In June 2014, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution establishing an inter-governmental working group to discuss a legally binding instrument relating to transnational corporations and other business enterprises. In this article, I outline four arguments for why such an instrument is desirable. Identifying the purpose of such a treaty is crucial in outlining a vision of what it should seek to achieve and in determining its content. The arguments indicate that a treaty is necessary to provide legal solutions to cure serious lacunae and ambiguities in the current framework of international law which have a serious negative impact upon the rights of individuals affected by corporate activities. The emphasis throughout is upon why a binding legal instrument is important, as opposed to softer forms of regulation such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The four arguments in turn provide the resources to respond to objections raised against the treaty and to reject an alternative, more restrictive proposal for a treaty that only addresses ‘gross’ human rights violations.

At the close of World War II (WWII), Winston Churchill suggested summarily executing the remaining Nazi leadership. Franklin Delano Roosevelt disagreed, insisting on prosecuting them in an international military tribunal. This is considered the “birth” of International Criminal Law (ICL), following a consensus that “[t]he Nazi atrocities gave rise to the idea that some crimes are so grave as to concern the international community as a whole.” A few earlier instances of penal action against violators of the laws of war are acknowledged, but they are dismissed as unrelated to current ICL, because (presumably) these cases are sporadic domestic legal actions that lack a common doctrine.

Working at the intersection between literary history and periodical studies, this article investigates the role played by the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (Rome, 1948–1960) in processes of Anglo-Italian literary transfer. The article charts the journal’s British network, analysing quantitatively the presence of both established and new writers. Further, it focuses on Botteghe Oscure’s publishing and distribution policy in the United Kingdom, drawing on its founder Marguerite Caetani’s correspondence in order to interrogate the location of the journal within the Italian and the English literary systems, and thus illuminate the journal’s role as a site of literary production as it was shaped in both Italy and Britain.

Long neglected by critical literature and historians, the Neapolitan journal Sud (1945–1947) shared similar aims and objectives with the more famous Il Politecnico, although the two journals were inserted into and connected with lively yet different cultural environments and networks, which crucially influenced their outputs. Most notably, both journals paid significant attention to politically committed literary and essay translations. By combining an analysis of the journals’ articles and translations with the editors’ published and unpublished correspondence, the article reassesses the journals’ relationship and illuminates the engagement of the two editorial boards through translations. The analysis of the two intellectual networks and projects will re-establish the relevance of Sud in stimulating a transnational dialogue and will reconsider the role of translation in shaping the editors’ political identities. Finally, the article offers a geo-cultural perspective on post-war Italian impegno by charting its multiple, both national and transnational, identities.

This article explores the intellectual discourse of Il Mulino’s intellectual group in relation to the transformation of Italian politics during the period leading up to the centre-left governments. First, it investigates Il Mulino’s cultural project of overcoming the hegemony of idealism by endorsing the empiricist approach favoured by Anglo-American social sciences, while establishing a new role for intellectuals. Then, it focuses on the group’s political agenda aimed at rationalising Italy’s ‘imperfect two-party system’. We argue that, within the Italian intellectual-political scenario, Il Mulino’s intellectual discourse sought to establish a new relationship between culture and politics. It tried to do so both by anchoring Italian political culture to the liberal- and social-democratic European tradition and by contributing to the stabilisation of Italian democracy, while proposing a reduction in the number of political parties.

This article evaluates the discourse developed around Benedetto Croce in the Italian cultural periodical press between 1944 and 1947 and it discusses the forms of adversarial discourse and the agents involved in the anti-Croce polemics that unfolded in the Communist Party’s official cultural journal Rinascita. Specifically, this article focuses on a selection of intellectuals who moved away from Crocean idealism to embrace Marxism in order to investigate how their conversion was presented in Rinascita.

This article aims at showing how and why two cultural periodicals, namely the German edition of Tempo, published by Mondadori between 1940 and 1943, and the German magazine Italien, the official periodical of the Deutsch-Italienische Gesellschaft from 1942 to 1944, contributed to shaping the German readership’s idea of contemporary Italian literature. The analysis of the contents of these journals shows a rather diversified cultural offer, promoting authors that would be later associated with the anti-fascist struggle. To this end, the article will particularly focus on the way these periodicals presented Elio Vittorini, who would be heralded as one of the most engaged writers of post-war Italy.