This article examines the near collapse of the legal fiction of extraterritoriality in nineteenth-century international law. Rather than treating extraterritoriality as a coherent doctrine or a straightforward instrument of imperial domination, it argues that the fiction functioned as a contested and unstable juridical device whose inadequacies exposed deeper tensions within international law. By distinguishing between two strands of critique—restrictive and reconstructive—the article reinterprets nineteenth-century debates as responses to the fiction’s conceptual failure rather than as efforts at technical refinement. Restrictive critiques, advanced primarily by Belgian and Italian jurists, rejected the fiction for legitimizing excessive jurisdictional privileges that conflicted with emerging principles of sovereignty, secularism, and constitutional equality in Europe. Reconstructive critiques, by contrast, abandoned the fiction while seeking to preserve immunity and consular jurisdiction by re-grounding them in treaties, capitulations, or functional necessity. This divergence explains why the decline of fiction did not entail the disappearance of privilege but rather its partial re-foundation on narrower, more positivist grounds. Finally, the article demonstrates how these European debates circulated transnationally, furnishing non-Western actors with conceptual resources to contest unequal treaty regimes. Extraterritoriality thus emerges not as a settled imperial doctrine but as a productive failure that illuminates the structural instability of nineteenth-century international law.

Protecting biodiversity on the planet through business involvement is a priority for many governments and citizens. To do this requires balancing different social, financial, and ecological objectives with economic output. This editorial questions what is the right way to do this based on considering different forms of capital, such as natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial. This enables renewed interest in the natural environment in terms of business involvement in issues such as climate change and the circular economy.

There is compelling evidence that humanitarian staff and volunteers face an increased risk of adverse mental health conditions due to their work, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and burn-out. This article first outlines the mental health consequences associated with working in the humanitarian sector, linking these outcomes to contextual, operational and organizational psychosocial risk factors. Building on both the evidence available and the theoretical models in mental health at the workplace, and going beyond solely offering psychosocial support interventions, we propose an evidence-based framework to guide protective actions at the individual, group, leader, organizational and overarching contextual levels (the IGLOO model), tailored to the specific challenges of humanitarian contexts. Based on our experience with the International Committee of the Red Cross, we present two examples of utilizing this framework within two interventions: (1) training managers to strengthen practices that promote and protect well-being, address psychosocial risk factors, identify individuals showing signs of distress and facilitate safe access to psychological support, and (2) applying a psychosocial response framework to support staff following critical incidents. Finally, we discuss the advantages and challenges of adopting an integrated psychosocial approach to staff care, drawing implications for policy and practice from our interventions and broader experience within the sector. We conclude that humanitarian organizations should adopt an integrated approach to duty of care, prioritizing not only treatment but also the prevention and mitigation of psychological harm among staff and volunteers operating in conflict zones, extending beyond immediate crisis support to ensure sustainable protection of mental health.

This article argues that, despite his reputation for intellectual heterodoxy, the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) actually set a high value on the political discipline of theoretical activity, and that some of his most creative thought was on that theme. In doing so, the article questions the prevailing assumption about the heterodoxy of Mariátegui’s Marxism. By reading Mariátegui in terms of discipline as much as heterodoxy, the article also unsettles historiographical conventions about Mariátegui’s attitude to various political practices and ideas, including cosmopolitanism and the politics of exile. The article proceeds by first contextualizing Mariátegui’s adoption of Marxism as a means of greater discipline in Peruvian intellectual life. It then traces the main lines of Mariátegui’s critique of politically ill-disciplined intellectualism during the interwar period, before reconstructing his positive models of a balance between intellectual discipline and innovation, understood as a necessary condition of genuine revolutionary thinking.

Coastal fisheries are central to Pacific Island nutrition, livelihoods and cultural identity, yet growing microplastic contamination threatens food security and public health. This study integrates fishers’ knowledge of locally important coastal fish species with empirical measurements of microplastic loads to identify priority taxa for monitoring across Fiji, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Interviews with 110 fishers documented commonly caught species, and the number of times each taxon was reported was calculated. Family-level catch data and mean microplastic loads were each standardised between 0 and 1 to generate Catch and Microplastic Scores, which were multiplied to create an Exposure Index reflecting both social relevance and contamination levels. Regionally, Lethrinidae and Scombridae had the highest Exposure Index values, while Acanthuridae, Lutjanidae, Scaridae and Serranidae emerged as country-specific priorities. Gendered fishing patterns revealed differences in catch, influencing potential exposure pathways and highlighting the need for gender-disaggregated data in future assessments. This approach of combining local knowledge with contamination studies offers a replicable, regionally-grounded method for identifying key indicator species for future microplastic monitoring. Species within the Lethrinidae family, particularly Lethrinus harak, stand out as regional priorities because of their importance to subsistence and artisanal fisheries, exposure to microplastics and consistent occurrence across the region.

