The “temporary golden age” of international courts is likely over. States seeking to provide oversight mechanisms and individual remedies at the international level are likely to opt for less intrusive and more flexible alternatives to adjudication. This Article analyzes the phenomenon of international complaint mechanisms through a detailed case study of the Ombudsperson to the ISIL and Al-Qaida sanctions regime. The analysis reveals an in-built tension between principle and pragmatism: the Ombudsperson's institutional design falls short of the requirements that are essential for adjudication, but it nevertheless proves to be a surprisingly effective remedy for persons wrongfully listed. The Article makes the case for the establishment of such bodies, despite some of their inherent shortcomings.

To foreign investors, data, either collected and processed before or after market entry in the host state, can be regarded as a part of the investment and subject to the protection of the applicable international investment agreements (IIAs). China has been developing rigorous and stringent data governance such as data localization requirements and mandatory business-to-government data sharing, and has also concluded the world's second largest IIA regime that provides sweeping investment protection. There is a risk of incompatibility between China's national data policies and its IIA obligations. Foreign investors may challenge China's national laws and practices on data governance, for alleged breaches of investor's protection obligations in Chinese IIAs, or breaches of the data residency provisions in Chinese trade and investment agreements. As a result, potential exists for such claims to be brought against China in investor-state arbitration.

This article examines the impact of the pandemic on ride-hailing drivers and their mitigation strategies during lockdown in Africa. Ride-hailing has emerged as one of the latest paid-work opportunities for the continent's many unemployed. Yet, ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Bolt misclassify drivers to avoid regulation and responsibilities towards workers’ welfare. Drawing on 34 in-depth interviews with ride-hailing drivers, driver representatives and trade unions in South Africa and Kenya, this article makes two arguments. First, the gig economy in Africa provides work opportunities for the unemployed on the continent and simultaneously vitiates the working conditions through the commodification and informalisation of work. Second, the state-directed emergency measures act as a veneer to capital's efforts to commodify labour and the gig economy platforms have emerged as primary tools for it. Our account points to an urgent need for better regulatory systems to hold platform companies accountable and a collective bargaining mechanism in the gig economy.

This study investigates why and how entrepreneurial municipalism is manifested in the case of Turkey despite limited local government autonomy and capacity in the area of migration governance. This article suggests four entrepreneurial strategies to understand and explain the variation in municipal practices: local networking, community engagement, organizational adaptation, and city branding. The most common strategies adopted by municipalities are local networking and community engagement often based on external funding alternatives that bring rapid and locally contingent, yet less durable and future-oriented solutions to challenges of forced displacement in urban settings. Against this background, this article highlights the importance of pathways that cultivate a culture of diversity and inclusion in the context of sustainable local integration by investing more resources in organizational adaptation and city branding. Finally, this study suggests redefining the concept of municipal capacity in terms of performance by focusing on the entrepreneurial strategies employed by local governments in their day-to-day practices.

Through comparative study, case and data analysis, this article summarizes the key points of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law, and analyses the expected practical significance. Meanwhile, this article also discusses the shortcomings of the new patent law after the fourth amendment, and puts forward some suggestions for further improvement and refinement. The purpose of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law is mainly to make the Chinese patent system more in line with the current technological and economic development in China as well as international cooperative innovation. The core points of the fourth amendment include: (1) strengthening patent enforcement by adopting punitive damages to intentional patent infringement, and increasing the patent protection duration extension for new pharmaceuticals, etc. (2) Promoting patent implementation by adding ‘Open Licence’ rules and improving employees’ invention regulations; (3) Improving design patent protection by expending protection duration and adopting protection for partial designs. (4) Increasing the provisions about the grace period for patent filings of inventions related to public interests. The new Patent Law 2020 will gradually show its significant practical effects. At the same time, however, there are still some regulations that need to be further clarified and refined for ensuring better implementation of the new law.

South Asia, as a region, consists of several stateless groups as well as groups at the risk of statelessness. However, none of the South Asian states are parties to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, thus these states do not have specific obligations arising from this Convention to avoid, reduce, or prevent statelessness in the region. In this context, this article ascertains that despite the prevalence of statelessness, there exists state practice and opinio juris in South Asia that point to an emerging customary international law obligation to avoid, reduce, or prevent statelessness.

Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backlash despite the convergence? Wouldn’t that convergence of masculinity produce similar political imaginations? In this article we argue that in shaping the family and urban space, Çukur’s masculinities remain precarious vis-à-vis the hegemonic masculinity in “New Turkey.” Rather than being the society’s building blocks, Çukur’s families are suffocating spaces. At the same time, as opposed to cultivating neoliberal responsibility, Çukur’s familialism emerges as a space of solidarity in a precarious neighborhood to which state forces can hardly enter. Therefore, the neighborhood (mahalle) is not a space of consumption and surveillance but a haven against urban precarities. Despite their hierarchies and authoritarianism, Çukur’s men reject unquestioned political loyalty, conspicuous consumption, and entrepreneurship while endorsing the various impasses in family and urban life. Showing that absolute political obedience and economic dependence is not the only way out of neoliberal authoritarianism, Çukur confirms popular culture’s power in representing liminal spaces outside the state’s oppressive power and the markets’ commodifying logics.

In 1894, Jacob Barth proposed that the preformative conjugation in some of the Semitic languages goes back to a – generally bygone – inverse correlation between the thematic vowel of the stem and that of the conjugational prefix. Evidence for such a distribution is well attested in all branches of Central Semitic, yet it remains disputed whether it should be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic as well. This paper makes use of new data from a living Semitic variety, namely the Arabic dialect of Ḥugariyyah in the south of Yemen, where the pattern observed by Barth is still operative. We examine the interaction of the conjugational prefixes with the dialectal future tense marker š(a)-, and point to cases where the inverse correlation is violated. We outline a sequential development, starting with a phonetically-driven re-distribution of the preformative vowels, and followed by their reanalysis as integral to the prefix. We then propose that comparable developments may have taken place in other Semitic varieties, predominantly Akkadian, and thus view the Akkadian preformative conjugation as a derivative of a former inverse correlation, as reconstructed by Barth.

This paper compares the Ḥamzanāma (Book of Ḥamza) with the Shāhnāma (Book of Kings), the two most popular works performed by the storytellers of Safavid Iran (1501–1736), focusing on their heroes, Ḥamza and Rustam, respectively. Following an overview of the Ḥamzanāma that helps to identify its main intertexts, themes, and narrative elements: the Shāhnāma; the Islamic Alexander tradition; and ʿayyārī (trickery); the paper re-examines how Ḥamza is modelled after Rustam by looking at his epithets and narrative functions. It then turns to their differences, which are most discernible in Rustam's epithet used as the name of Ḥamza's enemy, the split between the ideals of jawānmardī (generosity) and ʿayyārī, and Ḥamza's unheroic weaknesses. This latter serves to emphasize God's compassion at his martyrdom while giving storytellers an impetus to continue their performances.