The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights endorse a risk management perspective of human rights due diligence, which may create ambiguities with regard to the nature of risk and the objectives of risk management. By ‘human rights risk’ we understand a business enterprise’s potential adverse human rights impacts. Human rights risk can be contrasted to an enterprise’s ‘social risk’ which refers to the actual and potential leverage that people or groups of people with a negative perception of corporate activity have on the business enterprise’s value.

This article puts forward the argument that due diligence in respect of human rights risk is conceptually incompatible with the management of social risk, because social risk management and human rights due diligence vary at each step of the risk management process (risk identification, risk measurement and assessment, risk reduction measures). To resolve this incompatibility, an effective integration of human rights due diligence processes into corporate risk management systems would require an elevation of human rights respect to a corporate goal that determines corporate strategy.

This paper explores ‘awkward Antarctic nationalism’ and builds on the critical scholarship that explores the contours and contradictions of everyday, mundane, banal and even hot polar nationalisms. The emphasis on ‘awkward’ is designed to draw attention to the resonances and affordances that are associated with Australian polar nationalism in and beyond the Australian Antarctic Territory/East Antarctica. Using the 2016 Australian Antarctic strategy: 20 year action plan as a starting point, it considers how bodies, ice cores and gateways are put to work in order to address a fundamental pressure facing all claimant states. That is how to reassure domestic audiences that claims to territory and access are safe, sovereign and secure without alienating others with whom one wishes to do business within a particular area of Antarctica. More broadly, the paper concludes that both claimant states and non-claimant states are rubbing up against one another in areas such as custodianship, environmental stewardship and polar science and logistics. This has implications for how we interrogate the ideals and practices of the Antarctic Treaty.

This article presents the legal outlooks of two fundamental religious judicial systems—the halakha of Judaism and the shari'a of Islam—on the effect of war on private ownership. Specifically, we address the situation in which the conquered inhabitants are Jews or Muslims and halakha or shari'a are the legal systems of their religions, respectively, but the conqueror is a nonbeliever or secular sovereign. Such situations evoke the following questions: To what extent the transfer of ownership by the conquering sovereign is recognized by the religious laws of the conquered population? May a member of the conquered religion acquire property that was seized by the nonbeliever sovereign from a member of the conquered religion? Is transfer of ownership by virtue of conquest permanent or reversible, so once the conquest ends, ownership reverts to the pre-conquest owner? Various approaches to those questions within each of two religious legal systems are presented. Some of the similarities and the differences between halakha and shari'a are pointed out.

Words and phrases may differ in the extent to which they are susceptible to prosodic foregrounding and expressive morphology: their expressiveness. They may also differ in the degree to which they are integrated in the morphosyntactic structure of the utterance: their grammatical integration. We describe an inverse relation that holds across widely varied languages, such that more expressiveness goes together with less grammatical integration, and vice versa. We review typological evidence for this inverse relation in ten spoken languages, then quantify and explain it using Japanese corpus data. We do this by tracking ideophones – vivid sensory words also known as mimetics or expressives – across different morphosyntactic contexts and measuring their expressiveness in terms of intonation, phonation and expressive morphology. We find that as expressiveness increases, grammatical integration decreases. Using gesture as a measure independent of the speech signal, we find that the most expressive ideophones are most likely to come together with iconic gestures. We argue that the ultimate cause is the encounter of two distinct and partly incommensurable modes of representation: the gradient, iconic, depictive system represented by ideophones and iconic gestures, and the discrete, arbitrary, descriptive system represented by ordinary words. The study shows how people combine modes of representation in speech and demonstrates the value of integrating description and depiction into the scientific vision of language.

This article considers the emerging practice of human rights impact assessment (HRIA) in the field of business and human rights. As HRIA is relatively new, current approaches vary considerably, indicating that there is a need for the business and human rights community to engage in further dialogue and debate about what good practice HRIA can and should entail. I propose five key criteria for HRIA of business activities: (1) applying international human rights standards; (2) considering the full scope of impacts; (3) adopting a human rights-based process; (4) ensuring accountability; and (5) addressing impacts according to severity. It is suggested that these criteria should form the basis of methodologies used to assess human rights impacts of business activities, with the view to developing HRIA practice that meaningfully contributes to preventing and addressing adverse impacts of business activities on the human rights enjoyment of workers and communities.

During most of the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the main commercial hub of north-western Europe. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, Bruges lost much of its allure as an economic metropolis. One of the most urgent challenges the urban authorities were facing was the navigability of the waterways in and around the city. While the city government made structural investments to remedy the problems, written sources constantly emphasized how important it was that Bruges remained accessible from the sea. During the same period, the earliest preserved maps of the city and its environment emerged. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that these visual representations were informed by the same commercial ideology. Despite, or exactly because of, the city's decreasing maritime accessibility, they conceived Bruges as a place that could easily be reached by trading ships and where merchants could trade in the best possible circumstances.