This article examines the violent imaginaries and practices of squadrismo in the period preceding the establishment of the Italian fascist dictatorship. Based on the examination of newly accessible documentary sources at provincial state archives, the article sheds light upon the ways in which squadristi imagined, performed, justified and ascribed meanings to their violent actions and the disintegrative impact of violence on local communities. The article concludes with a reflection on Blackshirt violence in the aftermath of the March on Rome and the persistence of the ideological and cultural fabric of squadrismo in the years of the dictatorship.

This article shows how corporatism in the Nordic countries helped shape the ‘ecological turn’ as governments and conservationist associations co-organised the Council of Europe's ‘European Conservation Year 1970’. The national programmes came to present highly diverging levels of discord, as this nascent policy field channeled challenges to the premise of economic growth. Cross-national comparisons highlight the importance of variations in the institutional maturity of environmental administrations as well as in the power afforded to industrial representatives. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian archival sources illuminate negotiations between governments and private associations, contributing to an in-depth analysis of a rarely researched transnational event.

As a result of the nationwide strike wave in August 1980 that gave birth to the Solidarity trade union, the Polish state authorities conceded to the reform of state censorship and to Solidarity creating union bulletins that were not subject to preventative censorship. This article analyses the Solidarity press to explore its censoring through direct state censorship and self-censorship in 1980–1. It argues that Solidarity's dual commitment to truth and legality were irreconcilable and that the state cultivated this conflict, contributing to the undermining of Solidarity's moderate leaders and the treatment of history as an arena for politicisation and state control. It posits that these conflicts have contributed to the current Polish government's frontal assault on the legacy of the Solidarity leadership.

In 1987 a recreational centre called the Bowlingtreff arose at the centre of East German Leipzig without knowledge from central authorities thanks to 40,050 hours of volunteer labour. What can this incident of apparent optimism tell us about state–citizen relations as they had evolved on the eve of revolution? Rather than ‘ostalgic’ evidence of socialist paradise lost, this article shows how, overcoming years of bureaucratic proscriptions, dedicated local authorities built ‘off the record’ to prove to the people that they could attain something; and residents disillusioned with communism were eager to build a piece of the ‘imaginary West’ in their dying city. Ultimately, however, the bowling palace demonstrated system dysfunction and whetted Leipzigers’ appetite for the ‘real’ West.

In November 2018 eight people, including a mother from the Comoros and residents from Tunisia and Algeria, died when two buildings collapsed in the run down area of Noailles in the old port area of Marseille. A 2015 government report had already warned that 40,000 dilapidated and dangerous homes put 100,000 people at risk in France's second city, but campaigners say little was done. The tragedy occasioned widespread anger about run down and exploitative housing in the Mediterranean city. It also refocused public attention on housing and the concept of the home. In turn this raised questions about how housing and the home connect to space and social justice, the division of labour between national and local government, citizenship and ‘the right to the city’.