Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) occupies a distinctive place in the cultural and political history of the Italian Renaissance. To understand Botticelli is not merely to study an individual artist, but to examine the social forces, religious tensions, and power structures of late fifteenth-century Florence. His work reflects a society poised between humanist optimism and profound spiritual anxiety, a tension that defined the age. Born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Botticelli was trained in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, from whom he inherited a refined linear style and an emphasis on graceful, expressive figures. Unlike later High Renaissance artists such as Leonardo or Michelangelo, Botticelli showed limited interest in anatomical realism or mathematical perspective. Instead, his paintings privilege line, rhythm, and symbolic meaning—qualities that align closely with the intellectual climate of Medici Florence. Botticelli’s rise was closely tied to the patronage of the Medici fa...
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the international system has come to be defined by an unprecedented level of interdependence. Processes of globalization have not merely widened the scope of social interaction but have intensified and accelerated connections across both time and space. Advances in digital technology have acted as a powerful catalyst, generating dense networks of information and communication that bind individuals, states, and economic actors into a single, highly integrated global arena. This interconnectedness has also produced new and complex security challenges. Transnational terrorist networks, operating beyond the constraints of territorial borders, have demonstrated the capacity to strike across regions and continents. Their actions, particularly against symbols of secular and state authority, have led Western governments to frame security policy within the discourse of a “global war on terror,” thereby reshaping domestic and international politi...