The influence of Marcel Mauss' study The Gift has largely been confined to the study of the circulation of goods and the social relations in which their transfer is embedded. One of Mauss' principal aims, however, was to show the political importance of gift-giving in averting the recourse to violence. In this paper, his approach to the offering, receiving and reciprocating of gifts is used to analyse the phenomenon of pentimento – the exchange of confessions for reduced sentences by terrorists and mafiosi which has become a central feature of the effort to combat organised violence in Italy since 1980.

This paper examines from a comparative perspective the first historically documented case of transitional justice: the restoration of the Athenian democracy in 403 BC. It analyzes in particular the rhetoric of amnesty, justice, reconciliation and revenge and the discursive strategies informing the prosecutions and litigation which followed the transition. Comparison of the Athenian experience with modern situations of transitional justice helps to identify key features which made the Athenian reconciliation so successful.

Chosen during its negotiated transition to democracy in 1989, Hungary's Constitutional Court has emerged as one of the most powerful institutions of its kind. Drawing on round table transcripts and interviews with key participants, this paper presents a bargaining model of institutional choice that demonstrates how the greater patience of the opposition parties forced the ruling party to make significant concessions that increased the authority and independence of the court.

Car driving has received little attention from sociologists. Existing analyses highlight the irrationality of drivers, victims of an ‘illusion of control’, a ‘bias of optimism’ or influenced by social and cultural factors. Using qualitative and quantitative information, this article suggests a new perspective, in which driving is regarded as a ‘social activity’ (in the Weberian sense) and it is presumed that drivers operate on a cognitive rationality.

This article discusses the theory and practice of multicultural citizenship in liberal states. Regarding theory, I point to the shortcomings of both ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ approaches to justify minority rights. Regarding practice, the state-centered notion of multicultural citizenship defects from the decentered accommodation of multicultural minority claims in functionnally differentiated societies. It also runs counter to a trend toward de-ethnicization in liberal states, in which the cultural impositions of the majority on minority groups are growing thin, thus removing the case for minority rights.