Italian ultras have long been studied as a distinctive form of organized football support, yet their communicative practices, particularly stadium banners, remain underexplored through systematic large-scale analysis. This article examines the discursive and socio-political content of ultras banners in Italy’s top football league, conceptualizing them as a key component of ultras’ repertoire of action and a medium for publicly performing collective identities and oppositional claims. Drawing on scholarship on hooliganism and social movement theory, the study investigates dominant banner themes and assesses whether Italian ultras discourse extends beyond football-related issues. Methodologically, it combines a theoretically grounded frame scheme with a large-N corpus of approximately 8,000 banner images, from which text was extracted using OCR for quantitative text analysis. The findings show that while football-related content remains predominant, a significant share of banners conveys community and critique frames, including commemoration, solidarity and anti-system protest. Opposition to “modern football” emerges as the most recurrent critical theme. Overall, the findings indicate that ultras banners function as condensed socio-political texts through which collective belonging and grievances are articulated in a highly visible public arena, thereby providing support for interpreting ultras as social movement actors engaged in socio-political conflict beyond institutional channels.
International cultural-relations organisations increasingly present culture as a resource for climate transition, yet climate language does not itself demonstrate environmental transformation. This article examines how environmental sustainability became an explicit climate agenda within the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) between 2016 and 2026 and what form of institutionalisation followed. It conducts a longitudinal critical document analysis of 33 EUNIC, EU and EU–EUNIC policy, governance, programme and reporting documents, supplemented by a targeted robustness test of eight documents from four EUNIC member institutes. The analysis traces policy layering from developmental sustainability to strategic mainstreaming and distinguishes discursive, programmatic, operational and environmental-accountability dimensions. At network level, culturalising the green transition advanced more rapidly than common operational standards and environmental-accountability rules. Member-level evidence, however, shows substantial greening through emissions targets, travel restrictions, procurement rules and sustainability reporting. The resulting pattern is therefore not simple policy–practice decoupling but vertically fragmented institutionalisation: climate responsibility is formalised across multiple governance levels without being aggregated into comparable network-wide performance. This configuration reveals a trade-off between common accountability, member autonomy and the mutuality valued in international cultural relations, suggesting a proportionate model based on minimum environmental disclosure, adaptable member-level implementation and clearer partner authority.
Introduction: Research on populist attitudes increasingly treats anti-elitism and people-centrism as distinct components, but the substantive social implications of that distinction remain less clear. This article asks whether the two validated ESS10 dimensions are embedded in different institutional and symbolic relations: distance from political institutions for anti-elitism and markers of national belonging for people-centrism. Methods: Using European Social Survey Round 10 data from 31 European societies, the study reconstructs the Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism dimensions validated by Dolci and Melli (2026), documents their item content and measurement properties, and estimates parallel country-fixed-effects models for standardised factor scores. Formal coefficient-difference tests and targeted robustness checks assess whether their social profiles differ. Results: Anti-elitism and people-centrism are related but only modestly. Institutional distrust and low political interest are much more strongly associated with anti-elitism. National attachment is more strongly associated with people-centrism, and majority-group belonging shows the same directional contrast with lower precision. Immigration closure and threat have small positive zero-order correlations with people-centrism but no independent positive associations in the adjusted specifications. The central contrasts are robust to alternative scoring, weighting, survey-mode checks, country exclusions, and a larger-sample specification that omits household income. Discussions/Conclusions: The findings reveal differentiated institutional and symbolic profiles, showing how Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism are embedded in distinct configurations of political distance and social belonging. People-Centrism is associated more clearly with national belonging than with immigration exclusion once broader social and political correlates are taken into account. This differentiation gives substantive meaning to the distinction between the two validated dimensions, while the ESS10 indicators capture only specific aspects of these broader constructs.
The article examines the reinforcement of border control mechanisms and increasing adoption of surveillance technologies in the EU member states of Greece, Italy and Spain. This reinforcement of borders aligns with the securitisation of migration prevalent across Europe and these member states can be seen as principal actors due to their spatial position. This article situates these member states and their border policing and surveillance technologies within the broader literature of border management, securitisation of migration and the European migration dynamics. The article charts out the existing framework of border policing, giving significant attention to the national authorities and argues that both border policing and surveillance technologies have been enhanced in these states. A comparative assessment of these countries’ border mechanisms is also embedded alongside contestations from a normative perspective.
