This introduction situates the Allied occupation of Italy as a distinctive yet comparatively underexplored case within the broader history of mid-twentieth-century military occupations. It traces the origins, peculiarities, and contradictions of Allied rule, foregrounding the tension between liberation and occupation that shaped both contemporary experiences and subsequent historiography. After outlining the fragmented development of the field and the long predominance of liberation-centred narratives, it calls for recontextualising the occupation of Italy within wider transnational and comparative frameworks. Rather than examining the Italian case solely through an exploration of its domestic impact, the article proposes treating it as an early laboratory for Allied ruling practices that were later applied elsewhere. In addition, it suggests exploring the Italian case through a set of research themes that have emerged from the new comparative field of Occupation Studies. The special issue advances this agenda by combining attention to hitherto marginalised aspects of the era with critical reflection on established subjects, thereby contributing to a reassessment of Italy’s place within the history of Allied rule in mid-twentieth-century Europe.

In this tribute, I pay homage to the late Deborah Cameron (1958-2026), a leading feminist linguist whose scholarship shaped sociolinguistics’ understanding of the relationship among language, society, gender, sexuality, and power. The paper traces Cameron’s sustained intervention against biological determinism, romanticised accounts of gender difference, and the assumption that linguistic reform alone can produce social change. Throughout, the tribute highlights Cameron’s distinctive analytic stance: her insistence on complexity, her resistance to consensus, and her commitment to critique as an indispensable scholarly practice. I argue that Cameron’s legacy lies not only in specific theoretical contributions but also in her enduring challenge to treat language as a social phenomenon without mistaking it as a sufficient agent of social transformation. (Sociolinguistics, language and gender, feminism, power, ideology)

This article examines the discursive production and transformation of value through the oft-overlooked practice of hotel laundry work. In tracing the object biographies of luxury linen items, my goal is to surface work/ers ordinarily obscured and/or disregarded. The analysis is grounded in discourse-ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two five-star hotels and one commercial laundry in Hong Kong. Specifically, I consider how laundry is handled, evaluated, and talked about across three timespaces: (i) documentary regimes and frozen actions in hotel rooms; (ii) silent work and human-machine interactions in laundry plants; and (iii) the dis/assembling and re/valuing of ‘condemned’ linen. In each timespace, discourses of cleanliness/dirt and concomitant registers of value emerge. Following Graber (2023), I also pay special attention to sensory or ‘qualic’ evaluations. These ‘laundry routes’, I argue, expose how language and material practice intersect to structure broader value regimes and specifically, ideologies of cleanliness within economies of leisure/luxury consumption. (Language materiality, value discourse, luxury labour, object biographies, discard studies)

This article examines the near collapse of the legal fiction of extraterritoriality in nineteenth-century international law. Rather than treating extraterritoriality as a coherent doctrine or a straightforward instrument of imperial domination, it argues that the fiction functioned as a contested and unstable juridical device whose inadequacies exposed deeper tensions within international law. By distinguishing between two strands of critique—restrictive and reconstructive—the article reinterprets nineteenth-century debates as responses to the fiction’s conceptual failure rather than as efforts at technical refinement. Restrictive critiques, advanced primarily by Belgian and Italian jurists, rejected the fiction for legitimizing excessive jurisdictional privileges that conflicted with emerging principles of sovereignty, secularism, and constitutional equality in Europe. Reconstructive critiques, by contrast, abandoned the fiction while seeking to preserve immunity and consular jurisdiction by re-grounding them in treaties, capitulations, or functional necessity. This divergence explains why the decline of fiction did not entail the disappearance of privilege but rather its partial re-foundation on narrower, more positivist grounds. Finally, the article demonstrates how these European debates circulated transnationally, furnishing non-Western actors with conceptual resources to contest unequal treaty regimes. Extraterritoriality thus emerges not as a settled imperial doctrine but as a productive failure that illuminates the structural instability of nineteenth-century international law.

Throughout the twenty-first century, anti-gender activism in Colombia and across Latin America has demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt and reinvent itself. This article examines a recent transformation in its discursive strategies: the rise of anti-woke and anti-progre as new collective action frames for opposing sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and a broader spectrum of progressive policies. Drawing on an analysis of 128 actors involved in anti-gender campaigns and the content they produce in digital spaces, we identify two key tactics driving the spread of anti-woke and anti-progre discourses in Colombia: social media platforms and educational initiatives. By tracing these developments, the article sheds light on the evolving dynamics of anti-gender activism and the actors and strategies shaping their adoption of discursive repertoires.

