What kind of weapon is sex? Scholarship on the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) has broadened the “war story” by foregrounding women’s perspectives as fighters and by adding complexity to militiamen’s narratives. Yet, while gendering the analysis, scholarship has not examined the role that sexual relations and sexual practices played in the war. Meanwhile, Lebanese Civil War–era cultural production, including films, novels and popular magazines, display sexual transactions and sexual violence as if they were common instances in the war. In this article, I engage an intertextual ethnographic reading of sex and sexual violence, combining the civil war’s cultural archive with oral histories that I conducted with former militiamen and militia women across Lebanon’s political spectrum, and with cis- and trans-women who had transactional sex with militia members, as well as urban participatory mapping and interviews with other participants in the war. Mapping the sex economy and sexual relations in the war reveals the central roles that sex played both as a traffic in and of itself, and as a tool of political governance of civilians, through a traffic in women. I argue that militias used sex and the threat of it for multiple purposes: as a form of mobility that enabled other goods to circulate more smoothly; as a tool of intra-sectarian extraction and coercion and as a weapon of patriarchal governance that kept civilians in their designated neighborhoods. While sex enabled cross-sectarian connections, the violent use of sex thus also reinforced sectarian social boundaries. My findings build on scholarship that has foregrounded the political economy of the war and on intersectional feminist analyses of political governance in Lebanon. The article is indebted to this scholarship as well as to ongoing civil society efforts to document sexual violence in the war.

This essay makes the case that law in most of Africa has, since colonial times, been used as a framework of domination and imperialism. This has always been through repugnancy/supremacy clauses, which were predicated on the highly problematic assumption that European ways of knowing were superior to the African ones. This essay also demonstrates that, sadly, these clauses are still on the statute books of many African countries and continue to haunt the protection through law of Africa’s precious and unique tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The essay also shows that another way through whichthe development of African heritage was arrested through law was by criminalizing traditional Indigenous practices, which European imperial powers did not fully understand in terms of ontology. It is also argued that the same problems bedeviling the legal protection of African cultural heritage at the domestic level haunt this protection, even at the regional level(s). African regional courts continue to sadly apply alien notions of law to the exclusion of majority Africans. International law, being state-centric, has not been applied in the African context to revolutionarily protect African heritage. Where it has done so, it has been failed by the states or has been generally limited by its problematic colonial foundations. Finally, it is agued that African states need to de-elitesize, de-Westernize and decolonize the law if it is to effectively protect cultural heritage and property and make meaning to the ordinary African. This is urgent and imperative from a cultural, security and geopolitical vantagepoint.

This introduction provides context for this special feature on night work across time and place. It outlines past debates over the propriety and necessity of night shifts, as well as present and future challenges and opportunities for night workers, activists, and researchers.

Historians have been remarkably incurious about the legal dimensions of “informal empire.” This article shows that legal practices in fact created and sustained sovereign indeterminacy. Our focus is Pitcairn, a small, remote island in the Pacific settled in 1789 by a handful of Britons and Tahitians after the mutiny on the Bounty. British officials, legal professionals, island sojourners, and historians have advanced a jumble of claims, each attached to a particular timeline, about how Pitcairn became British. One prominent view is that a single British navy captain took possession of the island in 1838. We challenge this and other prevailing accounts by showing how repeated reconfigurations of island-imperial connections kept Pitcairn from being either enfolded into the empire or established as an independent entity. Intermittent visits by British naval officers gradually constituted a makeshift legal system, while rival factions of islanders steered imperial agents to support local schemes, including bids for island rule. For a century and a half, these processes held Pitcairn on the threshold of the empire. The significance of the narrative recounted here extends beyond one small island. This microhistory illustrates broad processes of interpolity ordering and locates the origins of sovereign indeterminacy in the “legal circuitry” of nineteenth-century empire.

This article discusses the development of lifestyle and value studies in the market research industry in relation to changing understandings of the consumer in late twentieth-century Sweden. It uses the analytical notion of the ‘sovereign consumer’ to argue that the market research industry both exploited and reinforced this perception of consumers through lifestyles as a means for categorisation. The analysis draws on material from the leading Swedish market research company at the time, Sifo, including its connections to the European industry. The results show how the industry sought to break up the supposedly homogenous postwar Swedish consumption landscape by constructing new consumer types that suited a more market-oriented society, and it was the confident, individualised consumer who sought self-fulfilment that was portrayed as the most attractive type. The article argues that the politics of marketing and advertising played an important part in shaping Swedish consumer culture during the market turn.

An expanding scholarship on interracial intimacy in colonial contexts has generally focused on cases of administrative disputes or judicial conflicts that brought “mixed couples,” “mixed-race families,” or “métis” to the attention of colonial authorities. But what of the lives and experiences of those who did not contest their legal status, remaining under the administrative radar and thus virtually invisible in the archives of the colonial state? This article tackles these issues in the context of the French colony of New Caledonia by analyzing the trajectory of a household established out of official sight, made up of a French settler, a Kanak woman, and their descendants. The goal here is to understand what this phenomenon of relative social invisibility reveals about the scope and limits of colonial domination “at ground level.” Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the article traces the conditions under which this family configuration was able to emerge and then endure for over fifty years. It finally disappeared after the death of the French settler, when each of the wider family groups—European and Kanak—to varying degrees sought to efface this awkward past within their respective social worlds.

