Indigenous Yorùbá poetry is often defined by such features as context, structure, tonal quality and the performer’s identity. Early taxonomy of the poetry focused on the poetics that could be deduced from a long tradition of practice. Recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies has been more interested in showing the ways in which the poetry is being inflected by encounters with postcolonial modernity. While these recent contributions demonstrate how new forms, such as ewì, distil expressive nuances from the older forms and invent new performative practices to address new publics, such studies encourage a generalization that credits to the new forms all the modern advances recorded in the indigenous forms themselves. Looking at specific indigenous forms in terms of how postcolonial modernity has reshaped them, rather than considering them another set of additions to a new generic category, allows us a clearer view of their transition. I track the inventions and changes in the practice of two Yorùbá forms, ìjálá and Ifá chants, using the performances of Àlàbí Ògúndépò and Yẹmí Ẹlẹ́buìbọn. I rely on ethnographic data to show how mutating audiences and electronic storage and retrieval systems have continually shaped composition and performance, discuss the imperatives of modernity and economy in the performative choices of the artists, and show how the performers simultaneously manage their resistance to and adoption of the modern.

In 2017, the editio princeps of a newly discovered Middle Persian text, the “Mādayān ī Wīrāzagān” or simply “Wīrāzagān”, was published by Raham Asha. This text, which is important not only from a literary and religious perspective, but also from a mythological point of view, was previously unknown to the scholarly community. The Middle Persian original of the text is found in the Codex TD 26 (49r-62v), preserved in the library of the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai. The manuscript was first discovered and studied by R. Asha in March 2011. The preliminary remarks on the Mādayān ī Wīrāzagān and other texts contained in the Codex TD 26 (Ms. R 494) were published in 2012 in the journal of the same institution. Here I present a translation (accompanied by the transliteration and transcription) of the original text published on pages 3–16 of Asha's book.

In this article I explore hagiographical narratives about Khwāja Yaḥyā Kabīr (d. 1430), among the earliest of the Sufi masters to be identified as Afghan. The social memory of Yaḥyā Kabīr's life exemplifies the function of hagiography as a key arena for the production of historical knowledge, generating a vivid and specific imaginary of the past for devotees. My goal here is to present a reading of the hagiography, but first I will situate it within the discursive nexus of Persian historical writing, which often essentialized Afghans as innately barbarous while peripheralizing Afghan homelands (identified with the Sulaiman Mountains). Yaḥyā Kabīr's hagiography is both reflective of Indo-Afghan anxieties about social hierarchies and a device by which marginalizing traditions could be subverted through a highly textured portrayal of the past. As such, it exemplifies how saints’ lives can index not only the hierarchies of imperial life, but also the techniques by which to escape them.

The Rolling Stones played a core role in establishing the generic conventions of rock. A key ideological element of this was the band's reverential dedication to the blues and the importance of the blues to their musical development. However, what is much less recognised is the influence of soul on the band's sound. By looking at the band's repertoire, composition and performing style, this paper explores the influence that soul, particularly Southern soul, had on the band's formative years and argues that, in many ways, they have adopted the aesthetic conventions of soul, rather than rock, for the majority of their career. Rethinking The Stones’ style in this way may help us better understand their position in the rock canon, while also encouraging careful interrogation of the racialised division of rock and soul that emerged in the late 1960s.

This roundtable explores how recent social and political upheavals in Turkey have impacted ethnographic research in and about the region. We propose that an analysis of ethnographers’ experiences in contexts of disruption and uncertainty can offer important insights into both research methodologies and contemporary politics and society in Turkey. The past twenty years have been a time of transformation and, arguably, disruption in the Republic of Turkey. In 2003, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) rose to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As the following decade heralded a period of rapid economic growth and development, social and political changes also began to reshape institutions in consequential ways. In 2008, top military leaders were charged with participating in a conspiratorial deep state in what would come to be known as the Ergenekon trials. While these prosecutions were framed by the ruling party as critical to securing democratic governance in Turkey, they also marked a turning point in the AKP's efforts to secure and consolidate its hold on the state. After the AKP won its third general election in 2011, their efforts to consolidate power grew, and over the following decade Turkey would devolve from being recognized as a model Middle Eastern democracy to an illiberal democracy and finally an authoritarian regime. This political transformation was punctuated by key events, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the attempted coup of July 2016 to the resumption of armed conflict with the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê PKK) in 2015 and the government's crackdown on Academics for Peace.

In an effort to control anthracnose disease, one of the major problems that has been faced by farmers, 14 chilli hybrids and their parents were screened phenotypically using the fruit inoculation method under laboratory conditions. Genotypic screening of 14 chilli hybrids and their parents was done by the identified polymorphic markers, HpmsE 051 and HpmsE 082. Based on the phenotypic and genotypic data, chilli hybrids, H1, H2, H3, H4, H6, H7, H8, H9, H11 and H12 were identified as resistant chilli hybrids against anthracnose disease caused by the C. truncatum. Molecular markers, HpmsE 051 and HpmsE 082 could be utilized as polymorphic markers to isolate resistant genotypes against C. truncatum.

