The most important ethical issues in the use of the Internet and World Wide Web in scientific research are considered together with some of the conceptual problems that arise as a result of applying new information technologies to old institutions. The paper concentrates on a set of issues relating to moral responsibility for the production, utilization and diffusion of scientific knowledge in a networked environment. A conclusion is that reliability of information and hence the individual scientist's capacity to take full moral responsibility may be compromised by the environment provided by the World Wide Web.

In the course of European integration, many transnational institutions representing national universities, research organizations and industrial research have been established over the last decades. The purpose of this article is to give an empirical account of the role of transnational organizations in European science policy.

This paper highlights the process of selecting a long term research agenda in the environmental-development field. What are the criteria to be used for the understanding of what is important in our phase of history? In order to dwell on this process somewhat from the outside, the entry-point chosen is Columbus' world and challenges 500 years ago. In his time the problem was not environmental issues; however, at a more general level an analysis of the interplay between what is supposed to be known, the ideological connotations, the political ambitions, and the economical and technical capacities, provide interesting parallels to our time.

The paper addresses the question of how, in a research-intensive university, choices should be made to determine strategies that are appropriate for ambitious and creative institutions committed to both teaching and research at a high level. The paper calls for accountable real leadership at the university level and at lower levels. It also calls for organizational flexibility and flexibility in the allocation of material and immaterial resources.

If someone says ‘I'm good thank you!’, usually in response to a polite ‘how are you,’ I am tempted, and often do, reply: ‘That's an interesting claim or hypothesis – how are we going to test it?’ This paper is about testing that hypothesis, taken literally; the hypothesis that someone is good, how such a claim might be tested and what thinking about the exercise tells us about goodness and hence of course about how to increase goodness in the world and in people.

We examine the strata of memory in Japan’s recollections of the wartime experience and explore the shaping and releasing of memory in Japan, seeking to penetrate and recover individual Japanese experience. Individual memories that seemed tightly contained, when released were told with great emotional intensity and authenticity. That there has been little public discourse does not mean that individual Japanese have forgotten that war, but that the conflict – a war with no generally accepted name or firmly fixed start or end – seems disconnected from the private memories of the wartime generation. Japan was defeated thoroughly and completely, and in the history of memory we see no well-established narrative form for telling the tale of the defeated. In Japan's public memory of the war, War itself is often the enemy, and the Japanese its victims. Such a view is ahistorical and unsatisfactory to nations and peoples throughout Asia and the Pacific. The prevailing myths during Japan's war, developed and fostered over 15 years of conflict, and the overwhelming weight of more than three million war dead on the memories of the living forged a link between a desire to honour and cherish those lost and the ways the war is recalled in the public sphere. Enforced and encouraged by government policies and private associations, protecting the dead has become a means of avoiding a full discussion of the war. The memorials and monuments to the Dead that have been created throughout Japan, Asia, and the Pacific stand silent sentry to a Legend of the war. This must be challenged by the release into the public sphere of living memories of the War in all their ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction without which Japan’s Memory can have no historical veracity. Moreover, the memories of the Second World War of other peoples can never be complete without Japan’s story.

This article charts and tries to explain the changing use of ‘minority’ languages in Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the 19th century. This period saw the beginnings of a decline in the use of certain dialects and separate languages, notably Irish and Scottish Gaelic, although some tongues such as Catalan and Welsh remained widely used. The article develops some models of the relationship between language and its social, economic and political context. That relationship was mediated through the availability of printed literature; the political (including military) relations between areas where different languages or dialects were spoken; the nature and relative level of economic development (including urbanization); the policy of the providers of formal education and that of the church on religious instruction and worship; and, finally, local social structures and power relationships. The focus is principally on western Europe, but material is also drawn from Scandinavia and from eastern and central Europe.

