The article examines efforts by the Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) to enumerate the harm its forces inflicted on Syrian and Iraqi civilians between 2014 and 2018. Drawing on more than 1,300 declassified civilian harm assessments, this article examines the rationale behind the decision to count civilian casualties, the policies that governed how civilian casualties were counted, and what CJTF-OIR officials did with the data collected. Although accurate counts are critical to ethical debates, we show that, on their own, these counts are insufficient when it comes to recognizing the harm inflicted upon civilians and holding militaries accountable. We trace coalition metrics back to concerns about consequence management, showing how martial considerations about optimizing violence—rather than moral concerns about constraining violence—governed the enumerative enterprise. We argue that the way the coalition previously counted civilian casualties erased certain harms from view, including the indirect, cumulative, and reverberating violence that civilians suffered during this conflict. Furthermore, we contend that these numerical indicators tell us little about how civilians experience these harms, a lack of which can become an impediment to ethical consideration. Finally, we contrast the coalition count with Airwars figures to reveal both the numerical discrepancies between the different counts and differences in how these figures have been used. We contend that counting casualties is critical, but also complicated, contestable, and—at times—too constrictive.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

On 28 July 1776, the German-born Philadelphia merchant Jonas Phillips enclosed a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence with a letter written in Yiddish to another Jewish merchant, Gumpel Sampson, in Europe. The letter was intercepted and today sits on display in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, with a curatorial note that it was the first copy of the Declaration known to have been sent out of the country. Within a transatlantic economic framework, the outbreak of a war that presented new business opportunities became a field for self-making to a degree that would not have been possible for Phillips within Britain itself. This article traces Phillips’s involvement in the Revolution, his growing confidence that he and other Jews belonged in the new polity, and the assertion of his political voice to rid his state of religious tests for office.

While Manchester enjoyed a thriving chamber music culture at the outset of the twentieth century, signs of decline were already evident in the years leading up to the First World War. The outbreak of war in August 1914 proved agential in the need to rethink the existing models of concert-giving, not least the pre-war reliance on a predominantly Austro-German canonic repertoire and the substantial support it received from Manchester’s large and often prosperous German community. It also faced more practical challenges in the unavailability of male performing artists. The important role of organist and composer Sydney Nicholson in the establishment of Manchester’s Tuesday Mid-day Concerts in 1915 is discussed, arguing that their innovative format, together with the opportunities they offered both for the introduction of newer repertoire and as a platform for local performers, positioned them as one of the most significant but still undocumented legacies of Manchester’s wartime music making.

What does it mean to think about trust as a legal scholar? From one perspective, there comes the broad question of why people trust or mistrust the law as it pertains to their lives and communities. Although there is no shortage of analytical angles from which to examine this question, to configure trust in relation to the lives of people and their communities is to broadly think about trust as a broad social phenomenon. That is because law is all-pervasive in structuring the social relations that shape the lives of individuals and their communities. On this basis, the multi-faceted traditions of ‘law and society’ and ‘socio-legal studies’ must become relevant for selecting the appropriate methods for exploring trust and trusting in relation to the law.

This paper focuses on two arguments William MacAskill discusses with approval in What We Owe the Future. Both arguments support the existentially unrestricted form of longtermism that MacAskill favors, and both rely on moral principles that reflect a particular way of resolving the decades-old, Narveson-inspired, value of existence controversy. But it is questionable whether that way of resolving the controversy — i.e., against Narveson — has ever in fact been entirely grounded. Instead, many in the population ethics mainstream have simply assumed that the controversy was happily put to bed soon after it first gained attention. Once we identify that assumption as mere assumption, we can see that the principles in question work, not as the solid underpinnings of an insightful resolution of the value of existence controvery, a resolution we ourselves are compelled to accept, but rather as dogma – thus the two dogmas of population ethics. That insight opens the door to an existentially restricted form of longtermism, a form that is arguably more attractive than MacAskill’s own.

The presence of the vilica or female supervisor at a Roman villa is attested across five centuries in varied texts, and her duties are detailed in an entire book of Columella’s On Agriculture. This paper challenges assumptions by modern scholars that her managerial functions were confined to those of a housekeeper, focused on food supplies for the household and the supervision of domestic labor inside the house. Through closer examination of textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence, we can see that the vilica’s principal role was to oversee not the domestic sphere, but rather a range of vital productive activities on the farm. In particular, she seems to have been responsible for wine and oil making and for important rituals linked to production. This has implications for our understanding of the roles of women within Roman farming and the Roman economy.

