This essay aims to analyse the presence of neofascist organisations and far-right terrorism in Italy in the early 1970s from a new perspective. Firstly, it will focus on the activities to combat the subversive structures of the ‘black galaxy’ carried out by regional institutions through the creation of special ‘regional commissions of inquiry on the problems of neofascism’. Between 1974 and 1975, these commissions carried out an extensive inventory of the movements, associations and organisations of the Italian far right. Their aim was to show the spread of the phenomenon and its local roots. Building upon the information gathered by the regional commissions, the essay will analyse the relationships between the various far-right groups in Italy and their European counterparts. The final part of the article will focus on the influence of local specificities in defining the relations between extremist movements beyond national borders.

We assess John Bishop's theory of the nature of Christian faith in God, as most recently expressed in ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, although we dip into other writings as well. We explain several concerns we have about it. However, in the end, our reflections lead us to propose a modified theory, one that avoids our concerns while remaining consonant with some of his guiding thoughts about the nature of Christian faith in God. We also briefly examine three normative issues Bishop's views present.

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty – often framed as “neurorights” in ethical, legal, and policy discussions. Several states are now looking at including neurorights into their constitutional legal frameworks, and international institutions and organizations, such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, are taking an active interest in developing international policy and governance guidelines on this issue. However, in many discussions of neurorights the philosophical assumptions, ethical frames of reference and legal interpretation are either not made explicit or conflict with each other. The aim of this multidisciplinary work is to provide conceptual, ethical, and legal foundations that allow for facilitating a common minimalist conceptual understanding of mental privacy, mental integrity, and cognitive liberty to facilitate scholarly, legal, and policy discussions.

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, I will reconstruct Mullā Ṣadrā's complex arguments for the soul's immortality based on its immaterial nature. Second and finally, I will briefly probe and assess various epistemological and metaphysical objections against Ṣadrā's immaterialist conception of the soul. Ṣadrā contends that our bodily death marks an awakening to the reality of our consciousness on the plane of the imaginal realm (the imaginal world is an isthmus between the sensible world and the world of intelligible forms). For Ṣadrā, ‘death’ does not mark an end or discontinuity in human consciousness, rather it signifies an awakening to a new mode of existence in which the soul, having once been the active principle controlling the actions of the physical body, now manifests itself as the passive recipient of the form given to it by its imaginal reality – a reality shaped by the actions it had performed in its earthly, embodied state. Thus, death is seen as the passage of the soul from the sensible to the imaginal world, until the soul unites with the intelligible world (ʿālam al-ʿaql).

A number of countries and states prohibit surrogacy except in cases of “medical necessity” or for those with specific medical conditions. Healthcare providers in some countries have similar policies restricting the provision of clinical assistance in surrogacy. This paper argues that surrogacy is never medically necessary in any ordinary understanding of this term. The author aims to show first that surrogacy per se is a socio-legal intervention and not a medical one and, second, that the intervention in question does not treat, prevent, or mitigate any actual or potential harm to health. Legal regulations and healthcare-provider policies of this kind therefore codify a fiction—one which both obscures the socio-legal motivations for surrogacy and inhibits critical examination of those motivations while mobilizing normative connotations of appeals to medical need. The persisting distinction, in law and in moral discourse, between “social” and “medical” surrogacy, is unjustified.

One key aspect of threat in terrorists’ language is incitement to violence. Contributing to a fuller understanding of how terrorists use language to encourage people to join their cause, this article examines the role of evaluative language in incitement strategies used by a far-rightist to align with and alienate particular social groups. The Affiliation framework (Knight 2010a; Zappavigna 2011; Etaywe & Zappavigna 2021; Etaywe 2022a), as grounded in systemic functional linguistics, is used to understand how values and social bonds are leveraged in the process of incitement, as explored in a manifesto published online by Brenton Tarrant, preceding his 2019 terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand. The findings reveal two main affiliation strategies used for incitement: communion (forging solidarity and alignments) and alienation. These strategies function to construct opposing social groups in discourse, with the condemned groups positioned as a threat, hostility legitimated as morally reasonable, and violence as warranted. (Far-right extremism, incitement, hate crimes, affiliation, morality of terrorism, forensic linguistics, conspiracy theory discourse)

This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is not there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity)*

This article explores Russian occupation policy in Ukraine as an adaptive tactic of Russia’s grand strategy and a manifestation of its military culture. Based on a comparative analysis of the Russian occupation policy during the hybrid and conventional stages of the Russian-Ukrainian war, including the employment of a de facto state playbook, we find both continuity and shifts in Russia’s approach. Although the main shift lies in the change of Russia’s conflict management in neighboring countries from reactive to proactive, the main continuities are the subordination of occupation policy to Russia’s geostrategic interests and path dependence in its military culture, which together lead to the employment of brutal violence against civilians and the demodernization of occupied territories.

The annexation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China in the 1950s led to an exodus of nearly 80,000 Tibetans along with the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso. Since then, thousands of Tibetans have taken refuge in the neighboring countries. Many live as refugees in different parts of the world today. Although the Tibetan refugee community has emerged as a successful model for other displaced communities, the individual struggles of these refugees in foreign lands cannot be underestimated. Dhompa's book A Home in Tibet shines a light on this other side of their exilic existence by raising questions about identity, home, country, and memory. It outlines the hardships, confusion, and contestations that Tibetans face on a daily basis. After a short introduction to provide context, this article reports a conversation with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, which grippingly addresses these issues.