Call for papers 2025
Call for paper 2025: Peoples and Governments in historical perspective and / or in the present
The board of the Italian Review of Legal History invites all scholars to contribute to the next issue of the year (2025) on the topic: Peoples and Governments in historical perspective and / or in the present
For centuries, in Western and Eastern cultures, it has been argued that the main function of 'good government' is to take care of the peace, utility and general interest of the people.
The prospects for debate on this topic are endless.
The term people has had in the past and has in the present many declinations: community, citizenship, ethnicity, nationality. The same can be said for the terms peace, utility and general interest, which involve both public law and social and cultural profiles if we think, for example, of the issues of inequality, health and education.
When did the 'good' of peoples begin to constitute a commitment for rulers and how much and which current forms of government take care of it? Is the fundamental function of governments to pursue the good of their people?
According to which values do governments orient themselves? Are there differences in this respect between the ancient models of Greece and Rome, the communes, the seigneuries, the principalities, the republics and monarchies of the distant or recent past, the non-European civilizations of China and India, the liberal State and the modern forms of democracy with universal suffrage, as well as the past, present or raising autocracies? What interpretation of good and useful, of improvement and progress or of involution, for present and future generations?
To what extent does general well-being coincide with individual interests? The birth of the welfare state in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century is an eloquent example of how poverty, long considered as a problem of the individual - called to improve his condition with personal commitment and work according to the rules of the market - has become a ‘political’ problem when the population as a whole has profiled itself as "subject of needs and aspirations" and, at the same time, as the "source of the power of the State" and for this reason the "ultimate aim of the government", both according to the well-known theories of Foucault and according to those developed in recent centuries and in different ways by scholars, jurists, philosophers and political scientists.
If and to what extent did the principle of solidarity influence government policies, particularly in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, and how much did it affect the development of relations between members of the same political community or between members of different political communities? How much and how have migratory phenomena influenced the definition of the characteristics of a people?
The changes of this relationship between governments and their populations in the globalized world call into question acquired rights and raises new and multiple questions.
Submission deadline June 30th 2025
Papers can be written in the following languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese.
At the choice of the author, papers will be published:
- in Italian (or in another of the languages above mentioned) and English
- only in Italian language (or in another of the languages above mentioned) with an abstract in English of at least 4.000 characters.
For author guidelines and additional information, please visit the website of the Journal https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/irlh, in particular, https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/irlh/about and https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/irlh/about/submissions
Please, fill the following form by March 31st 2025 (pdf file to be filled with Acrobat Reader) and submit it to segreteria.irlh@unimi.it and to claudia.storti@unimi.it
