Arising from the internationalization of training, when communication conditions have changed and now offer innumerable opportunities, highly skilled graduates manage their careers confident of unlimited possibilities. Following a qualitative study carried out within a research project on Maghrebian graduates educated in French engineering schools, this paper aims at analyzing the migration process of Maghrebian engineers. It was observed that the migration of these highly skilled individuals is neither irrevocable nor unidirectional. They may be regarded as being permanently “on the move” between their home country, the country where they studied and other destinations. At the cutting edge of IT, their mastery of digital technologies enables them to be almost permanently connected with several worlds – home or (former) host country(ies). They develop new strategies which symbolically question national borders and create multiple identities or hybrids of transcultural values.

The article deals with history and historiography of Social Europe, understood as integration of social forces (mainly the trade-unions) of the different European countries. The communitarian dimension of trade-unionism, indeed, is a topic more and more considered by historians. Starting from the first attempts of Europeanization of social dynamics in the ‘50s, the article follows the development of Social Europe trough its different stages: the political approach to the “social affairs” in 1957-1964; the spreading of the need to establish an European trade-union movement; the “long tunnel” of 1974-1984; the renewed trade-unionist awareness which made emerge a “Social Europe”; the social protocols annexed to the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam. The article underlines the scarce capacity for initiative of an articulated European trade-union representation, but points out that social dimension has always accompanied the success of the stages for the European unification and the reasons of its expansion.

In a world dominated by pluralism and where ‘diversity is reality’, the extension of citizenship becomes a hot topic of the conflict of modernity, so much so that many have discussed the possibility of a primacy of human rights on the citizen rights (Walzer, 2014). This theme arouses reflection on the conditioning that the physical and social borders have on processes of identification. If, then, the current political situation is marked by fear, humiliation, hope (Moïsi, 2009), the question that arises is this: how is it possible to promote the value of otherness for every human face, recognized as identical and at the same time to pursue the defence of its boundary beyond which the difference arises? To answer may be useful to educate oneself to a practice to emotions, “rediscovering the pervasiveness of different cultural processes […] and the power that these have to model individual interests expressed in social actions” (Colafato, 1998, p. 10).

Review of: Guerra all’ISIS. Diario dal fronte curdo [Waging War on ISIS: Diary from the Kurdish Front]. By Gastone Breccia, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016. ISBN: 978-88-15-26334-6. 210 pp. € 16,00.

Algeria is the core of the Maghreb and shares land borders with seven countries Maghreb and Sahel countries. However, since 2011, none of the seven land borders is stable and secure. So, even if Algeria is considered as a stable country, this stability is fragile and is likely to be more precarious if the country has to face simultaneously an economic crisis and delicate presidential succession. Domestic incertitude coupled to regional conflicts puts the Algerian borders under unprecedented pressure. Consequently, almost all the governmental declarations expressed worries about the vulnerability of the borders, and assurances about the security services determination to assure the state security. However, to what extant this promise can be entirely fulfilled, regarding the borders’ characteristics and the specificity of the context? Why is the virtualization of the borders forced ? As regards to the growing permeability of the borders, can their militarization guarantee their security?

The transfer of political concepts into different places and cultures happens first and foremost through translation. Far from being a simple transposition of meaning into a different language to facilitate border crossing, it also entails a process of adjustment to a different cultural context and a change in what is perceived to be the original meaning of the concept. Translation should also include the analysis of the social contexts that cause a political concept to be modified. Through Baker s social narrative theory, all these aspects can be integrated to analyse how the concept of democracy moves from place to place and from language to language leading to more complex understandings of it. I will examine the meaning of the concept of democracy in the 2012 Egyptian Constitution to outline the main features of an intercultural translational process of the concept of democracy.

Present society needs a new approach to knowledge, mainly required by the fast succession of the transformation of society and by the multidimensionality of the daily life problems. It is necessary, therefore, a more and more transdisciplinary perspective, able to connect the efforts of all social sciences and humanities. Moreover, it is essential an approach to history which may create a sort of circle between knowledge of the past and attention to the present world. These considerations are particularly important about the Mediterranean, which today is affected by dramatic shifts and problems of historical significance.

One of the basic problems confronting multicultural societies is the inclusion of cultural differences into a common citizenship. What does it mean inclusion? And inclusion to what? The ‘inclusion’ formula of modernity (lib/lab) leads to the inadequacy of the forms of cultural universalism as conceptualized and practiced in the processes of Western modernization. The more we globalize the social world, the more we come to reinforce ‘local cultures’. The paper contends that the political inclusion of minorities into a ‘universalistic culture’ can be wholly misleading if the concept of political inclusion is not well managed in terms of the articulation of the borders between different cultures. The author argues that there are three semantics used to manage cultural borders: dialectical, binary and relational. It depends on the choice among these semantics what kind of ideal model is followed in order to include people into citizenship. The latter can be configured as a culturally neutral public sphere (based upon the neutralization of cultural borders) or as a morally qualified public sphere, which defines the borders of citizenship as mutual relations between different cultures so to avoid any form of exclusion, discrimination or segregation.