A cross-cultural examination of adolescent civic engagement: comparing Italian and American community-oriented and political involvement

The purpose of this study was to investigate community-oriented and political civic engagement activities and intentions among youth in Italy and the United States. Adolescents (N = 566) from academically rigorous schools in both countries completed surveys assessing frequency of civic activity participation, motivation for activity, evaluations of activity, and intentions for future civic engagement. Results suggest that youth in both countries were more likely to participate in community-oriented than political civic activities and that youth in both countries found their civic experiences to be meaningful. American youth reported more past civic activities of both types and higher intentions for future community-oriented civic engagement compared to Italian youth. Finally, a model was tested to examine links between peer and school contexts and civic activities and intentions. Findings highlighted that, in both countries, peer and school contexts had a stronger impact on community-oriented than on political civic activity.     

Globalization and extraterritorial application of economic regulation: crisis in international law and balancing interests

There are two developments the combination of which has led to new challenges to international law: the growth of economic regulations and globalisation. While the modern economies are associated with the proliferation of regulatory laws which are rooted in the national economic and social policies, the loosening of the national borders and globalisation has led to conflicts of economic regulations. Such developments have posed various risks of violations of national economic regulations by the economic actors and could lead to tension among national states which have jurisdiction over multinational enterprises in one way or another. The private parties involved in such a situation could somehow avoid such risks by their own initiatives and contractual arrangements but in most cases such measures do now work and the conflict has to be resolved through the cooperation between the countries involved. The paper investigates the potentials for public international law to come up with rules, principles and norms to resolve such complex disputes which touch up issues such as non-intervention, equality of sovereign states, state immunity, self-determination and other principles of international law. Unlike certain area of international law such as law of sea where a few factors involved and the disputes could be resolved by relying on simple facts and rules, the application of national economic regulations extraterritorially creates tensions among the nation states in respect of the demarcation of national jurisdictions. It is here that public international faces a new challenges and need to come up with new approaches such a balancing of interests of the states involved in the conflicts.