Xinjiang’s location naturally makes it a focal point of the Silk Road (hereafter SR). But considering that for the first 60 years (circa 1920–1980) of Chinese archaeology—that is, over half of its development—the SR was rarely mentioned in scientific literature, the impact it has had on archaeological studies of Xinjiang remains unclear and poorly understood. With the eponymous Belt and Road Initiative (hereafter BRI) now a decade old and the field of Xinjiang archaeology approaching its centennial, this has become a critical subject of enquiry.

In this article, I recount the history of publication and discourse in Xinjiang, followed by a discussion of recent developments in archaeological practice instigated by the BRI. I contend that consistently using the SR to conceptualize the material record of Xinjiang, a prevalent approach in Eurasian scholarship, is based on flawed and unscientific presuppositions. Even in Chinese discourse today, the SR concept has become secondary to the state objective of building scientific and cultural infrastructure that is Chinese in method and approach, the goal of which is to amplify ‘discourse power’. Although the SR has served as a major banner for unifying studies on cross-cultural contact in Eurasian history, it is laden with complex layers of archaeological history intertwined with a century-old chauvinistic geopolitics that still reverberate globally today. As the scientific role of the SR becomes increasingly muddled, research referencing the SR must navigate the term’s biased presentist connotations to unveil the pertinent historical contexts, or consider alternative frameworks that resist totalizing narratives.

This article has two primary aims: first, to provide a non-sectorial history of business interest associations in Italy from 1861 to 1914, and second, to introduce a novel interpretation of the logic behind their collective actions. The study identifies three distinct periods in the evolution of these associations in liberal Italy, each defined by a unique collective action logic: the homogeneity phase (1861-1881), the fragmentation phase (1881-1898), and the conflict phase (1898-1914). In the homogeneity phase, there was a general unity among Italy’s political and economic elites, particularly among landowners who favored an antiprotectionist stance to support Italy’s agricultural export economy. This period was characterized by a relative uniformity of interests despite some conflicts. The fragmentation phase began in 1881, driven by the agricultural crises and the rise of new economic elites in the agrarian and industrial sectors. These new players challenged the traditional landowners and existing policies, leading to a diversification of economic interests and the splintering of their organizational representations. The final conflict phase occurred during the Giolittian Era, marked by the rapid development of organizations amid growing class struggles in both the industrial and agricultural sectors. This period saw significant adaptation within capitalist structures to counter the rising labor movement. The article ultimately examines the changing nature, scale, and scope of business interest organizations in response to the evolving phases of Italian capitalism from 1861 to 1914. It highlights how the transformation of these organizations reflects broader shifts in the relationships between the economy, state, and society.

In West German law, selling sex was held to be legal but ‘immoral’, a definition that prevented its recognition or protection as a profession. Despite this categorisation, however, women (and men) sold sex in streets, bars and backrooms across the country. They developed routines and relationships to manage their trade, while being excluded from many welfare state provisions and targeted by local police, health or welfare departments. Rising prosperity and the loosening of social norms in West Germany between 1949 and 1974 provide the backdrop to an exploration of how older notions of prostitution as ‘work-shy’ were confronted with the changing circumstances of urban commercial sex in this period. The article examines how politicians, police and welfare workers interpreted the continued existence of commercial sex in the context of rising security. It also highlights the disparate working practices of women who sold sex across the period.

In 1120 Notre Dame of Paris received a fragment of the True Cross from a former canon, Ansel, who had joined the First Crusade and become cantor of the Holy Sepulchre. The history of the relic was sought out, documented, inserted into the liturgy and in time revised according to political and cultural developments. This article reconstructs the story of the relic's arrival in Paris, and the way in which, through the successive narratives attached to it, it slowly gained and grew in meaning, giving definition to the Church of Paris and ultimately to the kingdom of France.

This article examines international and faith-based rural development from the 1950s to the 1980s, with rural Chile serving as a lens to explore the gendered intersections of these efforts. Rural education promoted rigid family models, separating feminine domestic responsibilities from masculine agrarian productivity. Drawing on archival records from the ILO, the WFP, and the German Catholic NGO Misereor, the article disentangles interactions between the Catholic-infused Instituto de Educacion Rural and international agencies. Despite competition among various players for control, a shared vision of distinct gender roles for men, women, and children prevailed. Neither liberation theology nor international development ideas significantly challenged these models. However, some young women navigated the ambiguities of Catholic education to break from rural domesticity. The violent regime change in 1973 further disrupted these norms, as men and women were increasingly driven into low-paid, seasonal agricultural labour within the expanding agro-industry.

Using Alabama as a case study of the beauty industry, this paper will demonstrate how licensing laws and regulations affected barbers and beauticians as they struggled to gain more clientele than their competitors. In the early twentieth century, white men dominated the market for cutting hair. Though the process started mid-century, by 1980, that relationship was inverted as women found themselves far outnumbering men. This research helps explain the gendered inversion of labor market trends while providing more general insights into the role of licensing laws in labor markets. Importantly, this work explores how race shaped labor market regulations, which affected and continue to affect labor markets and individual businesses in important ways.

The goal of this paper is to explain the multivariate causes of this important labor market reversal using an analysis of race, gender, and political economy. It will argue that the advocacy for restrictive licensing laws and regulations, the failure to innovate and adapt to new styles in hair, and the racial and gendered makeup of the Barbers, Beauticians, and Allied Industries (BBAI) led to the ultimate failure of the union and the overall decrease in barbers during the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the degree to which black women were represented on licensing boards and played a role in the unique structure of cosmetology groups and unions led and contributed to the proliferation of cosmetologists during the same period.