The article uses the scandal surrounding Jackson Yee, a state-endorsed celebrity and household name in China, as a case study to critically examine how the “government–industry–fan–platform” alliance co-conducts what we call “collaborative celebrity PR” to rescue co-opted stars from scandal. We find that the relationship between the four agents is symbiotic but that the government plays the most important “arbitrator” role. We argue that the state-endorsed celebrities face an inherent dilemma of “power(lessness)” in which they have to dedicate more effort towards propaganda and behave in a moral and exemplary way to please the government to gain more political capital and power and minimize their own precarity. We also highlight the uncertainty and risks using celebrities in its pop propaganda can bring to the CCP: if a state-endorsed celebrity cannot be saved, the scandal can damage the legitimacy and reliability of the Party propaganda.

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) is best known today for pioneering a novel synthesis between social anarchism and ecology in the 1960s. Both his writing and his activism had a substantial impact on the young New Left and the radical ecology movement, and were in polemic dialogue with radical environmentalists, anarcho-primitivists, and deep ecologists. This article explores the development of Bookchin’s early political thought within the framework of a “postwar environmental moment” and uncovers how he uniquely politicized ecological science in the 1950s. I argue that Bookchin’s early writings were a critical response to both the dire environmental issues of his time and the limitations he perceived in Old Left politics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Bookchin’s understanding of ecological science was not simply a product of a turn to anarchism, but was directly linked to debates among 1950s ecologists, typically overlooked in the recent scholarship on Bookchin.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the United Fruit Company (UFC) convinced tens of thousands of passengers a year to tour the Caribbean aboard its Great White Fleet. Many were awed by the ships’ pristine white hulls, lush interiors, surprisingly cool cabins, and on-deck swimming pools—each a means of both enjoying and mitigating the effects of the tropics. The fleet, along with the company's two hotels in Jamaica, augured a new era of leisurely travel in the Americas, but few grasped the extent to which their stays and the environments they experienced were shaped and conditioned by the preceding infrastructures of imperialist enterprise. Using literature published by the UFC and its subsidiary, Fruit Dispatch, along with travelogues and technical publications, this article looks at the distribution networks used by the United Fruit Company to ferry tourists to the Caribbean and “exotic” produce back to the US. It traces the movements of people and goods on- and offshore and reveals the technologies that connected the comfort of passengers above deck to the health of freight below, as well as the company's architectures of leisure to the infrastructures and violence of extractive industry.

In 1206 Chinggis Khan replaced the warring factions of Mongolia with a single polity, the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Mongqol Ulus). The ulus was ruled by a khan, who allocated pastures, households and revenues to his relatives as shares (qubi). Chinggis granted the first allocation to his brothers and senior sons in 1207 but many more redistributions took place in the coming decades. Many of these appanages grew so large that their holders challenged the khan's dominance and even broke free of his control to form their own polities (uluses). This article will explore the fluidity of the Mongol appanage system by taking the qubi of Chinggis Khan's grandson Ariq Böke (d. 1266) as a case study. The Ariq Bökids established their own secondary ulus in Inner Asia, before fragmenting and lending their support to neighbouring khans in the fourteenth century.

A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.

To the limited materials available for the study of the early Muslim tradition of renunciant piety (zuhd) may now be added the papyrus P.Vindob. AP 1854a–b of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, which is edited, translated, and annotated in this article. Its two incomplete and damaged leaves contain four texts that constitute a small anthology of meditations on the imminence of death and judgment: psalms 7–13 of the Islamic ‘Psalms of David’ (Zabūr Dāwūd); a collection of narratives surrounding the death of the Prophet Muḥammad; a collection of material about grief over the deaths of the Prophet and Fāṭima and over the slaughter of al-Ḥusayn's party at Karbala; and a dialogue between God and the prophet David about the rewards of the afterlife. The papyrus confirms that the long Muslim tradition of rewriting the ‘Psalms of David’ originated in early renunciant circles. It also illustrates the process whereby a ninth-century preacher could compile a notebook of sermon material from a wide range of sources, including poetry, hadith, and an apocryphal scripture. It also shows how much the still-underdeveloped study of early Islamic piety stands to benefit from the even less-studied resource of Arabic literary papyri.

