Populists emerge when distrust of state institutions or dissatisfaction with democracy convince voters that claims about conspiring elites blocking the general will are valid. We propose that these dynamics change when populists are incumbents; once they command institutions, their sustained support becomes contingent upon trust in the new institutional order, and they are held accountable for making people think democracy is working well. Newly collected data on party populism and survey data from Latin America show that support for populist parties in the region is conditioned by satisfaction with democracy as well as the incumbency status of populists. Dissatisfied voters support populist opposition parties, but support for populist incumbents is higher among those satisfied with democracy and its institutions. While democratic deficits and poor governance provide openings for populists, populists are held accountable for institutional outcomes.

This article offers the first detailed study of a manuscript preserving notes from the Modern Greek course held in 1801-2 by Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison in Paris. The notebook was kept by Karl Benedikt Hase, later Professor of Modern Greek at the French École de langues orientales vivantes, during his attendance of Villoison's course as a student. The article sketches first the historical context of the notebook, before an analysis of its contents, and finally a comparison with Hase's later published work on the primary text at its core, Amiras’ Greek translation of Costin's History of Moldavia.

This article uses the postwar trial of Fascist Italy’s most prominent general, Rodolfo Graziani, to examine issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian Fascism and colonialism after 1945. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as the nation’s colonial ‘hero’ despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. His position as minister of defence in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Salò Republic in 1943–5, however, threatened his heroic reputation as he worked with Nazi commanders and became responsible for atrocities against Italian civilians. After the Second World War, Graziani was tried for Nazi collaborationism at the Supreme Court in 1948, but his colonial conduct was left unquestioned. Unlike in the Nuremberg Trials in post-Nazi Germany, few Italians were tried for war crimes after 1945. This historical inquiry analyses the legal proceedings, transnational representation and outcome of Rodolfo Graziani’s 1948 trial as an emblematic case study to explore de-fascistisation and decolonialisation initiatives and their limitations in post-Fascist postcolonial Italy.

Fuentes Históricas del Perú (FHP) se ha convertido en un recurso imprescindible para la investigación histórica en el país. Esta iniciativa, liderada por estudiantes de universidades peruanas, representa un avance significativo en el proceso más amplio de creación de recursos digitales para la investigación histórica y el desarrollo de las humanidades digitales en Perú. En esta entrevista, realizada a fines de 2023 por Paulo Drinot con Jair Miranda Tamayo, Erika Caballero Liñán y Carlos Paredes Hernández, los tres fundadores de FHP, se ofrece una perspectiva sobre los orígenes de FHP, sus características y sus objetivos.

After Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress in February 1918, ‘self-determination’ was expected to be a guiding concept for a post-imperial order once the Great War had ended. Yet when the Covenant of the League of Nations was negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, the phrase was removed. Why and by whom? The existing literature offers little answer. This article argues that Wilson fought for inclusion of both the phrase ‘self-determination’ and the substance of it but was convinced to remove both by his own advisers and members of the British delegation. These men had an agenda at variance with Wilson’s, one focused on solidifying wartime transatlantic co-operation into a post-war governance model that would strengthen the British imperial position and bring the US into support of it. That agenda could not accommodate Wilsonian self-determination. Its resulting disappearance effectively reversed the post-imperial sense of wartime statements on self-determination made by Wilson and David Lloyd George. Anti-colonial movements, as the Paris negotiators knew, had taken inspiration from those promises. Their hopes for an organized dismantling of the imperial order were disappointed. Only after four decades of political violence would the pre-war order be replaced by one that better resembled Wilson’s abandoned vision.

In a collection of Hatt-ı Hümayuns (Imperial Edicts) at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, I located the Ottoman translation of the Greek Declaration of Independence. This article examines the terminology that Ottomans used to interpret the language employed by the revolutionary Greeks. The goal of this study is to examine Ottoman attempts to define the rebels and conceptualize the inner motive behind the revolt of their subjects. This article argues that confiscated documents such as the Greek Declaration of Independence contributed to the familiarization of the imperial authorities with the ideological background to the rebellion and the reasons that triggered it.

This article explores the hitherto understudied development of long-distance telephony in early 20th century China. It first explores the development of long-distance telephony before 1927 when it first appeared in China and was developed by foreign actors, the Qing government and various warlord regimes. The article then turns to the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) and compares the efforts of the Nationalist government in building long-distance telephone infrastructure with those of the Guangdong provincial government and other regional regimes. The article uses the case of long-distance telephony to make two larger arguments about state-building in Republican China (1912-1949). First, it brings in telecommunications development as a major element of state-building of both central and regional regimes. Second, building on recent work by scholars of Chinese Republican-era state-building, it emphasizes the importance of studying state-building from the vantage point of both central and regional regimes in Republican China. Additionally, the article demonstrates the value of an infrastructural approach to the study of political competition and formation in China during the Republican era.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Circuit of Detachment: Understanding the Fate of a Neoliberal Laboratory. By Kathya Araujo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 80. $22.00 e-book. ISBN: 1009310712.

