Images of migration to Europe in the media since the revolutions and protests in diverse North African and Middle Eastern countries that began in 2010 have often tended to focus on “landings,” which reduce people to victims or criminals and obscure the reasons behind their journeys. Such iconic images encourage binary perceptions of “us” and “them,” “citizen” and “migrant.” Some images are intended to trigger compassion and identification, but they only reinforce such binaries. Yet art, I argue, can move beyond such images to embody and activate its spectators by creating what I call a multilayered interface. I develop this concept in relation to installation art by Bissane Al Charif and by Hela Ammar, who combine innovative uses of oral narratives and alternative modes of imaging in indoor or outdoor spaces.

This article examines the participation of women as authors in five leading law journals of a generalist nature in the UK. For its data points, it takes each author of an article in the Cambridge Law Journal, the Journal of Law and Society, Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. From 2016 to 2020, around 900 authors have published over 700 articles in these five journals. The analysis of these results reveals discrepancies in women’s participation in legal publishing. It shows that those journals which publish fewer articles, publish fewer women authors. The article situates its data in a description of gender patterns within the academy generally and specifically within the UK law school. It draws on the experiences of gender publishing disparity in other disciplines where the debate is more established. It concludes with suggestions for changes in the publication process and further research to develop the picture of women’s publishing in law.

We have been here before. Echoes of the US invasion of Iraq reverberate in 2026 rhetoric about “regime change” and manipulated claims about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Echoes of the US invasion of Afghanistan reappear in 2026 rhetoric about saving Muslim women from Muslim men. Israeli state and non-state actors’ calls to invade, occupy, and settle south Lebanon echo a century of openly articulated Zionist expansionist aims that call for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Yet, this moment also feels different. As those in our field—and apparently only those in our field—know, Iran is a functioning state with complex infrastructure and bureaucratic systems and a well-established and well-equipped military. MESA members have taken to the airwaves and zoom screens in attempts to break through the distortions of echo chambers and the presumptions of experts as we all bear witness to clear shifts in the post–World War II hegemonic global order. One thing is clear: Imperial warfare is reshaping economic and political multilateral agreements and assumed norms in ways both predictable and not.

This article examines the early history of Iranian communism through two Persian translations of The Communist Manifesto (1923 and 1951), situating them within broader debates on Soviet cultural politics, Iranian modernism, and the politics of translation. By analyzing the rhetorical strategies and conceptual vocabularies employed by translators, the study highlights how Persian intellectuals mediated Marxism through local traditions of political thought and literary modernism. The 1923 translation by Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan drew on Perso-Islamic notions of justice and temporality, asserting Iran’s coevalness with the West and aligning Marxist concepts with late Qajar reformist discourse. In contrast, the 1951 Moscow-sponsored translation, produced under the auspices of the Tudeh Party, reflected Cold War cultural rivalries, privileging secular and nationalist vocabularies and erasing Islamic political resonances. Juxtaposing these two translations, the article rethinks Iranian Marxism not as a mere extension of Soviet influence but as a contested field of cultural mediation and conceptual innovation.

The Acholla Archaeological Project is an international collaboration at the site of Acholla (Tunisia) between the Institut National du Patrimoine (INP), Dickinson College and the University of Oklahoma, with additional support from the University of Leicester and the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project. The first season of the project took place in June 2025, focusing on three main tasks: fieldwalking, topographic survey and architectural documentation. Over a period of two and a half weeks, an area of over 25 ha was covered by a fieldwalking team and nearly 40,000 finds were collected for study and analysis. Topographic and architectural surveys were also undertaken to begin the process of creating an updated plan of the site. The work accomplished this season has already yielded new information about Acholla and has provided a strong foundation for future fieldwork campaigns and further research at this important coastal site.

This article explores Islamic citizenship education as the conduit through which ideological governance was articulated and enacted in rebel-governed northwestern Syria (2017–25) with a close ethnographic and textual analysis of the Dar al-Wahy al-Sharif (DWS) school network. Founded in 2017 under the patronage of Hayʾat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), DWS has grown into the region’s most expansive educational institution, blending Qurʾanic learning with nationalist Islamic pedagogy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Idlib in 2025, the study examines how DWS cultivates an “exceptional Qurʾanic generation” while operating within, and reinforcing, a political environment structured by HTS rule, shaping patterns of loyalty and parental alignment. Situating DWS within HTS’s post-Salafi turn and broader state-building project, the article argues that the school system functions as both a site of ideological reproduction and an arena in which postconflict Islamist governance takes shape.

