By reconstructing the boundaries of a ‘community’ that shared the same emotional horizon when it came to love, this article explores the role that concepts of romantic love played in the development of modern ideas of sexuality, with a specific focus on the relationship between women, sexual desire and pleasure. After a brief description of the Italian historical and cultural context in which Paolo Mantegazza developed his sexual science and the role that romantic love played within it, I analyse his Fisiologia dell’amore to show how, even without explicit references to sexual acts, the book clearly alludes to sexual desire and pleasure. I then examine a selection of letters from Mantegazza’s female readers to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the book. Finally, I show how ideas of romantic love and the introspective enquiry prompted by reading Mantegazza also affected women’s awareness of themselves as sexed beings capable of and entitled to experiences of pleasure.

This study investigates the variation in null subject usage across Slavic languages, focusing on Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. By examining the syntactic and interpretive conditions for null subjects in embedded subjunctive clauses, the paper highlights differences in subject–verb agreement, clause structure, and the role of complementizers. Polish, as a consistent null subject language, shows high acceptance of null subjects, while Russian and Ukrainian exhibit partial null subject behavior, with significant inter-speaker variability. A cartographic analysis reveals that clause size and syntactic movement play a crucial role in licensing null subjects, with Polish consistently realizing its complementizer in ForceP, and Russian and Ukrainian showing more variation. The findings highlight the importance of structural factors in explaining null subject distribution and contribute to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon in Slavic languages.

This study of Neolithic Comb Ware and Pitted Ware clay figurines from south-western Finland and Åland focuses on their provenance, technological traits, and cultural significance. Using ICP-MA/ES chemical analysis and thin-section petrography, forty-two figurines were analysed to identify clay sources and preferences in fabrication techniques. The data indicate that the figurines, and thus the humans, moved between contemporaneous locations along the south-western Finnish coast and on Åland, suggesting regional connections between sites. Most figurines were crafted locally, but a significant number was non-local, signifying mobility within a cross-Baltic network. Distinct clay recipes included calcareous or plant-based tempers and the use of grog. The symbolic value of adding grog is seen as reinforcing connections to a place, indicating that portability and provenance, i.e. movement between places, was an important characteristic of the hunter-gatherer figurine tradition of the Neolithic in the northern Baltic.

As Arctic stakeholders navigate a new era of great power competition, this article reflects on the influence that Indigenous Peoples have had on Arctic and international politics through their roles as co-founders of the Arctic Council (AC) system and as Permanent Participants (PPs) within it. Through a constructivist lens, this article highlights the influence the PPs have had on the evolution of the Council’s interests and practices. Based on findings from multiple interviews and an extensive document analysis of the AC’s official Declarations between 1996 and 2021, the article identifies how PP advocacy for the inclusion of Indigenous worldviews, Knowledges, and rights has shaped the AC over time. The article argues that the PPs are a crucial part of the AC’s structure and co-constitute its identity, challenging state-centric understandings of the Council’s existence. It asserts that the PPs’ co-constitution of the AC is what has endowed it with its legitimacy in Arctic and international affairs. However, despite being a core element of what makes the Council what it is, the research findings highlight a variety of challenges and limitations that remain for the PPs. Additionally, the article discusses how the pause of AC work following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed gaps in the recognition and full implementation of the rights and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.

This article examines how popular musical practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prague articulated and shaped Czech nationalist sentiment through intertwined forms of pastoral and urban nostalgia. In a rapidly modernizing city marked by migration, industrialization, and intensifying Czech–German antagonism, pubs, dancehalls and garden restaurants became crucial sites where everyday leisure intersected with the cultural politics of nationalism. These venues, many of which consciously evoked a rural atmosphere through architecture and repertoire, offered urban newcomers a symbolic refuge from the social dislocation of modern life. Here, brass bands and the emergent folk-like genre lidovka, alongside satirical café chantant couplets, became key media through which audiences negotiated the loss of traditional rural worlds and articulated desires for collective belonging.

