L'Occidente e la primavera araba

The “revolutions” in the Arab world have forced us to radically revise our geopolitical concepts and ideological interpretations of what we call the “Greater Middle East”. These were the result of an attempt to apply the basic principles of liberalism to a context radically different from its origins, and to spread them throughout a region that stretches from the Atlantic to the Hindukush. In general, the error was to think that democratic procedures could be exported without ensuring at the same time the conditions for strengthening democratic processes, and without waiting for them to acquire greater awareness and conviction in the societies concerned. The events of 2011 show that the West, and Europe in a special way, must pass from the rhetorical exportation of democracy to real democracy support, by strengthening the extremely fragile democracies coming to life in North Africa and the Middle East.Le “rivoluzioni” del mondo arabo obbligano a rivedere radicalmente un concetto geo-politico ed un postulato ideologico ormai superato, quello espresso dalle parole: “Ampio Medio Oriente”. Esso corrispondeva al tentativo di applicare, in un contesto radicalmente diverso da quello originario, i principi fondamentali della filosofia politica del liberalismo, estendendoli a una regione compresa tra l’Atlantico e l’Hindukush. Più in generale, l’errore è stato quello di chi ritiene di poter esportare le procedure democratiche, senza parallelamente verificare le condizioni per rafforzare i processi democratici e senza attendere che essi emergessero ad un livello di maggior consapevolezza e convinzione nelle società interessate. I fatti del 2011 dimostrano che è necessario, per l’Occidente e, in particolare, per l’Europa, passare dalla retorica del democracy export, cioè dell’esportazione (anche forzata) della democrazia, alla concretezza del democracy support, vale a dire del sostegno alle nuove fragilissime democrazie nascenti in Nord Africa e in Medio Oriente

The concept of periphery in Pope Francis' discourse : a religious alternative to globalization ?

Published on 16 January 2015.Since the beginning of his mandate, Pope Francis has used the concept of periphery as a metaphor of social marginality. However, the notion of periphery also seems to target the asymmetries generated by the liberal version of globalization. Pope Francis’ narrative has to be read in the broader context of the relation between religions and globalization. That interaction is usually conceptualized in terms of religions capitalizing on global “vectors”, such as new information and communication technologies, processes of political and institutional integration, shared cultural patterns, transnational phenomena and organizations. An alternative way to analyze the role of religions consists in considering them as agencies defending the perspective of a universal community, putting into question the national political boundaries and contesting the existing global order. Understood in those terms, the concept of periphery reveals to be a powerful rhetoric device, insofar as it suggests that it is possible to get a wider perspective of the current state of the world looking form the edge rather than from the center

Globalization and Post-Secularism: Religions and a Universal Common Identity

The most celebrated “return” of religion on the international scene has been considered by analysts, scholars, and diplomats mainly as a confirmation on a wider scale of the hypothesis of a “post-secular” era. What is missing, however, is a reflection on the present-day functioning of religions in connection with the systemic analysis of international relations in a phase of global transformation. If world religions are to be taken seriously in the field of international relations, this would require an approach to their role in the international system as a structural element rather than a mere cultural phenomenon with only a derivative or secondary influence on world order. In particular, it will be useful to make a clear conceptual distinction between the two diverging paradigms of “globalization” and “universalism,” as embodied in an explicit or implicit way in many world religions today; and to investigate if and how religions could contribute to the formation of a global collective identity, both symbolic and pluralistic

Improving Recommendation Quality by Merging Collaborative Filtering and Social Relationships

Matrix Factorization techniques have been successfully applied to raise the quality of suggestions generated\ud by Collaborative Filtering Systems (CFSs). Traditional CFSs\ud based on Matrix Factorization operate on the ratings provided\ud by users and have been recently extended to incorporate\ud demographic aspects such as age and gender. In this paper we\ud propose to merge CF techniques based on Matrix Factorization\ud and information regarding social friendships in order to\ud provide users with more accurate suggestions and rankings\ud on items of their interest. The proposed approach has been\ud evaluated on a real-life online social network; the experimental\ud results show an improvement against existing CF approaches.\ud A detailed comparison with related literature is also presen

On Facebook, most ties are weak

Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13 Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to predict the strength of ties. The approaches being used require handling user-generated data that is often not publicly available due to privacy concerns. Here, we propose an alternative definition of weak and strong ties that requires knowledge of only the topology of the social network (such as who is a friend of whom on Facebook), relying on the fact that online social networks, or OSNs, tend to fragment into communities. We thus suggest classifying as weak ties those edges linking individuals belonging to different communities and strong ties as those connecting users in the same community. We tested this definition on a large network representing part of the Facebook social graph and studied how weak and strong ties affect the information-diffusion process. Our findings suggest individuals in OSNs self-organize to create well-connected communities, while weak ties yield cohesion and optimize the coverage of information spread.Comment: Accepted version of the manuscript before ACM editorial work. Check http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179820-on-facebook-most-ties-are-weak/ for the final versio

Analyzing the Facebook Friendship Graph

Online Social Networks (OSN) during last years acquired a\ud huge and increasing popularity as one of the most important emerging Web phenomena, deeply modifying the behavior of users and contributing to build a solid substrate of connections and relationships among people using the Web. In this preliminary work paper, our purpose is to analyze Facebook, considering a signi�cant sample of data re\ud ecting relationships among subscribed users. Our goal is to extract, from this platform, relevant information about the distribution of these relations and exploit tools and algorithms provided by the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to discover and, possibly, understand underlying similarities\ud between the developing of OSN and real-life social networks