmī’s reasoning. He was a religious notable deeply involved in power struggles between nomadic groups and a fervent supporter of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jihad movements in West Africa. But he was also a jurist of the Maliki school, who approached his society from the perspective of Islamic legal thought, and a Bedouin preoccupied with the legal and religious implications of the cultural gulf between his world and that of the towns.

This article proposes a re-examination of one of the most controversial cases of reparations: the Treaty of Versailles. By focusing on Article 238, which stipulated the restitution of objects stolen or displaced by the German army during the First World War, we can see that the treaty helped to solidify norms concerning the protection of civilian property in wartime and gave civilians a right to have a voice in international law. However, the process of restitution was beset with both practical and political challenges and its success hinged on the role of public authorities, the nature of the objects returned and the impact of social class dynamics. Through this study, we are able to gain a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities of restitution, its potential as well as its limitations.

In 1945, actions which have been understood as strikes against wartime inflation occurred across colonized Africa: this essay identifies a deeper motivation in the events which happened in the Uganda Protectorate in early 1945. An understanding that people had a moral responsibility to act, and leaders had a moral responsibility to see them, to listen, and to respond led from a mobilization of workers on town streets, to efforts to see wrongful deaths acknowledged, to gatherings in the courtyard of the Buganda king in which he was almost overthrown. In each of the three stages of the protest, Ugandans of different ethnicities asserted an ethic of mutual obligation which acknowledged no boundary between the political and the economic, spoke to authority with an expectation that they would be heard, and drew on enduring knowledge of politics as well as a range of new ideas to solve the problems they confronted.

This article sets out to explain why Nigeria was unable to prevent the loss of heritage objects in the 1960s and 1970s. Obvious answers to this question would include the limited enforcement capacity of the African state and the complacency of European and North American art dealers. “How Our Heritage Is Looted” argues, however, that a colonial legal category, namely “antiquity,” played a key role in creating an ineffective enforcement regime for cultural property theft. The mismatch between the ordinary meaning of the term “antiquity,” denoting a remnant of an ancient civilization, and the kinds of modern crafts that the state wanted to protect ultimately resulted in the inability of Nigeria’s colonial preservation statute to convey clear rules to customs officers and museum curators about what exporters could take out of the country. Nigeria’s heritage law thus constituted a project of legal meaning-making whose failure facilitated illicit commerce.

In the second half of the first century ce, the Romans built a fort at the mouth of the river Apsaros on the coast of Colchis. A Roman garrison was stationed there also in the second century and first half of the third. One of the reasons for fortifying the estuary of the river, given by both Pliny the Elder and Arrian, was the immediate vicinity of the kingdom of Iberia. Both Roman authors also described the local tribes living on the coast between Trebizond and Apsaros and further north. One wonders whether they were the indigenous population of the region and what kind of a relationship they had with the Roman Empire. This study searches for answers to these questions in the preserved written sources and in the archaeological record.