Hilos tensados: Para leer el octubre chileno. Edited by Kathya Araujo. Santiago: Editorial USACH, 2019. Pp. 476. E-book. ISBN: 9789563034370. Open access at https://editorialusach.cl/producto/hilos-tensados-para-leer-el-octubre-chileno/.

18-O: Una radiografía desde la Academia. Edited by Claudio Espinoza and Luis Campos. Santiago: Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, 2020. Pp. 145. Open access at https://issuu.com/universidadacademia/docs/el_18_de_octubre/1.

Chile despertó. Lecturas desde la historia del estallido social de octubre. Edited by Mauricio Folchi. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 2019. Pp. 108. E-book. ISBN: 9789561911659. Open access at https://filosofia.uchile.cl/dam/jcr:c1c55bfb-f142-4415-8b68-15fe01ab1eb0/chile-desperto769-lecturas-desde-la-historia.pdf.

Chile en movimientos. Edited by Karla Henríquez and Geoffrey Pleyers. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2023. Pp. 246. E-book. ISBN: 9789878135625. Open access at https://filosofia.uchile.cl/dam/jcr:c1c55bfb-f142-4415-8b68-15fe01ab1eb0/chile-desperto769-lecturas-desde-la-historia.pdf.

Pensar el malestar: La crisis de octubre y la cuestión constitucional. By Carlos Peña. Santiago: Taurus, 2020. Pp. 340. $36.17 paperback. ISBN: 9789569635403.

Revuelta social y nueva Constitución. By Nelly Richard. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2021. Pp. 68. E-book. ISBN: 9789878130668. Open access at https://www.clacso.org/revuelta-social-y-nueva-constitucion-2/.

Octubre chileno: La irrupción de un nuevo pueblo. By Carlos Ruiz Encina. Santiago: Penguin Random House, 2020. Pp. 117. $10.78 paperback. ISBN: 9789566042259.

My contribution to this Forum highlights the ways that Michael Willrich’s story of early-twentieth-century anarchism intersects with and complicates existing scholarly accounts of the development of the American “surveillance state.” My essay reflects on the way the subjects of Willrich’s history—immigrant radicals, those who sought to subdue and deport them, and those who defended them—shine a new light on ongoing struggles over the boundaries of modern social regulation.

Using newspaper coverage of women's and girl's property offences in minor English and Irish courts, I analyze courts’ use of Catholic convent institutions between 1930 and 1959. Coverage of minor local hearings offers access to everyday cases, where boundaries between moral and legal transgression were blurred. I explore three interlocking themes in newspaper reports. First, those courts sent to convents were punished, at least in part, for breaching prevailing gendered moral norms. Second, judges represented convents as sites of moral reform; justifying convent detention by reinforcing gendered notions of damaged female agency. Finally, judges sent women and girls to convents even when they publicly resisted. In these ways, courts reinforced reliance on convents for gendered “moral reclamation.” In the conclusion, I explore the argument's implications for state reckoning with historical abuses in institutions like Ireland's Magdalene laundries, showing how abolition feminist legal histories can pose new questions about relationships between law and the experience of mass incarceration.

Kenya's first post-colonial government, under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, came to power in December 1963 having adopted emergency powers and security legislation that had been used in the colonial suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. Kenyan nationalists opposed this authoritarian and often draconian legislation in the 1950s for its abuses of human rights and excesses of state powers. This article explains how Kenya's nationalists came to accept and adopt this legislation, illiberal emergency powers becoming a key element in the protection of the fragile bureaucratic-executive state after 1963. An account is given of how colonial security officers used emergency powers in the counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau. In the decolonization process, the continuing activities of Mau Mau's Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the shifta secessionist movement in the Northern Frontier District, and political opposition from within the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party threatened Kenyan stability. To combat these challenges, colonial officers and nationalists alike agreed to retain colonial security laws, especially the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance. The legacies of colonial law therefore remain prominent in Kenya's security legislation and have been used as recently as 2023 to deal with perceived threats to the bureaucratic-executive state.

We conduct the first modern econometric analysis of the historical deaf population in the United States by incorporating deafness into a model of human capital. We find that the deaf population invested less in observable educational and physical human capital. Lower literacy, employment, and occupational scores also suggest that unobserved human capital investments were not substantial enough to improve productivity to the level of the hearing population. States that subsidized schools for the deaf provided deaf people with improved social capital and access to intangible goods that they pursued at the cost of higher economic achievement. Finally, we argue that substantial lifecycle differences between the hearing and deaf populations have implications for unbiased school attendance and employment rate estimation.