This article seeks to compare the policy histories of the legislative term limits in France and the United States. Both nations debated, initially adopted, and then ultimately rejected imposing term limits during the foundational moments of their democracies. Reemerging in the 1990s in America, proposals to refresh government through such limits have been successful in the states and have failed at the national level. The idea regained prominence in France when Emmanuel Macron supported it during his 2017 presidential election. Although Macron eventually abandoned the proposal, the revival of this debate is an opportunity to draw broad parallels but identify critical differences between the two nations in the philosophical debates over term limits and the ways that leaders have embraced or abandoned them to fulfill their political goals. We show how the idea circulated between the two nations, without a parallel exchange of evidence about its effects.

How does Durkheim's thought relate to colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial theory? To answer these questions, I first examine his explicit discussions of empire and colonialism, which are more extensive than previously thought. I then explore the implications of his general perspective—particularly his theories of anomie and morality—for discussions of colonialism and empire. I find that Durkheim was very critical of violent forms of colonialism and imperialism and that he firmly rejected the civilizational and racist discourses that underpinned modern European, and French, colonial conquest. He rejected forms of empire that exist “without internal acquiescence from their subjects,” and that engage in “conquest via annexation” and military imperialism. As an alternative he advocated an “international system of states” based on a universal but socially and historically grounded morality. The article examines the ways Durkheim's thinking pushed beyond existing French understandings and criticisms of colonialism. I then examine the afterlives of his ideas in later research on colonialism by French sociologists. The conclusion considers postcolonial critiques of Durkheim and adumbrates a Durkheimian theory of colonialism and empire.

In Ray Cummings's loony 1922 novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, a man known only as the Chemist discovers a beautiful woman in a subatomic world in the gold of his mother's wedding ring. Smitten, he figures out how to shrink himself to join her. Upon his return to our world, he finds that although seven days passed for him while “in the ring,” he has arrived back only forty hours after leaving. Over drinks, the Banker asks him to explain how the difference is possible. The Chemist replies, “To get a conception of this change you must analyze definitely what time is. We measure and mark it by years, months, and so forth, down to minutes and seconds, all based upon the movements of our earth around its sun. But that is the measurement of time, not time itself.” He then turns to the Big Business Man and asks, “How would you describe time?” “The Big Business Man smiled. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘is what keeps everything from happening at once.’”

This article investigates the developments of hawker discourse and movements across the Malay(si)an peninsula in the first decade of independence. Looking at news coverage and municipal records, it examines the contingent, gendered, and egalitarian qualities of hawking as labour which led to its adoption by people experiencing hardship, and influenced the ways in which municipal authorities and the public discussed hawkers. In effect, hawkers, long significant to the historical and cultural systems of Malayan trade, were recharacterized as vulnerable subjects at the urban margins. The article then explores how local administrations understood and regulated hawkers through categories of location, race, and food, shaping the politics and governance of hawkers in public spaces. To engage with such governance, hawkers formed associations that protested against injustice and established dialogue with municipal and town councils, impelling authorities to consider a more significant inclusion of hawking in street planning. Throughout the period, the potential and limits of hawker inclusion in post-colonial public spaces became subject to significant debate between municipal authorities, political representatives, and hawkers. As local administrations eventually deepened their commitment to support hawkers, they also expanded their regulation, signifying a cautious imperative to legitimate hawkers and influencing the logic of post-independence planned spaces.

This article traces how the Yemeni-origin Sufi order of Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya and its ritual litany of al-Ḥaddād, with chants and prayers for the Prophet and his descendants especially from Hadramawt, became part of everyday Muslim devotional practices in Malabar through immigrant networks of Hadrami Sayyids. Competing, sometimes rivalling, and appropriating other Sufi religiosities, the Alawi order meaningfully involved within the theo-legal Sufi discourses that have been remoulding the Sufi cosmopolis in the Indian Ocean. By focusing on two notable early immigrant Sayyids in Malabar, this article argues that the successful placement of the ʿAlawī order within the Sufi cosmopolis and the permeation of the ritual was a complex socio-religious project that was brought forth by various aspects of the sacred genealogy, Alawi Sufi writings, Sufi activism, and the effective utilisation of Hadrami immigrant networks.