The representation of language in the brain is one of the lively topics in recent cognitive neurosciences. The present paper argues that standard models of structures and mechanisms of the brain, which are essentially based on principles of activation spreading in neuronal nets and learning by synaptic strengthening through coincidental activation, cannot account for crucial properties of the Language Faculty and are misguided in central respects. In particular, the apparently elegant notion that working memory is just the activated state of long-term memory is shown to be incapable of accounting for structures and processes of language production and comprehension. Four types of problems are sketched that illustrate the impasses encountered by standard models of activation spreading.

The legal framework regulating property in Kosovo has been defined as ‘A jumble of laws, regulations, administrative instructions, court practices and directives combine to create a complicated and seemingly impenetrable system for determining contests over immovable property ownership in Kosovo. At the highest level, international human rights standards affect property rights…’1 As in other areas of legislation, laws addressing property issues derive from different periods in Kosovo’s history, that is to say the Yugoslav time, the so-called discriminatory period of the 1990s, UNMIK’s rule of the first decade of the 2000s and, finally, independent Kosovo. Laws are scattered through several legal texts, regulate different aspects of property rights, and often refer to institutions that no longer exist. This paper focuses on the specific issues affecting property law in Kosovo, a sector where international organizations and bilateral cooperation are massively intervening. While assessing legal acts in force and data collected on the field, the author argues how, for an effective reformation of the sector, a clear and coordinated strategy will have to be adopted by the two main donors which, in the next few years, will be launching several technical assistance contracts. Comparing European best practices with the proposed intervention suggested by the European Union and USAID will also give the chance to illustrate how a strict adherence to ECHR standards in the field of property, as the Constitution of Kosovo requires, will bring to light problems already seen in other European countries, that is to say a clash between domestic civil legislation on property, on the one hand, and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights on Article 1 Protocol 1, on the other. The author will also notice that the tendency to adopt a too political approach, typical of international organizations and donors, in an area characterized by legal principles of a more technical nature, will be cause for additional confusion.

One frequent observation about the contemporary world is that the pace of change appears to be accelerating. Turkey is a case in point, and the same is true of Turkey’s relationships with the Middle East, the European Union, and the wider world. All have continued to evolve at such an astonishing rate that almost the only constant has been change itself. Early in the millennium Turkey appeared to have managed the difficult transition from a long era of military control to a relatively stable elected government and liberal democratic values. That expectation eroded in subsequent years under the rule of Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), with an unmistakable drift towards a decidedly illiberal democracy – if not outright authoritarianism – and increased violence at home and abroad. At the time of writing (late-July 2016), Turkey has recently experienced a major military coup, a formal state of emergency has been declared, and a sweeping crackdown is occurring that affects virtually every sector of society.

The aim of this article is to contribute to thinking on pre-political foundations of secular societies. I do so through the idea of Europe. The importance of pre-political foundations relates to power and freedom, specifically how freedom truly can be freedom and not ultimately power. The paper includes two sections: Section 1 discusses Europe’s Westphalian system as the model for global international relations. Henry Kissinger’s proposal that a modern Westphalian system should be adopted by the international community, as outlined in his 2014 World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History, is explored and critiqued. Section 2 looks at an alternative vision of Europe as the global template which addresses many of the open issues identified in Kissinger’s proposal. Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI sees Europe as a historical and cultural idea with, as pre-political foundation, the primacy of rationality as creative reason. Ratzinger’s vision does not displace Kissinger’s; rather it informs it. Core to this discussion are freedom, power, interests and universal values, specifically how these four components interact and can be managed to produce positive constructive outcomes; ultimately these interactions relate to the pre-political foundations that orientate societies.

The process of European integration, the complexity of the problems involved and even the resistance it raises, astonishes observers in other parts of the world, especially in large states that have a long history of centralized government behind them. Is there really so little unity in Europe? If so, how can this be explained? Has European diversity generated only problems or has it, in fact, created new and unique opportunities? Is there a chance that growing concerns at EU-level about the cultural dimensions of European citizenship could, in fact, consolidate a sense of community? And, finally, how can historians contribute to the creation of a common European identity, if this is so weakly developed?

