Since commencing its illegal invasion in 2022, the Russian military and authorities have committed numerous war crimes against the people of Ukraine. These include the mutilation and execution of combatants; the torture, kidnapping, forced expulsion, rape, and massacre of civilians; and indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas. In this essay, I evaluate the strategic implications of this misconduct, focusing exclusively on Western responses. I argue that war crimes can and often do negatively impact the strategic goals of the perpetrator, but whether and how this occurs is rarely governed exclusively by the offending action. Western perceptions of battlefield atrocity, shaped as they are by identity, race, and politics, may radically shift from one context to another. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, the status of both the participants and the conflict itself has helped inculcate a particular sensitivity among Western actors to the battlefield criminality of Russia. Drawing on evidence from the 2022 Bucha massacre and the ongoing bombing of Ukrainian civilians, I argue that Russian misconduct has consolidated Western support for the Ukrainian military effort, politically, diplomatically, and materially.

Time is a Pandora's box that international lawyers have long been reluctant to fully open. Perhaps unwilling to tackle the complexities this elusive concept presents, or loath to confront past wrongs and future threats that might arise from the fabled box, international jurists have left core questions of time and international law largely underexplored. In so doing, however, they have overlooked time and temporality as useful analytical lenses through which to gain new and deeper understandings of international law as a discipline and governance system. After all, international law is entangled with time in various and multifaceted ways. International law does not simply exist in time, having its own past, present, and future. Rather, like law generally, international law is constantly being shaped, organized, and reconstructed by time, while also creating, embedding, and perpetuating temporal standards and understandings. Yet, whereas domestic law scholars have in recent decades devoted considerable attention to the complex time-law relationship, international lawyers have so far investigated this relationship in only a limited manner, focusing primarily on doctrinal and procedural questions, while leaving many theoretical issues unaddressed.

The human right to leave any country protects an intrinsic interest in free movement and is also a vital pre-condition to seeking asylum. The right to leave attracts little academic interest, but it is quietly being eroded. Exit restrictions in States of origin or transit have become an instrument of extraterritorial migration control for European Union Member States seeking to prevent the arrival of unwanted migrants. This article first explores the revival of exit restrictions, focusing on agreements between European destination States and select African States of departure. It argues that the adoption of exit restrictions from one State to prevent entry to another creates the paradox of seamless borders, where regulation of exit and entry are harmonized and fused to serve the singular objective of preventing entry to the destination State. The article further argues that the political and discursive coupling of anti-smuggling and search-and-rescue regimes occlude the rights-violating character of exit restrictions and enables breach of the right to leave to hide in plain sight. Additionally, current approaches to jurisdiction and State responsibility in regional and international courts render the prospect of destination State liability uncertain in circumstances where the destination State does not exercise legal and physical control over enforcement. The article draws on ‘crimmigration’ and border criminology literature to identify the common element of carcerality that connects confinement of migrants to the territory of departure States with migrant detention inside the territory. Beyond lamenting the erosion of exit rights, the article concludes by querying whether the erosion of the right to leave is symptomatic of a larger trend toward the regulation of mobility itself.

This essay seeks to lay out the process that went into the making of Dark Things, which I co-directed with Deepan Sivaraman based on Ari Sitas's oratorio on the Silk Road, by repurposing the production notes of the performance, which opened in Delhi on 18 April 2018 at the Ambedkar University Delhi and later played at the International Festival of Kerala in January 2019. Both the method and the form of Dark Things, I suggest, were a collaboration. Collaboration as a method intimates collective creation, usually by means of improvisation, where authorship is distributed between theatre-makers (actors, scenographers, musicians) and materials (objects, site, landscape). Collaboration as form intimates that the performance's explicit grammar has been shaped by a sensuous give-and-take between the practitioner and the material. In this essay, I ask, from my perspective as a theatre-maker, how handling actual objects and tools obviously leaves an imprint on the performance, scenography, dramaturgy and mise en scène. In writing this article, I have retained the stylistic features of production notes – their provisionality and incompleteness; their sliding timescale; their looking forward to work that is to be done and backwards at work already done, marking failures, solutions and openings.

In the early twentieth century, the Iranian Reza Shah state (1925–1941), in conjunction with the emerging group of state-trained scholars, called the status of ulama as knowledge producers into question. Existing scholarship has primarily examined the impact of state modernization on the Muslim clergy and their responses to modernization but has paid lesser attention to the passive role of the ulama or their representation in modernist intellectual and literary discourses. I examine two major Persian sources of the period to argue that intellectual representation of the ulama, in both polemics and academic critique, aided the state in its attempt to push the ulama from the center of intellectual and social life to the margins of ritual purity. Among my primary sources is a previously unexamined academic thesis authored by Qasim Tuysirkani in 1938.

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups, chiefly Hamas's armed wing, breached the fence around the Gaza strip and launched attacks on Israeli territory. Over several hours, Palestinian fighters killed 1,269 people, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture, and took 253 hostages. The same day, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched air strikes and later a ground invasion of Gaza. In the eleven months since, Palestinian groups have continued to hold, mistreat, and kill hostages and launched rockets into Israel's population centers. Meanwhile, the IDF has killed an estimated forty-one thousand people in Gaza, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture of Palestinian detainees, damaged or destroyed most of the food, water, and medical infrastructure, and restricted humanitarian access, with dire consequences. Civilian casualty experts argue the death toll (which excludes the likely greater number killed “indirectly” through disease and deprivation) far exceeds what we have come to expect from contemporary military campaigns. Both sides have committed violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), too many to list individually.