Abdol-Hossain Taymourtash, Reza Shah’s first minister of court, was universally recognized as the most powerful man in Iran after the shah himself. He was the lieutenant, ran the government for him. He played a key role at the shah’s side in selecting cabinet ministers and the deputies to be elected to parliament. He helped shape and realize Reza Shah’s vision for the revival and modernization of Iran. Yet in 1933, royal favor was suddenly withdrawn, and Taymourtash was arrested and imprisoned where, in all probability Reza Shah had him put to death. This article focuses on the always fraught relationship between a powerful autocrat and his loyal and efficacious lieutenant, and on the dilemma of those who wish to serve their countries and end up doing so at the cost of serving as the agents of a dictatorship.

Greenstone is commonly used to produce culturally significant items across Mesoamerica, including axes, earspools, figurines, and beads. This research characterizes the mineralogy of greenstone materials recovered from sites in the Jovel Valley, Chiapas, Mexico, to document the range of green minerals utilized by the inhabitants. Our analysis of the objects suggests that the Late Classic and Early Postclassic Maya of the Jovel Valley had access to a variety of greenstone minerals, including serpentinites, green micas, grossular, and jadeite. X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry characterization of reference materials suggests procurement of greenstone resources from the well-documented sources of the Motagua–Polochic Fault Zone, and also potentially from sources in the Chalchihuitán–Chenalhó area of Chiapas, Mexico. The Jovel Valley had access to materials over long distances through historically documented trade routes that allowed the movement of greenstone materials west from the Motagua River Valley into highland Chiapas or south from the Chalchihuitán–Chenalhó area.

The pursuit of measures to enhance the environmental sustainability of societies has shifted to become a core aspect of contemporary public policy. Taxation measures, intended to alter the behaviour of individuals and households, have become a central plank of many nations’ policy response. However, these initiatives arise alongside other taxation and redistributive policy objectives focused on equity.

The purpose of this article is to explore the taxation policy design challenges raised by attempts to pursue simultaneously environmental goals and traditional social policy objectives regarding social justice in line with sustainable development principles. Focusing on the experience of two liberal political economies with broadly similar tax structures but whose approach to carbon taxation has varied, Ireland and the UK, the article develops a social policy framework, inspired by the energy justice literature, to facilitate a holistic delineation of the social implications of carbon taxation in the two countries.

This article problematises two concepts frequently used in debates about resource allocation.

The term ‘system’ evokes a ‘unified whole’ and emphasises interaction among the different component parts within the system. However, the notion of a tax system insulated from the world around it obstructs an analysis of the ways in which interactions of tax arrangements with other elements of society shape distributional outcomes. The article argues that tax arrangements need to be understood as an open system.

Next, the article problematises the concept of ‘redistribution’ by examining the limitations of current approaches to redistribution. First, pre-distribution, referring to decisions about tax expenditures, is often overlooked, although it reflects allocation decisions that not only benefit recipients but also result in foregone revenues that might have been used for redistribution. Second, analyses of redistribution often focus exclusively on income. Third, taxes shape the kind of society we have in ways that limit future possibilities of redistribution. The article proposes the concept of structural redistribution to denote redistribution, which goes beyond redistribution among groups to change the nature of society.

On February 28, 2024, the International Criminal Court's Trial Chamber IX issued the largest reparations order in the Court's history against Dominic Ongwen, a former commander in the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), for crimes Ongwen committed in Uganda between 2002 and 2005. Ongwen had been convicted of 62 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murders, crimes of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and abducting children and forcing them to fight in Uganda's civil war. After the Appeals Chamber affirmed Ongwen's convictions, Trial Chamber IX awarded €52,429,000 in reparations to 49,772 victims of his crimes. Ongwen has appealed. His appeal remains pending as of this writing.

Life and death: they’re opposites. But each one can be defined by the other. That means death shapes life. But how? When things go well, death shapes life from the background of our awareness. This fact has profound consequences for every facet of life: politics and governance, interpersonal relationships, and all forms of human consciousness.

Archaeologists have relied on the presence of European material on Indigenous New England sites as the main indicator that a site was occupied during the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries—a span often characterized as the Contact period. The AD 1480–1630 span is particularly difficult to sequence because it lies on a radiocarbon calibration plateau. Here we report on a program of AMS dating from an Indigenous site on Great Island on Cape Cod in Massachusetts that highlights evidence of widespread activity during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—absent European material culture. Furthermore, the archaeological evidence indicates that a previously excavated colonial tavern in the same area on Great Island was the last in a long-term occupation in which “European contact” was not a defining event. Instead, the evidence points to a continuous Indigenous presence extending from the Middle Woodland period. Later colonial period activities, including those associated with European material, were mapped onto a long-standing Indigenous task-scape.