This article is an attempt to understand how diverse and seemingly incommensurable aerial perspectives on Arctic exploration could co-exist during the search for the John Franklin expedition in the 1840s and 1850s. I begin by examining the cultural context of ballooning before turning to proposals to send balloons and other aerial missions to the Arctic. Why did balloons and ‘balloonacy’, as the popular periodical Punch described this craze, come to feature so prominently in responses to the Arctic mystery, and how did women feature in these responses? I then discuss the clairvoyantes who were put into mesmeric trances and then described visiting Franklin and his men in the Arctic. Beginning at the time of greatest anxiety regarding the fate of the expedition, clairvoyante visionaries and their operators formed part of an emotional field of speculation and experimentation centred on the Arctic. I conclude by arguing that actual balloon expeditions in search of Franklin echoed many of the mesmeric and imaginary projects emanating from popular culture. This connects women’s perspectives about the Arctic with aerial exploration schemes and suggests that we look at both together for a deeper understanding of polar culture in the 1840s and 1850s.

This paper explores Japan’s maritime and Arctic policies. Japan’s interest in the polar regions emerged early due to its geographical characteristics and the impacts of climate change, expanding its scientific research activities in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Over time, Japan has broadened its involvement in the economic, scientific, environmental, and security domains. As a non-Arctic state, Japan has expressed its intent to contribute to resolving Arctic issues and has sought to take a leading role in Arctic governance within the international community. In 2007, Japan enacted the Basic Act on Ocean Policy to promote comprehensive and strategic maritime policies. Japan announced its 4th Basic Ocean Plan in 2023, which plays a crucial role in the sustainable use and protection of marine resources, marine environmental protection, and maritime safety. This paper comprehensively analyses Japan’s Basic Ocean Plans and Arctic policy, exploring the relationship and evolution between maritime and Arctic policies and examining how these policy changes reflect Japan’s international maritime strategy. While previous studies have treated maritime and Arctic policies separately, this paper analyses the interrelationship between the two, investigating the evolution of Japan’s maritime policy up to the present and the development and characteristics of its Arctic policy.

There is increased public attention directed to the topic of weapons trade and this is a positive development because enhanced scrutiny holds a promise of bringing more accountability to the field that has long been obscure. This article reviews the possibility of criminal prosecutions of corporate officials for supplying weapons to Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or a similar forum. The Nuremberg Trials planted seeds for such an endeavour by holding several industrialists criminally liable. Yet, modern international criminal law has so far largely stayed away from defining the scope of individual criminal responsibility for corporate officials. The case studies in this paper reveal that the moment is not ripe for commencing actual investigations at the ICC. Nonetheless, a future consensus is slowly building through (often failed) attempts to use legal or policy avenues to define the standards of conduct in the weapons trade.

It seems futile to look for order in the tangle of norms that abound in the global extractive sector, even more so to look for the teleological principle that would give it meaning. In this tangle, normative regimes interact with each other—in a largely contingent manner—as elements of an ecosystem. We argue that inasmuch as order emerges in the global extractive normative ecosystem, it is a function of the success of norm entrepreneurs such as Export and Development Canada (EDC), Canada’s export credit agency, a financial institution adhering to the Equator Principles. Norms entrepreneurs like EDC perform various normative bricolages claiming to deliver different goods such as free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). We analyse how EDC tinkers with different normative instruments, including the International Finance Corporation’s Standard 7 regarding Indigenous Peoples, to deliver ‘FPIC compliance’ in jurisdictions that are deemed ‘deficient’. We argue that the political ontologies promoted by EDC’s notion of FPIC are better understood within the logic of leverage that underlies EDC’s Environmental and Social Risk Management Policy. These ontologies directly contradict notions of FPIC as expressions of Indigenous self-determination. In our view, offering such normative solutions as a palliative for ‘weak’ jurisdictions—a kind of ‘do-it-yourself (DIY) FPIC regime’ implemented by extractive companies—is thus deeply problematic. We conclude that the appraisal of such normative solutions as put forward by these norm entrepreneurs should look beyond the vocabulary these bricolages mobilise to also consider the political grammar that they induce in territories subject to extraction.

