Young people’s disadvantages on the labour market in Italy: reframing the NEET category

Abstract

The worsening of young people’s condition on the labour market has been described as a long-term trend of contemporary advanced capitalist economies. In recent years, the NEET (not in employment, education or training) label has been increasingly used to assess the integration of young people into the labour market. Does the NEET category adequately grasp the complexity of the underlying processes? In this contribution we will try to answer this question considering the Italian case as an extreme example. Focusing on the features of the youth labour market in Italy, we show the heterogeneity that lies behind the NEET concept, as well as its relationships with the labour market, the education system and welfare institutions. We argue that the institutionalization of NEETs as an analytical category may prove to be problematic as it may fail to identify specific vulnerable subgroups clearly, thereby leading to ineffective one-size-fits-all policy responses.     

Intentional human burial: Middle Paleolithic (last glaciation) beginnings

This paper analyzes intentional burial as a historical phenomenon. Mortuary practices are viewed as a particular sphere of human activity, involving the transfer of the physical remains from one natural environment to another. The general and specific laws governing mortuary treatment and its development are discussed, and the earliest known deliberate burials—those of the Middle Paleolithic—are examined against this theoretical background. Middle Paleolithic groups invented almost all the basic ways of treating a corpse before burial and almost all the ways of burial itself. They seem to have developed a cult of the dead, based upon dualities such as concealment vs exposure of the body, burial of the body intact vs disarticulated, burial of the whole body vs parts of it only, and so on. It is shown that, in the Middle Paleolithic, there were centers of taphological activity, that inhumation was selectively practiced on only a small minority of the population, that men were buried much more often than women, and that the patterns of burial seem to have been independent of identifiable factors such as human physical type or level of technology.     

Contesting Putin's nation‐building: the ‘Muslim other’ and the challenge of the Russian ethno‐cultural alternative

This article explains the crystallisation of a new Russian national discourse, shaped by a challenge posed to Putin's statist non‐ethnic national model by a popularly formed ethno‐cultural alternative, constructed through negation of the ‘Muslim other’. The article describes this new and previously overlooked phenomenon of Russian nationalism and explicates the social mechanism behind its formation. The article concludes that when rampant corruption exists, generating a breakdown of legal order, the ‘other’ is defined through behaviour that deviates from accepted local norms, while the contrasting normative ‘general public’ is defined as ‘Russian’. Such group definitions mean that the current process of Russian grass‐roots exclusive national consolidation is based predominantly on culturally based behavioural codes, rather than on mere ethnic or religious affiliation, as is widely believed. Additionally, a conceptual landmark discourse shift from the question of Russia's mere plausibility as a nation‐state to a focus on its ongoing definition is demonstrated.     

The formation of a civil religion in republican Italy (1943–49)

Absract

The essay investigates the formation of a new political rituality in Italy after the collapse of the fascist regime. The first paragraph deals with the protagonists: especially religious and institutional ones. The second one discusses different liturgies: the institutional one, that followed the example of the pre-fascist period; the religious one, so important that made it possible some sort of interference between civil and religious rituals; the political one, characterized by different rhetoric attitudes. Finally, the essay focuses on the similarities which emerge among all liturgical experiences: the need to find a line of continuity with the past through a coherent interpretation of national history; the pedagogical aim given to the ceremonies; the tendency to excise World War II from the country s history; the tendency to turn to the primary sources of collective identity: death and mourning, and family ties.     

Roads and the diffusion of insurgent violence: The logistics of conflict in Russia's North Caucasus

How does insurgency spread? Existing research on the diffusion of violence at the local level of civil war tends to under-specify the theoretical mechanisms by which conflict can be expanded, relocated or sustained, and overlooks the real-world logistical constraints that combatants face on a daily basis. This paper attempts to address both problems by taking a closer look at the role of road networks in the diffusion of insurgent activity. By explicating the logic of diffusion in a simple epidemic model and exploiting new disaggregated data on violence and road networks in the North Caucasus, this analysis challenges the conventional view that insurgent logistics are either self-sufficient or highly flexible. Roads shape the costs of sustaining and expanding operations, which facilitates the transmission of violence to new locations, but can also intensify competition for limited military resources between nearby battlefronts. At the local level, this dynamic makes the relocation of insurgent activity more likely than its expansion. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates that a failure to account for logistical constraints in the empirical study of civil war can underestimate costs of diffusion and overpredict the transmissibility of violence between neighboring locations. The use of road network distances can yield more conservative inferences and more accurate predictions of how violence spreads.     

Athabaskan–Siberian Folklore Links: In Search of Na-Dene Origins

The North American Na-Dene languages, most of them belonging to the Athabaskan branch, are possibly related to the Yeniseian languages of Siberia. A series of episodes of traditional narratives link the Na-Dene with the Altai-Sayan region. The creators of the Sumnagin culture of eastern and north-eastern Siberia, who possibly reached Alaska in the Early Holocene, seem the most plausible candidates for the proto-Na-Dene speakers, although interpretation of corresponding archaeological materials remains controversial.