This case study focuses on intensificatory tautological constructions (e.g. tiny littlebird, big hugepay rise). The attention that intensificatory tautology has elicited in previous literature is scarce and often centred on specific aspects of its Present-day English (PDE) distribution. Formally, tautological intensificatory patterns often involve the combination of two synonymous size-adjectives (e.g. massive great, tiny little) in a given order (i.e. great big but not big great). Functionally, they are standardly associated with emphatic descriptive modifying functions and informal styles (Matthews 2014: 364; Coffey 2013: 59; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 561–2). This contribution takes a corpus-based, synchronic standpoint in order to (a) refine previous literature's account of the formal and functional distribution of tautological size-adjective clusters in PDE and (b) assess the significance of tautological intensification for functional–structural descriptions of the English Noun Phrase. The analyses indicate that PDE intensificatory size-adjective clusters have a wider functional distribution than has hitherto been observed, with reinforcer and adverbial intensifying functions slowly developing alongside the descriptive modifier functions. More generally, the article shows that tautological size-adjective clusters create pockets of interpersonal meanings whose impact on the formal and functional structure of the NP needs further exploration.

In this article, I offer a reading of the ‘creation’ of femminicidio and of its role in the emergence of a new women’s question in Italy. I concentrate on three central steps in the legitimation of the word and the worlds femminicidio: Unione delle Donne Italiane (UDI)’s political use of the term in 2006, UDI’s Staffetta in 2008/2009, and the birth of the movement Se Non Ora Quando in 2011. By following Rancière’s understanding of politics as a ‘reconfiguration of the sensible’, I argue that the emergence of femminicidio fostered the emergence of a ‘community of sense’ of women as a new political subject. This community did not gather mainly around ideas of who a woman is or should be, nor did it arise from a common acknowledgement of the nature of ‘violence’. Rather, it was structured around shared feelings and affects, triggered by women’s sense of being actual or potential objects of violence.

Legal theorists have long debated whether law originates from a single source (the actions of state officials) or from multiple sources (including the innumerable communities and associations that constitute broader civil society). In recent years, proponents have defended polycentrism—and its critics have tried to refute it—from various moral, economic, and historical angles. But no contemporary writer has examined polycentrism from a Christian perspective. In the absence of such a study heretofore, this article attempts to evaluate legal polycentrism from a Christian theological and jurisprudential perspective. The Christian scriptures and Christian theology do not directly address whether law is polycentric or monocentric. Nevertheless, appealing to a number of biblical-theological issues—including the image of God, the Noahic covenant (Genesis 8:21–9:17), wisdom, and the purpose of civil government—I argue that Christians have good reason to regard polycentrism as a more satisfactory view of law.

This article looks at the ways in which the legal system of a modern European jurisdiction has engaged with a counter-cultural minority religious movement. The jurisdiction in question is England and Wales, and the religious movement is revived modern Paganism. The article seeks to cast light on the question of what a post-Christian secular state does in practice when its commitment to pluralistic values encounters a group whose self-understanding challenges the norms of both Christianity and secularity. In more general terms, it allows us to look at how the law of England and Wales has attempted to move beyond its historic confessional Protestant premises; and how this attempt has not been without its anomalies and shortcomings.

The rabassaire struggle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented the most intense unrest in the Catalan countryside since the peasant rebellions of the fifteenth century, and it was one of the main social movements in rural Western Europe in this period. In this article we examine the rabassaire struggle over a period of roughly 150 years. Following Charles Tilly, we understand this social movement as a form of political action, which began in the late eighteenth century, reached maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and came to an end with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Beyond the organizational changes arising from the shifting social and political circumstances, a new long-term overview can shed light on the continuities of the movement, especially in terms of building a social identity and legitimating its claims and its struggle.

Divided between revolutionary syndicalism and reformist unions, Rio de Janeiro’s labour movement represented one of the most complex local cases during the Brazilian First Republic. This article intends to show how relations between these two currents were far from clear cut, and that, despite the confrontational discourse they adopted and the disputes over labour unions they were involved in, they eventually shared common practices and, to some degree, a common culture.

In the 2000s, Berlin saw the formation of so-called Baugruppen (construction groups) – associations of small-scale investors who pooled their modest capital to commission an architect and construct a multistorey building in which they would own and occupy a flat. They were mostly middle-class families united by a belief in community values and neighbourly contact as well as the qualities of urban living. This article will present the construction groups as an example of bottom-up architecture in an industrialized western country, in which individual initiatives and user-centred design had to be negotiated within a highly professionalized environment, as well as with contradictory political positions. It will show that construction groups brought together various threads of Berlin's recent urban history: the gradual integration of radical post-1968 lifestyles into mainstream society, the ‘return to the inner city’ connected with the increasing popularity of ‘new tenements’, and the evolution of innovative, post-functionalist architecture.

Scholars have suggested that ‘home’ states of transnational corporations (TNCs) have a legal duty to protect against human rights abuses occurring in ‘host’ states that may be breached by failure to regulate TNCs’ extraterritorial activities. This article challenges the claim that such a duty of home states to regulate TNCs’ extraterritorial human rights impacts can be said currently to exist as a matter of law. The article first summarizes the general structure of arguments made in favour of such a ‘home state duty to regulate’. It then considers the foundations and meanings of extraterritorial jurisdiction in public international law and international human rights law; requirements and conditions of attribution and state responsibility for the conduct of non-state actors; and the scope and limits of ‘positive obligations’ to ensure the effective enjoyment of human rights, domestically and extraterritorially, as they relate to prevention of human rights abuses by TNCs.

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.