This article reviews Martti Koskenniemi’s To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1780, Dannelle Gutarra Cordero’s She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World, and James Q. Whitman’s From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World. These authors raise fundamental questions about what was going on and what was or is at stake in the legal theorizing, argumentation, and adjudication that characterized the immediate prehistory of the nascent US constitutional order.

We study the geometry of Calabi–Yau conifold transitions. This deformation process is known to possibly connect a Kähler threefold to a non-Kähler threefold. We use balanced and Hermitian Yang–Mills metrics to geometrize the conifold transition and show that the whole operation is continuous in the Gromov–Hausdorff topology.

Scholars and policymakers have argued that territorial revisionism is dangerous because it risks setting off a cascade of claims by states dissatisfied with their borders. This Pandora’s box logic suggests that states that are vulnerable to an unraveling of the status quo have incentives to restrain their territorial ambitions to preserve stability. This paper explores this claim theoretically and empirically. It provides descriptive evidence to determine whether vulnerability to territorial threats has historically been associated with a lower likelihood of initiating territorial disputes. We find some evidence of such an effect in postindependence Africa, where this logic is most frequently invoked, and to some extent in Asia, but not in other regions. To help explain these empirical observations, we develop a multistate model of territorial conflict that identifies the conditions under which cooperation to preserve the territorial status quo can be sustained. The model shows that while an equilibrium of mutual restraint can exist, the necessary conditions are quite restrictive, and this cooperative equilibrium is never unique. Thus while a Pandora’s box of potential claims can provide the basis for a norm of restraint, the emergence of such a norm is neither straightforward nor guaranteed.

Kreck proved that two 2q-manifolds are stably diffeomorphic if and only if they admit normally bordant normal $(q{-}1)$-smoothings over the same normal $(q{-}1)$-type $(B,\xi)$. We show that ‘stably diffeomorphic’ can be replaced by ‘diffeomorphic’ if the normal smoothings have isomorphic Q-forms (consisting of the intersection form of the manifold and the induced homomorphism on $H_q$), when the manifolds are simply-connected, $q=2k$ is even and $H_q(B)$ is free. This proves a special case of Crowley’s Q-form conjecture. The basis of the proof is the construction of an extended surgery obstruction associated to a normal bordism. As an application, we identify the inertia group of a $(2k{-}1)$-connected 4k-manifold with the kernel of a certain bordism map. By the calculations of Senger and Zhang and earlier results, these kernels are now known in all cases. For $k=2,4$, the combination of these results determines the inertia groups. We also obtain, for a simply-connected 4k-manifold M with normal $(2k{-}1)$-type $(B,\xi)$ such that $H_{2k}(B)$ is free, an algebraic description of the stable class of M, that is, the set of diffeomorphism classes of manifolds stably diffeomorphic to M. Using this description, we explicitly compute the stable class of manifolds M with rank-2 hyperbolic intersection form.

This article examines how three generations of jasare – Zarma genealogists and historian griots from Niger – have responded to the challenges of recording and digitizing their performances, from analogue archives to social media platforms. It explores the tensions between performance and fixation, the transformation and circulation of narratives, and the question of ownership in the context of mediated orality. The first generation resisted state-led archival initiatives in the 1960s. The second adapted their discourse to radio audiences, navigating censorship and self-regulation. Since the death of Jeliba Baaje in 2018, the third generation – no longer active performers – has grappled with the ethical and symbolic stakes of managing digital archives, especially as renewed interest in jasare narratives emerges on platforms such as YouTube and WhatsApp. Drawing on long-term ethnographic collaboration, the article analyses the aesthetic and political strategies employed to preserve control over sensitive narratives in contexts where audience composition is diffuse or unknown. These strategies are situated within broader transformations of patronage systems, memory politics and digital circulation. Ultimately, the article reflects on how oral knowledge systems engage with global regimes of authorship, highlighting the dynamic interplay between tradition, performance ethics and the logics of new media.

This article explores the impact of music streaming platforms on popular Afrikaans music. It sets recent technological developments in digital music distribution against the complex historical backdrop of the Afrikaans language and the histories of social marginalization affecting large parts of its linguistic communities. These patterns have shaped Afrikaans music production, consumption and gatekeeping since the first recorded Afrikaans music in the early twentieth century. A key question arises: how has the fundamental shift in the music economy ushered in by streaming platforms enabled previously marginalized Afrikaans artists – particularly from the Coloured community and speakers of vernacular forms such as Kaaps – to reach wider audiences, thereby breaking with historical patterns? This article draws on interviews with music artists, scholars, producers, mixing engineers, platform founders and executives, as well as analyses of publicly available data from platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and TikTok. The evidence suggests continuity at the centre: white Afrikaans pop still dominates discovery playlists and editorial spaces – whether curated by human editors, algorithms, or both. Yet the peripheries are stirring. The rise of Afrikaans gqom on the Cape Flats and the growing visibility of Koortjies within Coloured Pentecostal circuits show how streaming can surface alternative publics, vernacular aesthetics and new circuits of value.

In Türkiye Halk Bankasi A.S. v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) does not apply to criminal prosecutions of foreign state instrumentalities. The Court found that FSIA’s text and structure address only civil actions. On remand, the Second Circuit ruled that Halkbank lacked common-law immunity from criminal prosecution, deferring to the Executive Branch’s decision to prosecute and concluding that state-owned corporations enjoy no immunity for commercial activity under common law. The court’s analysis relied primarily on pre-1976 U.S. cases rather than international law. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in October 2025, ending the immunity dispute.

In this paper, we take a participatory approach to the study of Disabled DJs’ experiences of navigating dance music culture. In collaboration with Drake Music – a leading UK charity on disability, music, and technology – we report on empirical research conducted with Disabled DJs, including media diaries and interviews, and consider our results in relation to dance music and disability scholarship. We show that being Disabled can both enrich and pose barriers to DJing, including experiences of hyperempathy for the dancefloor, conflicted feelings about dancing, and destabilising notions of DJ authenticity. DJing offers a role through which Disabled people can participate in the social and creative practices afforded by dance music culture, away from the crowd and through the music. In this way, this research challenges key essentialisms in dance music scholarship and disability research, including the centrality of dance and body movement and the social deficits of neurodivergence.