The ghost of Machiavelli: An approach to operation Gladio and terrorism in cold war Italy

In 1990, a document was made public in Italy that shed new light on the secret aspects of the Cold War in Western Europe. The document, dated 1 June 1959, had been compiled by the Italian military secret service SIFAR and is entitled "The special forces of SIFAR and Operation Gladio”. It explained that a secret stay-behind army linked to NATO had been set up in Italy for the purpose of unconventional warfare. Ever since, there have been allegations in Italy that the Gladio stay-behind army was linked to acts of terrorism during the Cold War. Despite their importance for criminal, legal and social investigations into the secret history of the Cold War, these questions have received next to no attention among the English-speaking research community since the documents' discovery, partly due to language barriers. With no claim to deal with the stay-behind armies in an exhaustive manner, this essay attempts to analyse and contextualise the Italian dat

Thespian musings beyond Abhinavagupta

This paper is the fruit of a close and lasting collaboration between the two authors, Elisa Ganser and Daniele Cuneo, the former being responsible for the first half (pp. 137-160), the latter for the second (pp. 161-183). The present contribution is the continuation of our ongoing research on the thespian experience, whose first instalment focused squarely on Bharata and Abhinavagupta. Elisa Ganser wishes to acknowledge the Swiss National Science Foundation for generously funding research for the present article in the framework of the project Performing Arts and Religious Practices in Classical and Medieval Sanskrit Literature (Department of Indian Studies, University of Zurich). We wish to thank Manasicha Akepiyapornchai and Naresh Keerthi for their insightful suggestions

Corporate Security Responsibility: Towards a Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Research Agenda

The political debate about the role of business in armed conflicts has increasingly raised expectations as to governance contributions by private corporations in the fields of conflict prevention, peace-keeping and postconflict peace-building. This political agenda seems far ahead of the research agenda, in which the negative image of business in conflicts, seen as fuelling, prolonging and taking commercial advantage of violent conflicts,still prevails. So far the scientific community has been reluctant to extend the scope of research on ‘corporate social responsibility’ to the area of security in general and to intra-state armed conflicts in particular. As a consequence, there is no basis from which systematic knowledge can be generated about the conditions and the extent to which private corporations can fulfil the role expected of them in the political discourse. The research on positive contributions of private corporations to security amounts to unconnected in-depth case studies of specific corporations in specific conflict settings. Given this state of research, we develop a framework for a comparative research agenda to address the question: Under which circumstances and to what extent can private corporations be expected to contribute to public security