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Lorenzo Bosi is currently ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social & Political Movements of the University of Kent. His research examines social movements, political violence, as well as consolidated political identities and relations, in socio-politically polarized contexts such as Northern Ireland. He is also participating as an affiliated researcher in an international research project: The European Protest Movements since the Cold War.

Hostile countermobilization is a crucial, yet relatively understudied, factor in radicalizing movement tactics and generating political violence. This chapter focuses on the movement–countermovement interactions between the Civil Rights Movement and the Loyalist movement in Northern Ireland to clarify the emergence and intensification of political violence in the 1968–1969 years. The interactions between the civil rights mobilization and the loyalist countermobilization created the conditions to fuel both protest-based and sectarian violence, setting the terrain for the eruption of the Troubles. Relying on quantitative data on the actors participating to contentious collective events, as well as original archival research, this chapter shows how the loyalist countermobilization activated mechanisms of object shift and tactical codependency that facilitated the emergence of radicalization in Northern Ireland.

Drawing on Bert Klandermans (2004) hypothesis that instrumentality, identity, and ideology are interacting motivations, which increase the likelihood of participation in social movements, this article examines why individuals joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement (CRM) during the 1960s. Analyzing data gathered from semi-structured interviews, newspapers, autobiographies, secondary sources, government and movement organizations documents, the empirical analysis indicates that the individuals’ motivations in the process of involvement in social movement activities differ over time. The accounts of former participants generally suggest that instrumentality provided a stronger initial motivation during the very early stage of the CRM. With the development of the movement and changes of the political context, the choice to participate rested – for the mass of individuals who decided to mobilize later in consequence of a “transformative event” – more on identity and ideology. The research underscores the importance of the “timing” of involvement in order to better grasp the causal justification of movement participation over time. Focusing on a deeply divided society, such as Northern Ireland, this research also broadens the comparative range of case studies in the field of collective action and enhances our understanding of how repressive measures by the establishment in relation to contentious politics in deeply divided societies mobilizes further the individual in social movement activities.

The title of this series, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, reflects the triple foci of its volumes. These three issues that are so central to the identity of this series – social movements, conflicts, and change – are also prominent features with regard to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Thus we open this 27th volume of the series with three papers analyzing various aspects of Northern Ireland's civil rights movement, a social movement working for political and social change in a society marked by protracted conflict. The first paper, by Gregory Maney, innovatively analyzes the interrelationships between the Irish Republican Army's campaigns of armed violence and the nonviolent civil rights movement.

This paper is one of the first attempts to explain the local dynamics of the 2010 ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan. No scholarly work has attempted to systematically analyze the 2010 ethnic violence and its local dynamics on the neighborhood scale. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this gap by analyzing neighborhoods’ responses to the emerging violence in the city of Osh. In order to do this, the author compares two typical neighborhoods in Osh, one violent and the other non-violent, with different spatial structures and built environments that demonstrate/represent similar dynamics of riots in many other neighborhoods.

The empirical findings of this paper are based on the ethnographic fieldwork the author carried out in 2010 and between 2012 and 2014. During nine months (in total) of the author’s ethnographic fieldwork, the author conducted around 60 semi-structured interviews in Osh city mainly with community leaders. In the author’s interview sampling, the author used two approaches: the snowball method and geographically/territorially representative sampling.

The author argues that among other factors, a particular type of public space provides favorable conditions for riot occurrence or non-occurrence. For example, in Osh, such places as areas around the central bazaar and densely populated multi-story building complexes were especially riot-prone. By contrast, residential areas with individual-unit houses and low residential mobility represented communally private spaces with more easy riot-control. In addition, some residential areas implemented strategies such as physical self-isolation to avoid violence. By restricting freedom of movement and erecting improvised barricades, the residents of such neighborhoods created a temporally new space with its own rules and interethnic cooperation.

This paper suggests new insights in the analysis of riots by connecting theoretical categories and concepts of space provided by scholars of contentious politics and applying them to the case of the 2010 ethnic riots in Osh city. By analyzing riot dynamics on the neighborhood scale, this research contributes to the understanding of the spatial dynamics of ethnic riots.

This paper aims to investigate the role that Italian third sector organizations have in the process of social and administrative categorization of newly arrived migrants living with human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/Aids) or hepatitis b. In Italy, free access to health is provided to all migrants and residence permits for medical treatment is granted for migrants living with a “serious illness” since the 1990s. The case of HIV/Aids and hepatitis b shows how this political openness, however, clashes with the tightening of migration policies.

The study is based on ethnographic research conducted between 2014 and 2016 within an associative centre that deals with the socio-health care of newly arrived migrants in Rome. In addition to the participant observations, the study is based in semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 health-care providers (nurses, health-care assistants and socio-cultural mediators) and doctors and with 22 migrants coming from Sub-Saharan Africa and living with HIV/AIDS (10) and hepatitis b (12).

In Italy, the two infections have been identified as top diseases among migrant populations in the country but if HIV/Aids is always considered as a “serious illness”, hepatitis b is considered as a public health priority only in the case of a treatment prescription. These aspects have an important impact on the interactions between medical and social professionals and migrants affected by HIV/AIDS and hepatitis b, contributing differently to the creation of legal categories assigned to migrants.

The case of HIV/Aids and hepatitis b shows how the political openness of the public health system, clashes with the tightening of migration policies and analyse the role of the third sector has in this issue.

Frailty is a geriatric syndrome which can be reversible or less severe through appropriate nutritional interventions. In the present study, to test the efficiency of individualized nutritional intervention was conducted a comprehensive assessment of the nutritional status of frail older adults and evaluation of the effect of nutritional intervention on the nutritional status of pre-frail older patients.

Frail older adults (n = 43; mean age 84.6 ± 6.4 years old; 81.4% women) had nutritional status assessed using nutritional anthropometry, body composition, and food frequency questionnaire. Pre-frail patients (n = 16; mean age 68.4 ± 5.5 years old; 81.3% women) for eight weeks were consuming 1.0 g protein/kg BW/day. Robust older adults formed a control group (n = 29; mean age 69.3 ± 5.3 years old; 82.8% women).

Frail older adults had weight and muscle mass loss, and their diet variety was sufficient. After the intervention, pre-frail patients increased their protein consumption by 25.8% (P = 0.002). An increase in lean body mass (+1.0 kg), skeletal muscle mass (+0.3 kg) and improvement in physical performance was also observed.

An individual diet for pre-frail older adults can reverse weight loss and increase lean body mass, furthermore preventing or delaying the development of frailty syndrome. Moreover, increased protein consumption improves physical performance of pre-frail older adults.

As testified by its secular history, Catholic Social Teaching is closely bound to the various attempts that have been made at putting it into practice. Today, one of the most interesting ones is that of the enterprises' association Compagnia delle Opere. Particularly in Italy, the Compagnia wants to become an important point of reference for Small and Medium Enterprises, the heart of Italian production system, through a new socioeconomic concept, based on the Subsidiarity Principle and the growth of the nonprofit sector. In many ways, it aims to create an alternative to classical capitalism, also supported by Benedict's XVI recent social encyclical; nevertheless, numerous ambiguities persist.