War is a lucrative business for the military industry, particularly in contexts of mass and structural violence, extensive violations of international law and genocide. For economically advanced states, the profits generated by military businesses are often seen as beneficial under the dynamics of the military-industrial complex. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has caused untold suffering that has ‘scarred the consciousness of humanity’, aptly illustrates this dynamic.

In such a context, states and corporations arguably have a duty under international law not to contribute to or benefit from the war economy of the state committing such violations. In practice, however, adhering to these obligations conflicts with the lucrative economic and geopolitical opportunities that this war economy provides. This essay reflects on the argumentative techniques used by states and corporations to justify continued military support for Israel, despite its clear contradiction with their international legal obligations.

In the Lafarge decision of 7 September 2021, the French Cour de cassation resolved a long-standing unclarity about the interpretation of French criminal law on complicity in the context of multinational corporations’ involvement in international crimes. The court found that complicity in crimes against humanity can be characterized as soon as a business actor is aware that its actions can facilitate the criminal activities of the main perpetrator, without sharing their specific intent to commit the crime. With this ruling, France’s highest criminal court asserted that the transfer of money from multinational cement company Lafarge to the Islamic State (ISIS) to maintain its industrial activity in northern Syria could trigger its liability for complicity in crimes against humanity. This article summarizes this case from a French and international criminal law perspective, focusing on the charge of complicity in crimes against humanity, and assessing the potential implications of this jurisprudence to the arms industry.

In 2018, human rights organizations filed a criminal complaint in Italy against the directors of the Italian armaments export licensing authority (UAMA) and the CEO of the arms manufacturer RWM Italia, following the discovery of bomb remnants on the site of an airstrike in Yemen that killed six civilians. The criminal complaint was dismissed in March 2023, despite the judge ruling that UAMA’s directors had violated the Arms Trade Treaty. In July 2023, the victims filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights against Italy, alleging a violation of the right to life. Drawing on an analysis of the criminal investigation files, this piece assesses the failures of the Italian state and RWM Italia to comply with their international human rights obligations regarding arms transfers. It considers the potential for improving accountability within the arms trade via domestic and European courts.

The Solutrean in the Cantabrian region is one of the periods in the Upper Palaeolithic with the highest number of faunal studies conducted in recent decades, which offer valuable insights into how human groups exploited their environment for survival. Here, the authors analyse twenty-four archaeological levels from twelve sites dated between c. 22 and 19.5 ky cal bp, focusing on the exploitation of large mammals through palaeoecological and palaeoeconomic approaches. Their examination of prey acquisition and transport, age profiles, seasonality, nutrition, and energy costs shows that hunting decisions were influenced not only by the economic profitability of prey but also by the environment, topography, climate, animal behaviour, and species abundance. This multifactorial perspective provides an updated view of subsistence strategies at the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum.

This article challenges long-held assumptions that Raknehaugen, the largest prehistoric mound in Scandinavia, served as a high-status burial monument. While traditionally seen as reflecting elite power in the Late Iron Age, this interpretation is poorly supported by archaeological evidence, which has consistently failed to reveal any evidence of a burial. Instead, the author argues that the mound’s construction should be understood as a communal, ritual response to a catastrophic landslide that took place in the wake of the ad 536 ‘Dust Veil’ climatic crisis. Drawing on a relational landscape approach, recent LiDAR analysis, and dendrochronological data, the study situates Raknehaugen within a dynamic landscape and suggests that it functioned as a structure intended to restore the cosmological and social order. Reframing the mound as an active agent in a sacred landscape opens new avenues for interpreting Iron Age monumentality beyond elite-centric narratives, emphasizing landscape, materiality, and collective ritual practices.