This paper outlines the results of particle-in-cell simulations of a relativistic magnetron with six cavities and a transparent cathode configuration. Excitation of the π mode in the interaction region was attained, which in turn led to $\textrm{TE}_{11}$ mode emission of microwaves to the waveguide. This mode transformation was achieved with a non-symmetric diffraction output, consisting of four large and two small tapered cavities. Simulations were performed with a voltage across the anode-cathode gap varying from 164 to 356 kV, and axial magnetic field strengths between 0.24 and 0.34 T. Maximum efficiency of 37% was obtained with a peak output power of 590 MW, having a voltage of 261 kV and a magnetic field of 0.30 T. Furthermore, a frequency of 2.57 GHz and a rise time of microwaves at the waveguide of 15 ns were demonstrated. The electron leakage current was shown to decrease from ∼10$\%$ to less than $1\%$ when employing a longer interaction region, while still exhibiting good performance. Additionally, we show that there is an optimal range of voltages given a magnetic field, for which π mode excitation with high efficiency is attained.

This article uses a micro-historical approach to examine an escape and murder among convict labourers between Cape Town and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa in the 1840s. It does so to demonstrate how imperial mobilities and legal conceptions of property crime were interconnected within settler colonial capital and the intimacies of colonial social worlds. Reforms in penal practice in the British Empire – in this instance, adopted in the Cape Colony from Tasmanian experiments in convict labour and moral improvement – formed part of post-abolition shifts in labour control and the management of the itinerant poor, increasingly guided by anxieties over race. Michael O’Brien, the murderer, was a suspected escaped convict from Australia, who claimed to have survived violent encounters in the Pacific as a missionary. His narrative contrasts with the predominantly regional mobilities and crimes of the other Cape convicts – notably stock theft and petty robbery – that occurred in the contested spaces of law, colonialism and property. This article discusses convict narratives around crime and redemption across a maritime empire, and the affective relations of coercion and care between convicts, overseers, constables and superintendents on the smaller scale of a convict station. It further contends that changes in criminal justice and governance in Southern Africa were thus contingent on the intimacies of scale and affect, on connections between the local, the global and the biographical.

On November 16, 2023, the International Court of Justice voted 13 – 2 in favor of issuing a binding Order in the case of Canada and the Netherlands v. Syrian Arab Republic. The Order adopted two provisional measures, which require Syria to prevent acts of torture and other cruel punishment, ensure that its officials and organizations do not commit torture or other cruel punishments, and preserve any evidence related to the allegations of the case. A Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures seeking such an order had been entered on June 8, 2023, by Canada and the Netherlands, for which oral arguments were held on October 10, 2023. The Request came alongside Canada's and the Netherlands' Joint Application instituting proceedings against Syria for violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The Request and Application were made pursuant to Articles 36 and 41 of the Statute of the Court, Article 30 of the Convention against Torture, and Articles 73, 74, and 75 of the Rules of the Court. Vice-President Gevorgian and Judge Xue voted against both provisional measures, with Vice-President Gevorgian appending a dissenting opinion and Judge Xue appending a declaration.

The professionalisation, institutionalisation and standardisation of transitional justice has often been critiqued for pushing more informal, vernacular or experimental approaches off the radar. While this concern is legitimate and needs to be addressed, this article explores the continued relevance of standardised approaches, and of a shared language of transitional justice more specifically. I develop this argument against the background of recent events in the Philippines where, in May 2022, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, won the presidential elections. In this article I show that there has been a multiplicity of context-sensitive, vernacular and experimental transitional justice initiatives to deal with intersecting and multilayered legacies of violence, but that what has been missing is an overarching framework as expressed through the discourse of transitional justice, and the potential to forge collaborations and coalitions on the basis thereof. The case of the Philippines hints at the potential of a more ecological understanding of transitional justice in which justice actors involved in standardised and vernacular, formal and informal, state and non-state, top-down and bottom-up approaches recognise each other and certain shared objectives through the shared language and normativity of transitional justice.

This paper introduces the concept of dialogic oversight, a process by which judicial bodies monitor compliance through a combination of mandated state reporting, third-party engagement, and supervision hearings. To assess the effectiveness of this strategy in the international arena, we evaluate the supervision hearings conducted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. We employ propensity-score matching, difference-in-difference estimators, and event-history models to analyze compliance with 1,878 reparation measures ordered by the Court between 1989 and 2019. We find that dialogic oversight has moderate but positive effects, increasing the probability of state compliance by about 3 percent per year (a substantial effect compared to the baseline rate of implementation). However, it requires the engagement of civil society to yield positive outcomes. Our framework connects related findings in distant literatures on constitutional law and international organizations.

This article engages the views of PRC Confucian scholars who responded to the United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's citing of Confucius in his majority opinion on same-sex marriage in 2015. It questions their separation of tolerance for homosexuality from legalization of same-sex marriage and argue that tolerance is not enough. The arguments in the mainland Confucian discourse about same-sex marriage highlights the historical and persistent entanglement of Confucianism with patriarchy. Instead of reviving traditional patriarchal society, further entrenching and increasing gender inequality, contemporary Confucianism could shape its own unique modern society that aspires to (and hopefully one day achieving) gender equality together with sexual inclusivity by deconstructing the patriarchal Confucian family and reconstructing a different Confucian family ideal. Accepting same-sex marriage would lend weight to the latter, and there are Confucian reasons for legalizing same-sex marriage and recognizing its ethical value.