This is an ambiguous word. A very easy one to use and a very hard one to define, and in recent years has led to juridical labyrinths and massive resorting to hypocrisy. In the West the technically acceptable definition mainly follows the British Terrorism Act 2000, which among European ones is the only one to attempt a full definition.

The Armenians descend from Indo-European populations who, between the 7th and 6th century B.C., settled in the area which is currently Southern Caucasia. For centuries they gave birth to independent states and according to some historians, they were the first to adopt Christianity as the State religion as early as the 4th century A.D. In the 15th century, after having been the theatrical stage for various invasions by the Romans, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Persians, the land of the Armenian population fell under Ottoman rule. In the 18th century the transcaucasian region became the target of the Russian Tsarists who, after having lost Persia in 1828, assimilated thousands of Armenians inside their own Empire, which they aimed to expand.

Literally a diaspora is the “dispersion of a people leaving their homeland and migrating in various directions”. The word itself, which derives from Greek “to sow here and there”, already appeared in The War of the Peloponnesus by Thucydides, and was later used to indicate the dispersion of the first Christian communities in the days of the Roman Empire.

Appeals to personal honor often seem to belong to the past, conjuring images of gentlemen in wigs dueling at dawn; or worse, of blood-soaked Achaeans storming the walls of Troy. And yet Italian criminal law still recognizes crimes of honor (defamation and insult) whose core seems to be a private harm to the honor of the victim. Indeed, until relatively recently—August 5 1981, to be precise—the Italian criminal code treated the murder of a spouse caught in flagrante delicto as punishable with a lighter sentence of three to seven years’ imprisonment (when the sentence for other murders is a minimum of 21 years), provided the act was committed in a state of anger due to the offense to his honor or that of his family.[1] Until the same time, under Article 544 of the Italian criminal code, the rape of an unmarried woman by an unmarried man was not punishable if the woman consented to marry her rapist; the marriage in question being a matrimonio riparatore, because it restored the “lost” honor of the woman.

An ethnic and linguistic minority in the Near East, the Kurds now live divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, in a region unofficially known as Kurdistan, where they have always been the object of persecution and oppression. The Kurdish issue arose after World War I following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.

Mediterranean: literally the sea in the middle of lands, a bordering sea, and linking these lands. This characteristic makes the Mediterranean a sea that does belong to all the countries overlooking it, but to none in particular, a shared sea, not available for becoming private property.

The Organization of the United Nations is the largest international organisation and in fact includes almost all the states existing on the planet. There are currently 192 member states. The seat of the UN is in New York and the current Secretary General is the South Korean Ban Ki-Moon.

After the Nineties of the 20th Century tolerance returned to the centre stage in political thought, returning to fashion a concept that has certainly been central within the framework of political thought in modern times, but that appeared to have become a closed book with the French Revolution that on its flags bore the words freedom, equality and fraternity, and not tolerance.