Across Europe, refugees and asylum seekers often find themselves in precarious situations, facing limited access to housing, employment, education, and legal protection. While government responses have frequently proved inadequate, grass-roots movements have emerged to fill the gaps. These citizen-led initiatives represent more than simple charity; they embody new forms of political engagement where refugees and volunteers work together across differences to create useful change.
This issue is particularly pressing in the Republic of Cyprus (RoC), where the island’s own history of division and displacement shapes contemporary responses to newcomers. Since 2015, the RoC has experienced a dramatic increase in refugee arrivals, making it the EU member state with the highest number of asylum applications per capita in 2021. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – this pressure, women in the Cypriot city of Paphos have created remarkable spaces of collaboration and mutual support.

In 2016, a team of three researchers based at Stanford University —Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, and Gustavo Robles— conducted a groundbreaking experiment in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela (informal settlement), to test whether body-worn cameras (BWC) could reduce police violence and improve community relations.
The findings reveal that body cameras hold great promise, but they also come with serious challenges. Before the experiment started, one police unit commander ominously told the researchers: “If you give body cameras to my officers, this will stop them from doing their job.”

Dr Carolina Montero Orphanopoulos contends that contemporary Catholic moral theology has become mired in combative debates around personal health choices and sexuality, losing sight of broader ethical challenges. She proposes a radical renewal through three key categories for progress: vulnerability, corporality, and recognition. Drawing on Pope Francis’s vision of ‘theology in exit’ (the Church actively engaging with the world), she argues for a public-facing moral framework that addresses 21st-century crises such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and political fragmentation, while remaining grounded in traditional Catholic values.

When wandering through Italian cities today, visitors will encounter Latin inscriptions on all manner of buildings and monuments. While many date back to ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, others were created during Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime (1922–1943). These Latin texts weren’t merely decorative — they were deliberately crafted political tools that helped forge connections between Fascist Italy and ancient Rome, embedding the regime’s ideology into the very fabric of Italian society.

Ongoing research by Professor Han Lamers (University of Oslo) and Professor Bettina Reitz-Joosse (University of Groningen) reveals how Fascist Italy weaponized ancient Rome’s language to legitimise its power and connect Mussolini’s regime to Italy’s imperial past. Their projects involve collaboration with an international team of mostly junior researchers based in Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, and Italy.