For centuries the Arctic has served as a stage of imagination and has inspired countless artists in different ways. Also the music genre of heavy metal frequently utilises the ‘north’ and the Arctic. This paper briefly explores how two heavy metal subgenres, black metal and Viking metal, approach and utilise narratives associated with the ‘north’. By using lyrics of black and Viking metal bands, different forms of utilisation come to the fore, ranging from narratives of death to the raging Northman. Also polar exploration finds musical expression and is a source for generating extreme conceptual settings.

Most game-theoretic accounts of institutions reduce institutions to behavioural patterns the players are incentivized to implement. An alternative account linking institutions to rule-following behaviour in a game-theoretic framework is developed on the basis of David Lewis’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein's respective accounts of conventions and language games. Institutions are formalized as epistemic games where the players share some forms of practical reasoning. An institution is a rule-governed game satisfying three conditions: common understanding, minimal awareness and minimal practical rationality. Common understanding has a strong similarity with Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of lebensform while minimal awareness and minimal practical rationality capture the idea that rule-following is community-based.

The claim that corporations have human rights obligations remains contentious and can be fraught with confusion. This article synthesizes existing corporate human rights theory and responds to objections to the idea that transnational corporations (TNCs) have human rights obligations. The argument proceeds in three stages. The first section describes the different forms TNCs take and explains why TNCs are properly understood as moral agents responsible for their policies and practices. The second section reviews and explains different philosophical theories of corporate human rights obligations. The third section articulates and responds to objections to the idea that corporations have human rights obligations. The main conclusion of this article is that there are multiple, compelling and overlapping justifications of corporate human rights obligations.

This article outlines the case for a business duty of care to exercise human rights due diligence, judicially enforceable in common law countries by tort suits for negligence brought by persons whose potential injuries were reasonably foreseeable. A parent company’s duty of care would extend to the human rights impacts of all entities in the enterprise, including subsidiaries. A company would not be liable for breach of the duty of care if it proves that it reasonably exercised due diligence as set forth in the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. On the other hand, a company’s failure to exercise due diligence would create a rebuttable presumption of causation and hence liability. A company could then avoid liability only by carrying its burden to prove that the risk of the human rights violations was not reasonably foreseeable, or that the damages would have resulted even if the company had exercised due diligence.

The politics, economies, and ecology of the Arctic region are experiencing fundamental transformation driven largely by human-caused environmental change. Drawing on the work of Robert Cox, this article presents a critical account of environmental security that allows security issues in the Arctic to be reconceptualised. It outlines the environmental changes transforming the Arctic, and theorises the Arctic as a regional environmental security complex in which conditions of security for state and non-state referent objects are predicated on a particular ecological context. It then surveys state- and human security issues in the Arctic, and argues that environmental change has destabilised the ecological base on which the contemporary Arctic as a cooperative region supportive of human activity has been built. The article concludes by outlining alternative ways of conceiving of Arctic security that are more compatible with maintaining the region's ecological base, and suggests that dominant approaches to Arctic security are pathological because they remain premised on the control, extraction and consumption of hydrocarbon resources. It argues that, in the context of the geological Anthropocene, security cannot be sustainable if it fails to address the relationship between human wellbeing and human-caused environmental change, or informs practices that further contribute to environmental change.

This article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

Based on the author’s experience as one of the German translators of The Making, this article lays out its protracted and contradictory reception in Germany. When E.P. Thompson’s magnum opus was published fifty years ago, German scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain failed to take note of it for several years. The relatively muted reception in West Germany during the 1970s was marked by its dismissal as theory-lacking and “subjectivist”. Examining the contrasting contexts of postwar Britain, with its popular anti-fascist experience, and post-fascist West Germany helps to understand why Thompson’s “empirical idiom” of class history failed to strike a chord at the time with leading representatives of the new generation of “progressive” social historians in Germany and a broader reading public. It was only with the arrival of Alltagsgeschichte, feminist history, and, more generally, the cultural turn in humanities that The Making and its German translation became a canonical point of reference both in working-class history and the wider humanities. A brief epilogue discusses its lasting potential for a historical understanding of today’s processes of post-Cold War class formation and human rights struggles.