This article challenges the long-established orthodoxy concerning the legal basis of the persecution of Christians under the Roman empire. First, it demonstrates the problems with the current consensus, which holds both that the only extant legal enactment pertinent to the persecution of Christians before Decius is the rescript of Trajan to Pliny, and that Christians were always charged for their name alone. Second, it tests an alternative hypothesis, that Christians could be charged with multiple crimes, as part of the routine litigious culture of the empire, and that this was periodically exacerbated by legal enactments that did not target Christians but could be mobilised against them.

Newsround offers a platform for new discoveries that do not appear within the specialist contributions of this year’s Archaeological Reports, but which nevertheless warrant emphasis, either as a result of their particular characteristics or for the contribution they make to broader archaeological narratives. This section is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an overview of archaeological research in Greece. It comprises largely preliminary reports (results of excavations that took place up to and including June 2025, where possible) that complement the digital content made available through Archaeology in Greece Online (https://chronique.efa.gr). Due to the diachronic nature of a number of the sites, and for ease of reference, the material is organized geographically in the first instance and then chronologically (earliest to latest) within each section as far as possible.

This brief note corrects an aspect of our 2024 paper looking at the evidence for the route of the Dorchester aqueduct in which we attributed a previously hypothesised route for the aqueduct to Christopher Sparey-Green.

Authenticity in hip-hop has long served as a central organizing principle grounded in lived experience, cultural knowledge, and community accountability. As the genre’s cultural geography expanded beyond its coastal origins, regional affiliation became a key marker of authenticity, compelling peripheral artists from less traditionally “credible” locations to develop new strategies to assert belonging in a landscape dominated by New York, Los Angeles, and the South. Building on Justin Williams’s concept of “historical authenticity,” which identifies intrageneric borrowing as a powerful way hip-hop artists invoke the genre’s past to establish credibility, this article explores how such intertextual practices function as essential sociolinguistic strategies. Through masked self-reference and lyrical quotation, marginalized artists negotiate authority and membership within hip-hop’s symbolic economy of referential knowledge. This symbolic economy values the ability to recognize, manipulate, and circulate coded references that bind them with canonical predecessors. Focusing on Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere, I theorize how dense intrageneric quotation enables marginalized artists to signal cultural fluency and claim legitimacy amid regional marginalization. I argue that Atmosphere’s strategic invocation of hip-hop’s late 1980s and early 1990s “Golden Age” serves not as a nostalgic homage but as deliberate cultural positioning. By embedding these intertextual references, they align themselves with hip-hop’s cultural memory and inscribe their place in the genre’s evolving canon. Extending Williams’s framework, I propose that intrageneric borrowing functions as a coded language within what I term an imagined community of interpretive practice, where authenticity is earned through symbolic literacy and interpretive labor rather than geographic identity.

The question of unity between Egypt and Sudan has received extensive scholarly attention, with most studies focusing on the monarchy’s efforts to preserve both polities as a single geopolitical entity. A prevailing view holds that the Free Officers abandoned this project, relinquishing Egypt’s claims to Sudan. Drawing on materials from the Egyptian National Archives and the National Archives in London, this article shows instead that unity with Sudan remained a core objective of the new military regime. I trace how an ostensibly secular regime strategically deployed religion in pursuit of this objective. I demonstrate that transnational networks of al-Azhar and Sufi orders were central to the Free Officers’ efforts to maintain Egyptian hegemony in Sudan. This analysis offers new insight into the religious diplomacy of the post-1952 regime, complicating our understanding of a key episode in Egyptian–Sudanese relations and highlighting the interplay between religion and statecraft in shaping Egyptian politics, especially under Nasser.

This essay explores the inner world of Undine Smith Moore, a Virginia-born practitioner and educator, reverently known as the “Dean of Black Women Composers.” Herein, I ask: what might it mean to learn from the Dean not only who she was and what she did, but how she remembered and reimagined? Drawing on Moore’s speech “On Becoming a Virginia Composer” (1984), I am attentive to what she called her “inner world.” Existing as a subconscious and spatiotemporally fluid realm in which liberatory dreams and Afrodiasporic nightmares could converge, Moore’s inner world reflected what Michelle M. Wright calls “Epiphenomenal time, or the ‘now’ through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted.” Accordingly, I look and listen for Moore’s ideas about the past, present, and future not only in her own words and music but also in a range of artistries and texts, including those of Toni Morrison, Kehinde Wiley, Wright, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. With the musicological interventions of Tammy L. Kernodle, Helen Walker-Hill, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., and others undergirding this work (and an Afrodiasporic interdisciplinarity guiding its path), this essay situates Moore’s inner world and compositional practice in the wider art and science of Black women’s knowledge production.