This paper considers the neglected history of Arwa Salih, a leader in the underground Egyptian Communist Workers Party in the 1970s. Women’s role in leading student strikes and underground communist activism has been marginalized in the accounts of the movement, but Salih’s case is marked by deliberate silence. Salih’s intimate history of the movement in her memoir al-Mubtasirun: Dafatir Wahida min Jil al-Haraka al-Tullabiyya (1996; The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation, trans. Samah Selim, 2018) underlines the historical factors contributing to the depoliticization of the private sphere in Marxist organizations. Although not a feminist, Salih questions the quest for national liberation alongside reinforcement of gendered, traditional family values. Drawing on oral history interviews in an environment shaped by suspicion, with narrators close to Salih until her suicide in 1997, I seek to fill gaps in this historiography and explain the reasons Egyptian Marxists struggled to reconcile the fight for liberation, for which they have paid immense sacrifices, with gender equality.

The history of post-war climate science has been written with a strong focus on the role of global geopolitics and climate models. In this article, I will broaden this perspective with a smaller-scale approach and a different technology. Drawing on the history of a radiocarbon dating laboratory in Switzerland, I show, on one hand, how local political and cultural contexts could influence the development of climate science and, on the other, how research technology beyond computer modelling also played a crucial role in this development. I argue that such a smaller-scale approach can help us to better understand the process of the interdisciplinarization of climate science, as well as the role of technology in this process.

This paper analyzes the use of rubu unpaid “traditional” labor in Toro District in western Uganda during the colonial period. It explores how the “traditional” roots of the unpaid labor system were negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor through wrangling over exemptions and commutations for the work which, then, shaped British responses to the forced labor regime. Chiefs managed rubu labor on the ground and wielded a lot of exploitative power. However, the British administration used intermediaries, luwalo inspectors, to monitor rubu labor and delimit the power of chiefs. This paper also investigates the growth of commutations from so-called traditional labor as a colonial revenue generator.

This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

In the afternoon 20 May 1916, Ernest Shackleton with Frank Worsley and Tom Crean unexpectedly arrived at the whaling station in Stromness, South Georgia after completing one of the most extraordinary journeys in the history of Antarctic exploration. There are numerous versions of what actually happened on arriving at Stromness, whom they met and what was said during this first encounter between the whalers and the explorers. There has also at times been a confusion about which whaling station and at which building they arrived. Despite the discrepancies between several accounts dealing with the Stromness arrival, there has been little explicit analysis to try to separate fact from fiction. Despite some attempts to get the records straight, books and other publications on Shackleton still appear where details on the arrival are marred by fiction. This paper, therefore, continues the search for a “sober” narrative of what happened that afternoon in South Georgia more than a hundred years ago. A main reason to revisit the questions surrounding the arrival in Stromness now is the renewed focus on the Stromness Manager’s Villa that was finally repaired and stabilised during the Antarctic summer 2025/26.

This paper examines competing treatments—surgery and radioactive iodine (RAI, I131)—for hyperthyroidism in the context of post-colonial Cold War nuclear science in Taiwan. Although the U.S.-led Cold War Atoms for Peace project pushed for the globalization of nuclear medicine, it had to compete with the Japanese colonial legacy in Taiwan (Republic of China). This government-in-exile embraced nuclear science and ushered in RAI with staged rituals. However, this modern procedure failed to overtake the surgical approach (thyroidectomy); in fact, as late as the 1990s, well after RAI had become a standard procedure throughout the world, surgery was still the major treatment option for this common disease in Taiwan. The tension between the global and the local is rooted in infrastructure as well as the materiality, regulation and availability of the Iodine 131 isotope, and, finally, the customary practice of the surgical tradition, established since the colonial period. Thyroid diseases, especially endemic goiter, were an important issue in colonial medicine, and the study, diagnosis, and treatments of thyroid diseases were an integral part of colonial surgeons’ identity. Surgical clinics had been a fixture of institutional medicine throughout Taiwan by the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, with the exception of a few prestigious hospitals in Taipei such as the National Taiwan University Hospital, most medical institutions and clinicians were not equipped to use isotopes. The availability of I131 was also limited, as the nuclear reactor did not become active until the 1960s. The preference for surgery thus points to the significance of material and social conditions of medical practice in Taiwan, amid the backdrop of the haunting images of the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on nearby Japan which the Atoms for Peace Project had aimed to overcome.

This article examines the 1928 German–Soviet Alai–Pamir expedition as a moment when different scientific traditions, political ambitions and bodily practices met in the high-altitude borderlands of Central Asia. Focusing on the mapping of the Fedchenko glacier, it argues that knowledge emerged not simply from instruments and protocols, but from the difficult encounter between bodies, technical tools and a resistant glacial landscape. The glacier thus became more than a physical object of study; it was an epistemologically charged terrain where ways of knowing were tested and made visible. German scientists, drawing on alpine traditions of glaciology, emphasized precision, discipline and methodological control. Soviet participants, by contrast, highlighted endurance, improvisation and collective struggle, casting physical hardship as proof of revolutionary commitment and shaping a distinctly ideological form of scientific masculinity. By tracing these entanglements of body, landscape and ideology, the article presents the expedition as an example of how science operates not only as a cognitive project, but also as a deeply embodied and politicized practice.