During the 20th century, Economic History grew into one of the main sub-disciplines of the Historical and Economic Sciences. Its roots can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries: mercantilists as well as classical economists, and later the German and English Historical Schools, they all were already using economic-historical data to support their reflections and theories. During the inter-war period, quantification was added as an analytical tool. Immediately after the Second World War, research focused mainly on macro-economic problems, with some American scholars during this period introducing a ‘New Economic History’, Cliometrics. From the mid-1970s onwards, the interest shifted increasingly to micro-economic questions, to be interpreted as a positive movement. The shift, indeed, creates a potential for a future combination of macro- and micro-approaches in Economic History. Such a combination would stimulate the integration of the three main variables of economic life and development (structure, hazard and freedom) into a more meaningful explanatory synthesis.

The Irish literary revival at the beginning of the last century established the concept of ‘house’ as a symbol of ‘nation’ in dramatic writing. Strangers to the house thus took on the mantle of imperialist forces whose colonial project, practices and values had to be resisted and expelled. The allegorical situations of houses and strangers in theatre foreshadowed revolution and eventual independence for the country decades later. Contemporary Irish playwrights continue to use the house/stranger, familiar/foreign dichotomies as templates for their exploration of the current state of the ‘nation’, but they are also beginning to explore the idea that ‘strangeness’ might be a condition that should be embraced to ensure the future health of that nation.

This article pursues a comparative approach to honour, a choice determined not only by the fact that anthropology, with regard to other disciplines, has striven to build its specificity on comparative analysis ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. A further reason is to steer clear of methodological nationalism,1 i.e. to sidestep forms of Orientalism.2 The point, therefore, is to avoid the pitfall by which issues of honour and its more violent forms, such as honour killings or blood feuds, are downscaled to a ‘Turkish’ or ‘Albanian problem’ or to a phenomenon specific solely to Middle Eastern societies.

This article highlights the problems faced by teachers, students, parents and authorities in Romania during the Coronavirus pandemic, as well as their management in the general context of the health crisis unfolding in this country. The documentation regarding Romania was compiled mainly on the basis of official reports and information taken from the media, due to the novelty of the subject for the case study presented. They were joined by theoretical-methodological works on the general epidemiological context and by studies on the particularities of the Romanian education system, which helped us to outline the theoretical-methodological background of the research. The authors have tried to highlight good practices, but also the errors that led to an increase in the number of cases and the imposition of restrictions, during the first four waves of the pandemic, with a major impact on educational activities in Romania. The main restrictions and advantages of online education, a first for the Romanian education system, are also highlighted.

An important proportion of citizens do not manifest confidence in many basic institutions (parliaments, parties, unions, army, public bureaucracies, big business, courts, ecclesiastic hierarchy, police) nor in the political class. Such a deficit of trust is attested by a wealth of empirical data. Nonetheless, the legitimacy of democratic regimes is not challenged: European citizens do not conceive realistically of an alternative system of government. A new counter-power is playing an increasing and crucial role in advanced pluralist democracies – that of magistrates and journalists combined. France and Italy are considered as typical cases, concerning in particular corruption at the highest level of the State and society. What types of citizens are needed in advanced democracies? Ignorant, naive, deferential, credulous, believers in myths or well informed, rationally distrustful citizens? Today, democracy is permanently under the supervision of the public, as attested by surveys conducted periodically.

Discussions of creativity and university governance often conflate multiple kinds of creativity–governance relations. Focusing on the ‘third kind’ of creativity–governance relations in universities, I discuss the role of creativity in prospecting governance models. In other words, this paper focuses on the methods for creatively seeking (third kind) creative governance models (second kind) that foster academic creativity (first kind). I argue that the methods of prospecting governance models are subject to institutional dynamics that steer such search off the path of creativity. I note in particular two such institutional dynamics that track the prospecting process – namely, professional expertise and referentiality – and I argue that these institutional dynamics generate inherent tension in the governance of creativity in universities. I illustrate these claims with findings from a large-scope research project on the branding of universities.