First coined in the United States in the 1990s, the notion of "culture wars" refers to the polarisation of public debate around societal and moral issues. As an increasingly popular way of looking at shifts in political divides, the concept of "culture wars" also constitutes a war of words that this issue aims to examine.

Self- and hetero-denomination are embedded in social interactions and carry political, legal, cultural and social conflicts. Through five case studies addressing the question in different religions, this special issue examines the social logics behind the scholarly and non-scientific patterns of religious naming processes.

This issue offers critical analyses that examine how institutional assessments, which have sometimes-intertwined certifying, selective and/or informative functions, influence teachers' practices and teaching choices and, as such, are used for the political management of teaching.

This issue sets out to explore the various discursive mechanisms of depoliticisation, including the disqualification of a political approach to the issues and subjects at stake, the narrowing of the space for democratic debate, and the invisibilisation of politics through the gradual imposition of supposedly apolitical rationalities.

Invoking "the Republic", calling oneself a "Republican"... Does the term Republic still have any meaning? The texts in this issue show that the polysemy of the word is less a reflection of the evanescence of its meaning than of a polymorphous debate on the definition of citizenship in a world marked by deepening individualism.

This issue of Tracés revisits the classic question of the social life of words and seeks to understand how the appearance of a term and its various potential meanings are socially produced and reproduced. it looks at the controversies surrounding the meaning of words and what they reveal about our societies and the functioning of language.