This article investigates ministerial instability within autocratic regimes, with a particular focus on the case of Argentina. Using an original dataset on ministerial tenures in four key portfolios – Economy, Education, Foreign Affairs and Health – across seven Latin American countries between 1945 and 2020, we show that, in contrast to broader regional patterns, Argentina’s military governments experienced exceptionally high levels of cabinet turnover. Applying Kaplan–Meier survival analysis and process-tracing methods, we examine two critical autocratic periods: the Argentine Revolution (1966–73) and the National Reorganisation Process (1976–83). Our findings reveal that political fragmentation, intensified by the incorporation of competing civilian actors and complex institutional arrangements, undermined ministerial stability. Through detailed case studies of El Cordobazo and Law No. 21.431, we demonstrate that a fragmented system of rule, rather than inter-branch military rivalries or formal institutional designs, accounts for the instability observed. This study challenges prevailing assumptions that autocracies are more likely to maintain bureaucratic continuity and contributes to a broader understanding of elite competition and internal dynamics within authoritarian regimes.

This article focused on the erotic encounters between male characters in the Ottoman frontier epic of the Battalname that led to conversion to Islam. It argues that these moments of eroticism between two male warriors parallel other literary and cultural expressions wherein male-male eroticism was the norm. Romantic and erotic encounters in these frontier epics have focused on the much more limited cases of female-male interactions, obscuring the fact that these were more often the exception. While male-male eroticism has been largely studied for elite literary works, narratives considered to be expressions of folktale have been treated as if they belong to separate cultural worlds. I show that some of the language of eroticism and conversion had strong parallels between the two forms of cultural expression and thus highlight the normalized all-male space of eroticism both in the Ottoman frontier and in nascent Ottoman urban culture.

This article argues that antifascism began to acquire a new meaning in the early 1990s, making a vital contribution to the emergence of a national antiracism movement in Italy and the spread of an antiracist culture built on new foundations. This thesis is based on observations of Italian society. The first section reconstructs the operations of the association Senzaconfine and analyses the contents of its publication of the same name. The middle section describes an exhibition entitled La menzogna della razza, its connection to the ‘Pantera’ student protest movement and its continued travels around Italy until recent years. The final section is dedicated to the reaction of several segments of the youth population and political community to the neofascist Luca Traini’s attempted racial massacre in Macerata in 2018. The article concludes that although the new focus on antiracism is not the only way the Italian antifascist tradition is being remoulded, it remains one of the most important, given the issues we face in a globalised, postcolonial world.

Gelman v. Uruguay (2011) was a watershed moment in Uruguayan civil society’s quest for accountability, prompting official repeal of the country’s 1986 Amnesty Law. Much scholarship about the case centres around the immediate aftermath of the decision, largely on initial compliance and cautious optimism for accountability. Yet the analysis of a longer timeframe reveals mixed results. The article examines how initial momentum unravelled as conditions for compliance weakened amid backlash against the judgment. It reveals the challenges with implementing criminal accountability measures, even in established democracies with otherwise strong human rights records, and argues for the importance of understanding compliance as a non-linear process.

The essay deals with the rape component of the Muslim Turkish massacres of Christian Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians during the years between 1894 and 1924 and the pertinent archival sources. During the three bouts of massacre, amounting to staggered genocides, in 1894–1896, 1915–1916 and 1920–1924, in which the Muslim Turks, under Ottoman imperial governments and, subsequently, under Ataturk’s Nationalist/republican rule, murdered some two million Christians, tens of thousands of Christian women were raped and/or forcibly abducted to Muslim households and Islamized. While almost all Turkish official records of these events have been destroyed or slicked away, archives in the West - US, German, French and British state archives and archives of missionary societies then operating in Asia Minor - are open to researchers and abound with materials that describe and analyze the massacres and the rapes and abductions that accompanied them. The essay lays out what happened and why, and how researchers have traced what happened.

To inhabit the city is to inhabit a layered and contentious space, a space whose meaning cannot be comprehended without closely navigating its layers. This article analyses two images and representations – a tweet and a song – as narrative forms that reveal the palimpsestic nature of Nairobi in the context of the city’s expressway, which was constructed between September 2020 and July 2022. I read the expressway as a physical infrastructure for mobility as well as a material and metaphorical representation of urban marginalization, which at the same time materializes various forms of social marginalization and exclusion that predate it. The narrative forms, critically analysed together, underscore the palimpsestic nature of the city that would otherwise be obscured should readers be blinded by the iconicity of the expressway. I consider both the images, the tweet and the song alongside the arguments of Michel de Certeau, Karin Barber and Setha Low on urban aesthetics. While de Certeau provides lenses through which we understand the practices of everyday life in the city, Barber makes a case for urban infrastructure and the growth of popular culture, and Low focuses on how power relations influence the social construction of space. Ultimately, I argue for a reading of urban spaces using a synthesized literary approach as a nuanced way of understanding such spaces. This approach weaves together different media and approaches – both textual and visual – in its reading of the materialities of urban spaces and how meaning is constructed and contested within those spaces.

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices, and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly. It does so through an examination of 195 petitions that apprentices or their supporters submitted to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, which sought the cancellation of their indentures on grounds of ‘immoderate correction’. It offers a quantitative overview of the surviving petitions, examining the proportion that featured allegations of violence, the terms and level of detail in which violence was described, and its relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to reconstruct the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints to legal authorities. Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, the material considered here suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. The final section considers what implications this might have for our understandings of violence, gender and apprenticeship, and a genre of document – the petition – that provides access to these issues.