Focusing on the cultural history of vocal music in Pahlavi Iran, this article examines the senses in modern Iranian history. As the article shows, the performance of Iranian vocal music became subject to a gendered male and female dichotomy. While this dichotomy did not exist in early Pahlavi Iran, in the early 1950s, a gendered consciousness and language emerged among male musicophilias, eventually separating genres of vocal performance across gender lines. Hence, vocal music known as āvāz became increasingly associated with male performers, while tarāneh and tasnif were increasingly associated with female performers. As the article attempts to show, this gender dichotomy should be contextualized in the broader tension between the sense of vision and sight and disciplined notions of aurality and the body. While the “modern woman's” body permeated the visual domain in the public sphere, the cultural ideals of disciplined aurality and body docility informed the male musicophilias countercultural claims in Pahlavi Iran. Eventually, the latter attempted to challenge the female agency in the public music sphere.

On January 31, 2024, marking the tenth anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its eagerly anticipated judgment on the merits in Ukraine v. Russia concerning alleged violations of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (ICSFT) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This was the first case lodged by Ukraine against Russia back in 2017, in response to alleged numerous violations arising from Russia's occupation of Crimea and its proxy war in Donbas. Although Ukraine might have hoped for a more favourable outcome, the majority only established narrow and rather minor violations under ICSFT and CERD, despite a plethora of claims advanced by Ukraine under both Conventions. A 13:2 majority found that Russia violated Article 9, paragraph 1 of ICSFT due to its failure to investigate individuals who allegedly committed terrorism financing offences upon receiving the information from Ukraine. As for CERD, another 13:2 majority found that Russia violated Articles 2, paragraph 1(a), and 5(e)(v) of the Convention with regard to the implementation of school education in the Ukrainian language in Crimea. In addition, an 11:4 majority found that Russia violated the provisional measures order, which obliged Russia to lift restrictions on the Mejlis, the highest representative executive organ of Crimean Tatars in Crimea banned by Russian authorities, and imposed the non-aggravation measure. The judges were divided on the scope of the non-aggravation measure, and questioned the appropriateness of establishing the violation of the provisional measures order in part concerning the Mejlis in the absence of the majority's finding of the corresponding violation under CERD on the merits.

The mischievous quote making up this article's title comes from the Humayunnamah, a chronicle written around 1587 in Persian by Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603). Gulbadan was a Mughal princess of Timurid heritage and the daughter of the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530).1 In the Humayunnamah, Gulbadan recounts the response Hamidah Begum (1542–1605) gives upon being chastised by her future mother-in-law, Dildar Begum:

In a short article, Saul Smilansky (THINK 60, 2022) provides an argument in favour of the belief in social progress. He considers the ‘probability of losing a child’ to be a pivotal element among various criteria to be assessed in order to evaluate human progress and as this probability has decreased considerably in the modern era, he believes humanity is today in a better situation than in previous generations. In this article, I criticize Smilansky's argument and try to show that his criterion of progress is superficial.

Now in its third year, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine remains at the very top of the international security agenda. This conflict has largely refocused the West's attention away from the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz went so far as to declare that the invasion signaled a zeitenwende, or “dawn of a new era.”1 Russia's aggression and the threat of having to fight a peer or near-peer competitor raises difficult questions, many of which are ethical in nature. The essays gathered in this roundtable seek to provide answers to some of those questions. They are the result of a workshop I organized for the King's College London Centre for Military Ethics in October 2023. One of my ambitions for this workshop was to put leading academics working on the ethics of war into discussion with military practitioners, making sure to include Ukrainian voices. I was very fortunate to succeed in these objectives, and I am convinced that the published essays have benefited enormously from our conversations.

This article focuses on the history of the Czechoslovak sociology of popular music, which formed at the beginning of the 1960s. The article first examines the origins of thinking about ‘mass music genres’ in the Czech lands in the interwar period. It further discusses considerations of mass music genres and their audiences after World War II in light of the communist takeover in 1948, Stalinism of the 1950s and liberalisation of the 1960s. Finally, the article presents the situation after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. Based on analysis of archival sources and original theoretical texts, hitherto unknown in the context of Anglophone scholarship, this article seeks to show how the specific political background of the Central European state behind the Iron Curtain determined the foundation, scholarly focus and social role of the sociology of popular music and how it differed from the situation in Western capitalist countries.

Like any form of artistic production in the Soviet 1970s (Brezhnev's ‘Stagnation’ era), films had to tread a fine line between being acceptable to official organs, yet managing to appeal to the average citizen. Music – and specifically popular music or estrada – was an important factor contributing to how filmmakers could express themselves and connect with audiences despite official restraint. This article will explore the soundscapes of two iconic movies embodying that tension: The Twelve Chairs (Двеннадцать стульев, 1971, dir. Leonid Gaidai) and The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ирония судьбы, или с легким паром!, 1975, dir. El'dar Riazanov). A close reading of musical scenes from these Stagnation-era artefacts will expose several key tactics that emerge in the complicated nexus between composer, director and text, demonstrating how popular music fits into a complex and multi-faceted relationship of minor liberties and major limits.

In 1988, Haagerup and Størmer conjectured that every pointwise inner automorphism of a type ${\rm III_1}$ factor is a composition of an inner and a modular automorphism. We study this conjecture and prove that every type ${\rm III_1}$ factor with trivial bicentralizer indeed satisfies this condition. In particular, this shows that Haagerup and Størmer's conjecture holds in full generality if Connes’ bicentralizer problem has an affirmative answer. Our proof is based on Popa's intertwining theory and Marrakchi's recent work on relative bicentralizers.

Mexican theatre company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes are world-renowned for their intensive laboratory processes leading up to unique, interdisciplinary performances that defy expected theatrical conventions. Their piece El Gallo (2009) is a poignant example of this company's capacity for innovation and social action. Here, actors are transformed into opera singers in a piece that is sung – in an entirely invented language – while inciting audiences to consider the anxieties that fuel the act of exposing one's body onstage, as fears over our own perceived differences prevent us from feeling ‘normal’ in a society that constantly judges us as we recognize the discriminatory power of social normativity.