Suchergebnisse

Factors that contributed to the making of a democratic-minded military in Spain, Portugal, and Greece since the mid-1970s.

The Mediterranean agro-food systems need to be properly managed. A promising pathway is the transition towards more sustainable food systems through agroecology, which represents the ecology of food systems. In this paper, the state-of-the-art of agroecology is described for three representative euro-Mediterranean countries: Italy, Greece, and Spain. The analysis has been partly based on results of a dedicated literature search and partly on grey literature and expert knowledge. After an overview of the history of agroecology, targeted research and education, collective action (political and social), and some agroecological practices in the three countries are presented. These countries share a rather similar use of the term &ldquo ; agroecology&rdquo ; but they differ regarding (i) the existence/extent of strong civil and social movements ; (ii) the type of study/educational programmes, and the relative importance of different scientific disciplines and their evolution ; (iii) the development of political support and legal frameworks ; and (iv) the elaboration of concepts to rediscover traditional practices and apply new ones, often taken from the organic agriculture sector. Agroecology is an emerging concept for the Mediterranean agricultural sector, with huge potential due to the peculiar socio-cultural, bio-physical, and political-economic features of the region. To boost agroecology in Mediterranean Europe, better networking and engagement of different actors within a coherent institutional framework supporting the transition is strongly needed.

In the full-text databases of Latin sources from Europe from the period between 400 and 1500, the Latin word for violence crops up around two thousand times, about as often as "justice" (2,400) though not as often as other interesting words like "envy" (6,000) or "vengeance" (3,800). The frequency of use of the word, adjusted for the vagaries of survival, reveals an interesting trend. From the tenth to the eleventh centuries, an age of predatory castellans and violent territorial expansion, the frequency nearly doubles in the extant literature, and remains high for several centuries to come. The word often appears in texts alongside nauseating tales of violence, of hands lopped off and eyes plucked out and intestines dragged from their hidden recesses. There is the story told by Guibert of Nogent about the predatory castellan Thomas de Marle, who hung his captives by their testicles until the weight of their own bodies tore them off. These were exempla. They painted verbal pictures of the behavior of those who were surely doomed to hell. In the hands of clerical authors like Guibert, they served as a goad to kings and princes who, in their indolence, might allow this stuff to go unavenged.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the current copyright framework conditioning the progress of OA in Mediterranean countries and to examine whether this copyright framework needs to be improved and by which measures. In order to do so, this paper firstly introduces MedOANet, which is an EU-funded project the aim of which is to enhance existing national policies, strategies and structures for OA and to contribute towards the implementation of new ones in Mediterranean countries, namely France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey. Secondly, this paper gives an overview of the results of a survey which has been conducted in 2012 amongst research publishers by MedOANet. Thirdly, an interpretation of the most striking results of the survey is given: research publishers based in Mediterranean countries have, on average, very OA-friendly copyright and self-archiving policies in place. Some improvements could be achieved by developing an OA-conductive campaign of awareness rising; however, OA as the default way of scholarly communication would best be supported by an OA-friendly legal environment. In the end the author of the paper therefore asks the national and European legislators to introduce an exception or limitation for a green road OA publication of any publicly funded research paper into European and national copyright law.

This volume illustrates and deepens the understanding of current agrarian dynamics developing in Mediterranean countries in the light of recent theoretical contributions. The book compiles and analyses a set of Mediterranean case studies that show the range of transformations shaping contemporary agriculture in Southern Europe