This article studies how Allied archaeological activities in Ottoman lands between 1918 and 1923 were part of the post-war negotiations over those territories. It uses the occupation of İstanbul as a reference point to understand the larger reconstruction of the Middle East through the inspection of practices and policies used by the Allies in the realm of cultural heritage. It explores the changes that World War I brought to this realm and asks what kind of practices were used and why. Using archival documents and archaeological literature, it argues that the Allies used institutions like museums and schools of archaeology, scholarly activities such as excavations and publications, and laws and regulations on cultural property to make geopolitical claims in the region and legitimize their occupation while acquiring as many antiquities as possible. By comparing the motivations, practices, and results of Allied archaeological activities in the capital to those elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, this study shines a light not only on the making of the post-war cultural heritage regime but also on the emerging geopolitical system in the Middle East.

In Estate Origins, Tomila Lankina sheds new light on the logic of persistence and resilience in the Russian social structure that shapes political possibilities in Russia to the present day. It is a wonderful and rewarding read on the historical origins of social requisites of democracy, such as greater civic activism and more pluralistic political competition. To understand variation in attitudinal and behavioral support for democracy in contemporary Russia, according to Lankina, we must go back to tsarist Russia’s estate institutions. A set of institutions that codified the rights and privileges of different social groups, the estates system created incentives for an eclectic and growing stratum of urban dwellers known as meshchane to invest in education while simultaneously fostering the creation of institutional “infrastructures”—professions, educational institutions, charitable, civic, and local governance bodies—that retained during the communist period a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the state. This, Lankina argues, allowed the meshchane’s distinct value orientations to persist over time.

The available choices of political responses to disruption in the global climatic system depend in part on how the problem is conceptualized. Researchers and policymakers often invoke a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency,” but such language fits poorly with current knowledge of the problem's physical causes and social impacts. This article argues that climate change is instead more like a political epic. It involves neither sudden onset, as in the concept of emergency, nor decisive resolution, as in the concept of crisis, but rather a protracted ordeal of (temporally) obscure origins and uncertain outcomes. This alternative ontology of climate change highlights its novel temporal properties, including unusually slow-moving or time-lagged causal dynamics, with unsettling implications for academic research on the climatic-institutional nexus. Normatively, it undermines arguments for democracies’ environmental superiority over autocracies that rely on the former's general superiority at resolving crises and responding to emergencies. At the same time, some new arguments for democratic distributions of power become possible within the epic frame. More broadly, embracing the assumption of epic climate change may redirect attention from Promethean, managerial, or technocratic solutions to questions about which values or identities deserve preservation amid presumptively interminable and imperfectly remediable sources of disorder.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in the number of civilian resistance movements (CRMs) within states to counter government repression and coups d’états through which civilians are on the frontlines of state brutality and mass atrocities. This article considers the implications of CRMs for atrocity prevention and the associated responsibility to protect norm by asking, Should the international community support CRMs as part of its wider commitment to ending mass atrocities? In this article, we evaluate both military and nonmilitary support to CRMs. We argue that in the context of coups and government repression, providing lethal military support to CRMs will often make things worse in terms of atrocity prevention. We however explain that the provision by the international community of nonlethal and nonmilitary support through political recognition, technical assistance, and accountability can yield positive results. We illustrate this argument with the case of Myanmar.

This essay assesses the morality of Ukraine's use of drones to attack targets inside Russia. Following its invasion by Russian forces, Ukraine has had a just cause to wage a war of self-defense. However, its efforts to achieve that cause remain subject to moral limits. Even a state that has been unjustly attacked may not, for example, respond by deliberately targeting the attacking state's civilian population. To do so would violate the jus in bello principle of discrimination. The essay first describes how drone technology has frequently enabled long-range strikes against Russian military assets as well as other targets inside cities. It then explains why it would be morally wrong for Ukraine to attack its enemy's population centers. First, Russian civilians are not liable to attack, and this nonliability is undiminished by the injustice of Russia's invasion or by any in bello wrongs committed by the Russian military. Second, attacking Russian cities with drones would arguably achieve little or no self-defensive benefit for Ukraine, and it could even be counterproductive.

The Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates the crucial role of technology in modern warfare. The use of digital networks, information infrastructure, space technology, and artificial intelligence has distinct military advantages, but raises challenges as well. This essay focuses on the way it exacerbates a rather familiar challenge: the “civilianization of warfare.” Today's high-technology warfare lowers the threshold for civilian participation in the war effort. A notable example is the widespread use of smartphone apps by Ukrainian civilians, who thereby help the armed forces defend against Russian aggression. Through the lenses of international humanitarian law, conventional just war theory, and revisionist just war theory, this essay evaluates the normative dimensions of such civilian participation. The analysis shows that civilians can lose their legal protections when they use these apps to directly participate in hostilities, and this loss of immunity can be justified by Michael Walzer's conventional just war theory. Revisionism, however, puts the justness of the war at the forefront, and so sheds doubt on the moral liability of Ukrainian civilians. Considering the broader implications, including the blurring combatant-civilian distinction, indicates that such civilianization of warfare should not be welcomed; the risks will often outweigh the benefits. At a minimum, states ought to exercise restraint in mobilizing civilians and inform them of the implications of their actions.