The paper – based on a qualitative study carried on between 2017 and 2022, which includes document analysis, semi-structured interviews and participant observation – analyzes the criminalization of the Catalan independentist movement, in the broader context of contemporary processes of criminalization of political dissent and freedom of expression. The focus is on the wave of repression and on the strategies of criminalization employed by the Spanish police and judiciary in the years after the referendum of October 1st, 2017. The study shows how this process of criminalization shares some common traits with other processes and, at the same time, which are the peculiarities related to the Spanish context, in terms of punitive strategies and of the type of mobilization.

The paper analyzes from a socio-legal point of view the empirical case of the special surveillance procedure to which five political militants were subjected due to their participation in the Syrian conflict between 2015 and 2018 as internationalist fighters in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The qualitative research lasted one year (2019) and the research techniques used were participant observation, discursive interview and ethnographic diary. The research delivered as results the reconstruction of the legal culture and criminal policy choices of the Turin prosecutor regarding social conflict and the description of the criminalization process to which activists of radical political areas are subjected.

The article explores the response of Northern Irish republican prisoners to the attempt by the British government to criminalize the republican armed struggle during the Northern Ireland conflict. Male and female republican prisoners reacted to the attempt to stigmatize their use of violence as criminal, rather than political, with increasingly extreme protests. Even though male and female prisoners adopted the same forms of protests, the respective success of their endeavours – coinciding with the acquisition of heroic status among the Northern Irish Catholic\nationalist working-class and international sympathizers – varied greatly. The article explains the success of the male protests and explores why the protests carried out by the female prisoners were not equally successful in granting them heroic status

This article deals with types and stereotypes of terrorists, in particular with 4th and 5th waves terrorists (i.e., collective and individual terrorism). We analyze vertical and horizontal terrorist organizations and address the points of consensus and controversy about this form of collective terrorism. We then deal with the controversial definition of individual terrorism: how to classify the individual terrorist. Finally, we analyze the stereotypes of collective and individual terrorists in North America and Europe

In Italy, the Black Hand is scarcely studied as a criminal phenomenon, and it is often considered one of the prodromes of mafia. Developed about two centuries ago in many cities in the United States, it became extinct within a few decades, at the dawn of Prohibition, replaced by another phenomenon, also illegal but criminally more evolved, more organized and with greater social impact: gangsterism. This paper, starting from a general analysis of the characteristics of this phenomenon – against which Joe Petrosino fought –, focuses on the specific case study of the “Banana Societyµ, developed in Ohio at the beginning of the 1900 by an Italian immigrant group, then defeated and convicted in the first American trial against an organized group.