This paper investigates modernisation policies for agricultural production and human reproduction in postwar Taiwan and their internal contradictions. The main actor was the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR). The first half of the paper discusses how the JCRR allied with American experts to overcome military opposition to family planning by highlighting the economic burden of population growth. The second half of the paper studies how, as population control gained wider support in the 1960s, the JCRR embedded family planning in the extension network while, ironically, facing the challenge of rural exodus induced by its own policy. By 1980, Taiwan’s family planning programme was declared a success, but rural decline cast a shadow over its food security. By scrutinising the synergy and contradiction between the two policies, this paper illustrates the ambivalent legacies of modernisation and the entangled politics of land, food, and population.

This commentary returns to the initial motivation for the 2000 volume Beyond Kinship, which was to create an intersection between ethnographic approaches to kinship and archaeological ones through the overlap constituted by materiality and practice. From the vantage point of that project, the current collection of papers adds important additional material bases for exploring kinship derived from archaeogenetic investigations. It is significant that the contributors express shared commitments to non-reductive use of new genetic data, seeking to avoid static and essentializing approaches that would privilege a biological domain. Equally important is the commitment of the participants to understanding kinship as work, making kin, not simply recognizing kin. In this sense, it exemplifies the rhetorical move ‘beyond kinship’ in the 2000 volume. By adopting a perspective from queer theory, the volume’s push to recognize a ‘kinship trouble’ parallel to Judith Butler’s ‘gender trouble’ invites consideration of making kin as a process of emergence of belonging. This begins to fulfil an ethical burden that anthropology has, as the discipline that claims kinship, to understand the intimacy of the kind of knowledges we produce, and to ensure they are so critically grounded that they can no longer be used against people’s interests.

The East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey, established in 1964, is one of the longest running twin birth registries with known placentation in the world. It operates across 13 maternity hospitals in East Flanders, Belgium, and has already registered 10,787 twin pairs and 318 triplet sets. Using a standardized protocol, EFPTS prospectively collects perinatal and biological data at birth, including detailed placental examination, systematic clinical documentation, and biobanking. Longitudinal follow-up and integration with national health and environmental databases enable linkage of early-life data to later-life phenotypes. Enrichment through nationwide datasets, such as the Study Centre for Perinatal Epidemiology, Child and Family health centers, environmental databases (based on land cover data and national monitoring stations), the Belgian National Register, and genomic reference data, further expands research opportunities. With over 60 years of experience, the EFPTS provides a uniquely rich and reliable framework for investigating the (epi)genetic and environmental determinants of health and disease.

Four new Pleistocene track-bearing aeolianite surfaces have been identified on South Africa’s Cape south coast, each portraying evidence of tortoise tracks. Together, they add to and buttress previous reports of tortoise tracks and trackways from the region. Globally, this remains the only area from which fossilized tortoise tracks have been recorded, and for the first time we illustrate the preservation of typical tortoise trackway morphology (involving a ‘tramline’ pattern with a wide straddle and closely spaced tracks), as observed in the trackways of extant tortoises. One site provides further evidence for the inferred presence of a very large tortoise trackmaker from the region during the Pleistocene. This tortoise was substantially larger than the largest extant tortoises in southern Africa, which bolsters the inference of either an extinct very large tortoise or a large chrono-subspecies of the extant leopard tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis). The mismatch between the body fossil record and trace fossil record with respect to the presence of large tortoises in the southern Cape persists. One trackway was probably registered by a smaller leopard tortoise, and the other trackways may have been registered by an angulate tortoise (Chersina angulata).

Throughout the twenty-first century, anti-gender activism in Colombia and across Latin America has demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt and reinvent itself. This article examines a recent transformation in its discursive strategies: the rise of anti-woke and anti-progre as new collective action frames for opposing sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and a broader spectrum of progressive policies. Drawing on an analysis of 128 actors involved in anti-gender campaigns and the content they produce in digital spaces, we identify two key tactics driving the spread of anti-woke and anti-progre discourses in Colombia: social media platforms and educational initiatives. By tracing these developments, the article sheds light on the evolving dynamics of anti-gender activism and the actors and strategies shaping their adoption of discursive repertoires.