The memory of the early-1940s Greek famine has rarely been researched. A narrative attributing full responsibility to the Axis occupying forces, mostly Germans, and focusing almost exclusively on the 1941–2 ordeal of Athens was shaped by 1950. This became the official collective (cultural) memory and remained largely unchanged until the early twenty-first century. The financial crisis that Greece experienced since 2009 further enhanced this memory, bringing the focus exclusively on the German responsibility. This article interrogates the adult fiction works that dealt with this famine in the period 1950–2019, exploring whether these reflect the official collective memory and its changes. Furthermore, it explores how fiction has dealt with two aspects of the famine that are not included in the official collective memory: the black market and famine prostitution. The selected fiction works are utilised as ‘archives’ of the collective memory that prevailed at the time of their writing.

How do term limits affect dyadic ideological representation? Despite reformers’ claims that term limits should improve legislators’ connections to their constituents, much empirical political science research suggests that term limits actually break that electoral connection. In this study, I use a regression discontinuity design to measure the ideological gap in how Democrats and Republicans represent evenly matched districts and then explore how this gap varies across settings with and without state legislative term limits in effect. Across a number of specifications, my results are consistent with term limits exacerbating rather than improving dyadic representation. This study contributes to a growing scholarly consensus that term limits do not improve, and may worsen, state legislative representation.

Legislative term limits garnered public support because they promised to drain the swamp, removing entrenched incumbents from office. There is often a partisan dimension to this appeal since “the swamp” that is to be “drained” has often been controlled by one party for a lengthy period. However, it remains unclear to what extent term limits realign partisanship within US state legislatures. Using newly available turnover data, this research evaluates how legislative partisanship shifted after the implementation of term limits in state legislatures and continued over 20 years. The initial surge effects of term limits did appear to level the playing field between parties. The passage of term limits reversed party majorities in state legislatures, primarily benefiting newfound Republican majorities. These findings have important implications for current understandings of legislative term limits, as more states revisit these proposals, and provide insight into party trends at the state legislative level.

Discussions of term limits are happening in the United States and abroad. In July 2024, President Biden announced his support for limiting the number of years that federal judges may serve. Surveys suggest that limits for judges are popular with Americans.1 Relatedly, voters have historically supported term limits for members of Congress, with the most recent survey (from July 2023) finding support among 87%.2 For now, limits are unlikely to be imposed on federal judges or members of Congress, but there are recent changes in the states. Voters in North Dakota imposed limits on their state legislators in 2022, and those limits will take effect in 2028. In Michigan, also in 2022, voters shortened the long-standing lifetime limits for their legislators from 14 to 12 years. Discussions or reforms, including the elimination of limits, have also occurred outside of the United States. In Russia, voters seemingly reset the term limits that applied previously to President Vladimir Putin, thereby allowing him to serve in office until 2036. In China, where limits for various leaders including the president were first added to the country’s constitution in 1982, limits were abolished in 2018. Although these are prominent examples of limits being lifted, a remarkable number of new limits have been enacted elsewhere, with limits on executives being imposed in 17 countries within the past decade alone. To date, only a handful of countries, most of which are in the Americas, have legislative limits.3 Conversely, nearly every country limits the service of judges.4

Jacob Lorenz (1883–1946) was a pathbreaking Swiss statistician and sociologist turned right-wing intellectual who promoted a revision of Swiss society and politics. In 1938, the Turkish government invited Lorenz to conduct fieldwork and submit a report on the country's high cost of living. Recent studies of transnational corporatism might lead us to assume that this invitation was the result of a shared corporatist ideology. Using Lorenz's report and travel writings alongside archival documents, however, this article argues against the hypothesis that Lorenz's mission served as a conduit of transnational corporatist interaction and influence. Instead, Lorenz's mission is best understood in its Turkish domestic political context, while its findings were shaped by Lorenz's personal ideological ambivalence. By highlighting the ideological tensions inherent in Lorenz's mission, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on ‘illiberal internationalism’.