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With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top-down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to question and problematise the local turn's use of the concept of 'everyday', in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local turn's project of critique.

This book advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheism), a view that has flown in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle's time. The book has been at the centre of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since the first edition was published in 1987. This text contains the second edition of the book. It expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author's reflections on developments over the last two decades.

The story of Amir Arsalan is the adventurous story of Prince Arsalan Rumi, the son of Sultan Malekshah. The Roman emperor is killed by Sam Khan Farangi, commander of the army of King Peter, the king of Persia, and the emperor's pregnant wife is left in captivity on an island dressed as a slave girl. Khajeh Noman, an Egyptian merchant who left his homeland for business; He happens to come to that island and take the woman with him to Egypt. The baby is born. His name is Arsalan. In childhood and adolescence, he became a teacher in all sciences and learned seven languages well, learned the etiquette of war, and became close to Khadio of Egypt. With the arrival of Almas Khan Elchi, King of Persia, who came to Egypt at the request of Arsalan and his mother; Arsalan's identity is revealed.

Afterlives of Endor offers an analysis of the way early modern English literature addressed the period's anxieties about witchcraft and theatricality. What determined whether or not a demonologist imagined a trial as a spectacle? What underlying epistemological constraints governed such choices and what conceptions of witchcraft did these choices reveal? Pairing readings of demonological texts with canonical plays and poetry, Laura Levine examines such questions. Through analyses of manuals and pamphlets about the prosecution of witches-including Reginald Scot's skeptical The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), King James VI/I's Daemonologie (1597), and Jean Bodin's De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1580)-Afterlives of Endor examines the way literary texts such as Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and The Tempest , Spenser's The Faerie Queene , and Marlowe's Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus address anxieties about witchcraft, illusion, and theatricality. Afterlives of Endor attends to the rhetorical tactics, argumentative investments, and underlying tensions of demonological texts with the scrutiny ordinarily reserved for literary texts.

Lu Xun's translation discourse and his concept of “grabbism” (拿来主义 nalai zhuyi) are mutually constructed in a historical and evolutionary process. This article investigates how two different notions of “untranslatability” embedded in the discourse of Lu Xun's translation interact with his constantly rectified idea of “grabbism.” Lu Xun's translation process is replete with tensions and contradictions resonating with his simultaneous aspiration to and resistance against Western modernity. These tensions and contradictions are reflections of his self-contradiction between the collective responsibility of saving the nation by embracing Western modernity and a kind of unconscious reclamation of himself as a man of letters whose roots in Chinese tradition were less pronounced. Lu Xun's translation practice along with his “grabbism” provides us an alternative perspective to understand the politics of translation beyond English contexts and sheds light on our reconceptualizing the nature of translation.

There is evidence that not only believing in one conspiracy theory (CT) makes a person more probable to believe in others, however unrelated their content is, but that people can even believe in contradictory CTs about a single event. After piloting locally relevant conspiracy theories on a convenient Serbian speaking sample (N = 152), we sought to replicate this finding on a larger sample (N = 252), but introduced several changes. We differentiated necessarily and probably mutually exclusive CTs, and interviewed the participants who answered contradictory to understand the reasoning behind it. The participants were more prone to endorse probably than necessarily exclusive items (we registered positive correlations in former and no correlation or negative correlation in later). Two strategies enabled them to overcome the contradiction: (a) distilling the crucial content and downplaying other information and (b) treating the contradictory scenarios as possible versions of events. Taken together, these results indicate that participants are not as irrational as sometimes portrayed.

Abstract This case study explores the spiritual and moral perceptions of Italian youth through two focus groups – one composed of non-believers and the other of Catholics – conducted in Rome in April 2024. The research complements the broader Footprints survey, which examined religious beliefs among young people aged 18–29 across eight countries. Participants discussed themes such as spirituality, belief in God, conscience, sin, moral consistency, and controversial ethical issues like abortion and pornography. Findings reveal that both non-believers and Catholics experience a strong desire for spirituality, yet are heavily influenced by secular cultural trends. Non-believers demonstrate a thoughtful, self-critical approach to their beliefs and maintain openness to transcendence without aligning with traditional Christian concepts. Conversely, Catholics often exhibit limited theological knowledge and struggle to articulate their faith, frequently treating it as a set of inherited opinions rather than personally internalized convictions. Both groups reveal moral contradictions between stated beliefs and actual ethical positions. Catholics particularly show a tendency to accommodate cultural norms over religious doctrine, especially regarding issues like abortion and sexual ethics. The study highlights the need for more robust catechesis and pastoral engagement for Catholics.

This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. While many progressive scholars have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what these scholars mean by rights has often been left unexplored. The first half of this essay focuses on the distinctions that political philosophers and legal scholars often draw between various kinds and forms of rights. The second section focuses specifically on how rights are mobilized within scholarship on the right to the city, as well as the tensions and contradictions – with respect to rights – that arise therein.

The contemporary global and African food security agenda is heavily dominated by the narrative that food insecurity is primarily a rural phenomenon. This presupposes that food insecurity is a rural predicament requiring a stupendous increase in smallholder production. This agenda is advancing despite the growing evidence in scholarly accounts of rapid urbanisation and the expansion of the likelihood of an urban future for a plethora of Africans. In the context of South Africa, the advent of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) laid bare the extent to which the country’s urban spaces are food insecure. While food insecurity is a universal challenge, in South Africa, it has particularising aspects that are rooted in colonial legacies, which include, among others, spatial and environmental injustices and urbanisation. These threats to food security interact with such factors as markets and access to credit, pricing policies and other factors to threaten food supply. This paper is qualitative in nature and uses content analyses and a combination of both the Marxist theory of conflict and the intersectionality theory as methodological insights used to obtain data. The aim is to analyse the persistent crisis of urban food security, framing it as an enduring consequence of class contradiction inherent in the post-1994 state administration. The context of its consideration is Johannesburg, South Africa. The paper found that urban food insecurity, particularly in South African townships, has increased exponentially over the years, and as a result, this has reproduced the cycle of generational poverty and disenfranchisement among the natives. The paper concludes and recommends that the panacea to urban food insecurity is the recognition of the informal economy in government policy as a key driver of food access for the urban poor.

Information technology is generally considered an enabler of a firm's agility. A typical premise is that greater IT investment enables a firm to be more agile. However, it is not uncommon that IT can also hinder and sometimes even impede organizational agility. We propose and theorize this frequently observed but understudied IT-agility contradiction by which IT may enable or impede agility. We develop the premise that organizations need to develop superior firm-wide IT capability to successfully manage their IT resources to realize agility. We refine the conceptualization and measurement of IT capability as a latent construct reflected in its three dimensions: IT infrastructure capability, IT business spanning capability, and IT proactive stance.We also conceptualize two types of organizational agility: market capitalizing agility and operational adjustment agility. We then conduct a matched-pair field survey of business and information systems executives in 128 organizations to empirically examine the link between a firm's IT capability and agility. Business executives responded to measurement scales of the two types of agility and organizational context variables, and IS executives responded to measurement scales of IT capabilities and IS context variables. The results show a significant positive relationship between IT capability and the two types of organizational agility. We also find a significant positive joint effect of IT capability and IT spending on operational adjustment agility but not on market capitalizing agility. The findings suggest a possible resolution to the contradictory effect of IT on agility: while more IT spending does not lead to greater agility, spending it in such a way as to enhance and foster IT capabilities does. Our study provides initial empirical evidence to better understand essential IT capabilities and their relationship with organizational agility. Our findings provide a number of useful implications for research and managerial practices.