In recent years, palaeogenomics has significantly advanced our understanding of human population history and evolution. Emerging studies now employ ancient genomic data to explore biological relatedness in archaeological contexts, with a growing number of studies on the topic. These investigations probe, for instance, the role of biological kinship in burial organization and mortuary practices, shedding new light on the complexities of ancient and historical human societies. Our review surveys a few examples of these studies, scrutinizing the methods and interpretations of DNA-based kinship research. We discuss the overlap between biological relatedness and other forms of kinship, acknowledging the complexity of human relationships across time and cultures. Emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration, we advocate for integrating theoretical frameworks from sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, and Indigenous studies into palaeogenomics for a more thorough understanding of kinship in past societies. Additionally, we offer guidance throughout for newcomers venturing into using ancient DNA to study relatedness, reviewing key methodological aspects involved in biological relatedness inference and addressing common misconceptions, potential pitfalls, and methodological limitations.

This essay explores the affinities between Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) and the constitutional political economy advanced by Adrian Pabst and Roberto Scazzieri in The Constitution of Political Economy: Polity, Society and the Commonweal (2023). Gioberti argued that Italy’s political regeneration required a prior renewal of its moral and civil order, insisting that institutions cannot be legitimate or enduring unless grounded in dispositions, associations and collective vocation. Pabst and Scazzieri similarly reject contractarian and institutionalist accounts of political economy, proposing instead that polity and economy are constituted by interdependencies, proportionality, systemic interests and dispositions. By placing these works in dialogue, the essay highlights convergences in their conception of politics as constitution rather than contract, their emphasis on civil association, their recognition of structural embeddedness and their understanding of persistence and transformation as mutually dependent. At the same time, important divergences are acknowledged: Gioberti’s teleological nationalism and reliance on providential history contrast with the pluralism and secular structural analysis of Pabst and Scazzieri. The comparison suggests that constitutional political economy is best understood as both structural and civil: grounded in coherence, viability and proportionality, but equally dependent on dispositions and collective imagination. In contemporary Europe, where crises of legitimacy, inequality and ecological sustainability prevail, such a civil-structural vision of political economy offers a timely, critical resource for re-thinking the commonweal.

Ferrisia dasylirii (Cockerell) (Hemiptera: Coccomorpha: Pseudococcidae) is a polyphagous mealybug species and native to North America, but has spread to Asia and Africa. In this study, we report F. dasylirii for the first time from China using an integrated taxonomy approach combining morphological characters and molecular analyses of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 gene. It was found on 12 tropical fruit species in Hainan Province: Annonaceae: Annona squamosa L. and A. squamosa ‘Purple’; Myrtaceae: Eugenia brasiliensis Lam. and Psidium guajava L.; Malvaceae: Theobroma cacao Linn.; Lecythidaceae: Lecythis pisonis Cambess.; Sapotaceae: Pouteria campechiana (Kunth) Baehni and P. sapota (Jacq.) H.E.Moore & Stearn; Rubiaceae: Coffea liberica W. Bull ex Hiern; Cunoniaceae: Davidsonia pruriens F. Muell; Arecaceae: Areca catechu Linn.; Musaceae: Musa nana Lour.; Malpighiaceae: Malpighia emarginata Sesse & Noc.ex DC.; and Phyllanthaceae: Phyllanthus emblica Linn. This record increases the known geographic range of F. dasylirii and underscores the importance of combined morphological and molecular approaches for accurate mealybug identification.

This article examines the ideological and organizational evolution of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the world’s largest Hindu Nationalist organization, in response to the challenges posed by the anti-caste politics in post-Independent India. Focusing on the leadership of Balasaheb Deoras (1915–1996), the third sarsańghacālak of the RSS, it situates the period between 1973 and 1990 as a critical yet understudied period in the history of the Sangh, marked by a significant departure from the organization’s earlier defence of caste hierarchy. Unlike his predecessors, Deoras publicly rejected the caste system in the early 1970s and paved the way for the Sangh to adopt the rhetoric of Sāmājik Samarastā (Social Harmony), which became the central pillar of the Sangh’s engagement with the question of caste in its bid to create a wider Hindu community which posed itself as caste-neutral and caste-assimilative. The article argues that the Sangh’s engagement with caste was neither superficial nor a new feature of its post-2014 avatar. Samarastā helped the Sangh develop a conservative model of caste reform, one that invoked the language of social change without challenging the Brahmanical ideas inherent to its Hindu Nationalism.