Disarmament and non-proliferation education is a key tool in curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, with a view to their elimination. This article examines the remarkable story of the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary of continuous engagement in educational and training activities. ISODARCO offers a unique forum where nuclear experts from different backgrounds and approaches can meet, debate, and promote action as a transnational knowledge-based network of experts and, equally important, pass on their expertise to the ‘next generation of non-proliferation specialists’. The contribution of this small Italian NGO is indeed noteworthy, highly praised at the national and especially international level, and worth the attention of an audience broader than just non-proliferation and security experts.

Getting published in academic journals is increasingly important for research students in terms of gaining employment when they complete their studies and, in the future, for tenure and promotion applications once they have obtained an academic appointment. In this paper, I discuss some of the challenges that student (and early career) writers face when submitting articles to academic journals and, in particular, how they might better understand and respond to the reports they receive on their work.

A remarkable cluster of Irish town histories appeared in the early nineteenth century, coming after several generations of unprecedented urban growth. But that growth stalled and most Irish towns entered a long period of stagnation. Meanwhile, academic interest in the urban past became dormant. Urbanization in Ireland resumed in the twentieth century, but the study of urban history was late to develop and slow to move beyond the documentation of built heritage. However, public interest in medieval origins, official interest in urban heritage and the vision of a handful of medieval historians and historical geographers have helped transform the prospects for Irish urban history.

This article is motivated by certain issues for which, in current Business and Human Rights (BHR) discourse, largely framed in terms of the Ruggie reports, no satisfactory solutions have been found to date. These quandaries refer to (a) foundational matters: the link between human rights law and ethics; (b) normative force: the obligatoriness of human rights claims on corporations; and (c) scope and content of human rights claims on corporations. Turning to the virtue ethics and natural law (VENL) tradition, we encounter the following possible responses: (a) positive laws, such as those concerning human rights, ultimately require a basis in natural law; (b) although the public use of the coercive force of law belongs to the state alone, its private use by non-state actors such as individuals and corporations may be legitimate in some cases; and (c) practical wisdom is necessary in the proper interpretation and implementation of human rights claims on corporations, taking into account relevant contingencies. The blending of BHR discourse with the VENL tradition is best captured in modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Although historically CST has adopted the VENL language, engagement with social issues in the modern world has enabled it to reach an understanding with rights theory as well, particularly in connection with business and the economy.