This article investigates the critical and often overlooked role of families of missing persons in peacebuilding when the hostilities of armed conflict cease. The unresolved fate of missing persons creates ambiguous loss, a state of chronic psychological and social uncertainty that structurally impedes communal recovery and undermines the fragile foundations of peace. While the issue of missing persons is typically framed as a humanitarian and legal challenge, this study argues that families of the missing are uniquely positioned to act as transformative peacebuilding agents.

Drawing on primary data collected across three distinct settings – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Nepal – the study employs a qualitative, comparative case study methodology. It analyzes how families of the missing, driven by the imperative of establishing the fate of their loved ones, actively engage across conflict divides and contribute to lasting social and political transformation.

Findings demonstrate that the search for the missing necessitates engagement with individuals and groups on the opposing side, effectively forcing the creation of cross-community relationships. Families of the missing successfully overcome deep-seated suspicion, hostility and sometimes political pressure from their own communities to forge solidarity, based on shared experience of loss, with other families. This process enables relational reciprocity and the cognitive reframing of former enemies, leading to the humanization of the “other”. These encounters produce profound personal and interpersonal transformation, which in turn can catalyze the challenging of antagonistic community-level narratives and support broader societal reconciliation.

Families of the missing leverage their legitimacy and humanitarian framing of the issue to become powerful agents of structural change. They challenge exclusive, one-sided interpretations of conflict, advocate for a universal and broad vision of justice, and demand truth-telling and accountability. By acknowledging victimhood on all sides and articulating an understanding of peace based on mutual recognition of suffering, families help to heal social divisions and address the root causes of conflict. Through their focus on truth-seeking and cross-community relationship-building, families of the missing can make an essential contribution to the prevention of renewed conflict and the establishing of a foundation for sustainable peace.

A medicinal herbal tea classified as a traditional herbal medicinal product cannot, in principle, be marketed with the organic logo. The position may be otherwise where such an indication on the packaging has been approved by the competent authority on account of the beneficial effect of the organic production on the therapeutic characteristics of the medicinal product.

The global order is undergoing significant transformations with far-reaching implications for international criminal justice. These shifts pose an existential challenge to core crimes accountability while re-shaping its pursuit. As the liberal order recedes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) faces a crisis driven by absolute sovereignty’s reassertion, weakened multilateral governance and increasing political and coercive pressures from powerful states. Simultaneously, these developments promote decentralised accountability, fostering the emergence of a polycentric system of international criminal justice. Trends in re-nationalisation, hybridisation and regionalisation align accountability with a more pluralistic, fluid global order. In this context, the ICC is not obsolete but requires a redefined role. While no longer the apex of international criminal justice, its existence remains crucial to addressing the risks of decentralised accountability. The Court, particularly its Office of the Prosecutor, should reconfigure strategies around positive complementarity, repositioning itself as a co-ordinating hub within this polycentric system.

Over a decade of conflict has ruptured protective layers for children, adolescents and caregivers in Syria, resulting in heightened mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) needs. Despite growing recognition of the potential of MHPSS in conflict zones, there are few documented cases of integrated, intergenerational programmes that work with children and their caregivers in parallel to strengthen child socio-emotional skills and the caregiving environment at scale. This study examines two nationally implemented MHPSS programmes, Sawa (“Together”) for children aged 6–17 years and Sanadi (“My Rock”) for their caregivers, co-created with families and delivered across Syria. Through a mixed-methods approach, early results suggest strong potential for intergenerational, trauma-informed, community-based MHPSS interventions in strengthening emotional regulation, relational communication and responsive caregiving among families living through armed conflict and protracted crisis.

The Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa (OHADA) was developed to introduce simple, up-to-date business laws in its member states. It has various goals, including harmonizing business laws, attracting foreign investment in its member states and promoting broader economic integration across Africa. At its initial development stage, OHADA chose a path dependence route, which positively impacted the achievement of some of its initial goals. While OHADA has been widely praised for its efficient business laws, its commitment to path dependence is likely to create a trap for the organization, hindering its further progress. This article analyses the unification of law in African former colonies from the critical perspective of path dependence theory. It examines how OHADA’s legal choices have impacted its various objectives at different stages of its development. Ultimately, the article proposes that OHADA amend its legal framework to achieve its broader aspirations.

The traditional account of the criminal trial holds that its fundamental purpose is to search for the truth—that is, the truth of whether the accused factually committed the alleged crime. However, purely truth-seeking accounts, as well as more nuanced side-constraint and pluralist accounts, fail to adequately explain the relationship between the epistemic principles and those of political morality shaping the criminal trial. In response, this article proposes that we understand the criminal trial first and foremost in terms of its purpose as a public procedure concerned with the legitimate use of coercive state powers against a particular person. Specifically, the criminal trial is a procedure that calls upon the state to provide a public justification for exercising its criminal law powers to convict and punish the accused. This account preserves the importance of establishing factual guilt because doing so is an essential part of the state’s justificatory burden.

This paper examines the 2016 trial of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi by the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the lenses of discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology, with a focus on how trial actors navigated legitimacy challenges. Al Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, was charged with the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu, which were UNESCO World Heritage sites. This paper argues that the trial actors used a rhetorical “local-to-global parallelism” which sought to consolidate a global range of constituencies and legitimate the ICC’s actions both normatively and sociologically. The local-to-global parallelism served to “talk into existence” a broad-based victimhood, which reinforced the court’s symbolic authority and its claims to jurisdiction. It also relied heavily on intertextual connections between the ICC and UNESCO, thereby legitimating the prosecution of cultural heritage destruction as a grave international crime.

This article revitalises the debate on European citizenship by redefining its meaning within the EU and contributing to a broader understanding of constitutional transformation under conditions of post-national governance. Moving beyond the comparative method that evaluates European citizenship through the lens of national citizenship, it reorients the analytical focus to the interaction between national and European rights and introduces the concept of European Material Citizenship. This new form of citizenship reflects a normative shift in the regulation of social, political and economic relations within a constitutional order reshaped by European integration. While national citizenship synthesised the normative ideal constituting and regulating the relationship between the nation-state and individuals, European Material Citizenship synthesises the normative ideal governing a far more complex constitutional geometry – composed of European institutions, Member States and citizens.