This article analyses the story behind a vast collection of personal objects, furnishings, books, photographs and documents belonging to Benito Mussolini and his entourage. Most of these items were dispersed after the war, revealing how the collective memory of fascism was caught between historical erasure, preservation and reuse. Following the collapse of the Italian Social Republic and the end of the war, the assets were transferred from Lake Garda to the Monti Riuniti di Credito su Pegno in Brescia. Considered historically and artistically insignificant but potentially dangerous as objects of worship, the authorities swiftly eradicated them in the early 1950s for fear that they might affect public opinion, which oscillated between authoritarian nostalgia and the exoneration of Fascism. Studying these objects can provide valuable insights into the cultural identity, aesthetic preferences and daily life of Mussolini and his inner circle, offering a better understanding of the internal dynamics of power management at the heart of the regime.

This article argues that women welfare claimants, particularly lone mothers, were disproportionately targeted by invasive and punitive anti-fraud measures in the post-1945 welfare state because they were considered most likely to commit fraud through their perceived sexual immorality and reckless childbearing. Although the issue of welfare fraud has influenced high-profile policy and legislation, existing historical scholarship is scant and we know little about the form, extent, or consequences of welfare fraud. Here, a mix of correspondence, statistics, and reports produced by the National Assistance Board, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, and National Assistance Board for Northern Ireland are analyzed alongside memoirs and a sample of offenses dealt with by the police to explore the nature and scale of welfare fraud by women alongside an examination of anti-fraud measures employed by the state in Britain and Northern Ireland. It shows that fraud policies risked bringing women into unwelcome conflict with authorities and pushed women into dropping their claims, out of fear of prosecution. In Britain, this approach became intertwined with an embedded hostility toward migrants, while sectarianism underpinned the delivery of state welfare in Northern Ireland. Consequently, these findings suggest new ways of understanding how the welfare state reshaped the relationship between central government and its most vulnerable citizens.

After the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty obliged the German Reich to far-reaching military disarmament. Pacifist journalists who reported in the 1920s and early 1930s on illegal rearmament measures by the Reichswehr were threatened with legal action by the Reichsgericht, Germany’s supreme court, on charges of journalistic treason. Contemporary opponents of the proceedings, as well as modern research, accused the Reichsgericht of siding with the Reichswehr against the republican governments in its ruling in favor of the Reichswehr’s illegal rearmament. However, the rulings of the Reichsgericht were not solely based on legal provisions; they also invoked the official guidelines of German foreign policy. The article demonstrates that the Foreign Office exerted far greater influence than the Reichswehr Ministry for most of the period. It thereby highlights the tension between law and politics in political criminal trials and nuances the so-called “crisis of confidence” in the Weimar judiciary.

This article employs terroir as an analytical framework to examine how a place-specific tea acquired its reputation and contributed to processes of cultural self-fashioning in Song China. Focusing on Fujian’s Beiyuan 北苑 tea—exceptionally well documented in Song sources—it explores the close connections among tea, landscape appreciation, and place-making. Drawing on tea manuals and connoisseur writings, the article shows how literati linked tea quality to both natural conditions and cultural practices, using such associations to articulate refined taste and produce place-based knowledge. The case of Beiyuan tea reveals the emergence of a distinctly Chinese rhetoric of terroir, one that transformed environmental description into a rhetoric that mediated between local expertise and imperial order. Within this framework, place itself came to embody quality, integrating physical environment, cultural identity, and sensory experience.

This article aims to demonstrate that the “Alevi Revival,” commonly described as the sudden increase in visibility of Alevis in Turkey in the early 1990s, was actually the result of a decade-long transformation experienced by Alevis in Europe since the late 1970s. This historical contextualization is not entirely novel but is typically only framed in reference to certain milestone events. The present article substantiates this approach based on an analysis of nine issues of Yurtseverler Birliği, one of the earliest Alevi political journals, published from 1982 to 1989 in Berlin and not yet studied. The evolving discourse surrounding Alevism in this journal’s issues provides the earliest substantial evidence for understanding the emergence and evolution of strategies employed to promote the visibility of Alevism from the 1980s to the 1990s. By the end of this period, the strategy of “making Alevism known” had become dominant in defining Alevism in Europe, in contrast to heterogeneous approaches to framing Alevism in Turkey. In this sense, the “Alevi Manifesto,” an open letter published in 1990 in Turkey, and the first Alevi Culture Week, organized a year before in Germany, should be regarded as outcomes of the preexisting context rather than the Revival’s initiation.

The global order is undergoing significant transformations with far-reaching implications for international criminal justice. These shifts pose an existential challenge to core crimes accountability while re-shaping its pursuit. As the liberal order recedes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) faces a crisis driven by absolute sovereignty’s reassertion, weakened multilateral governance and increasing political and coercive pressures from powerful states. Simultaneously, these developments promote decentralised accountability, fostering the emergence of a polycentric system of international criminal justice. Trends in re-nationalisation, hybridisation and regionalisation align accountability with a more pluralistic, fluid global order. In this context, the ICC is not obsolete but requires a redefined role. While no longer the apex of international criminal justice, its existence remains crucial to addressing the risks of decentralised accountability. The Court, particularly its Office of the Prosecutor, should reconfigure strategies around positive complementarity, repositioning itself as a co-ordinating hub within this polycentric system.