This article explores the responsibility of wind energy developers for the rights of Indigenous Peoples whose lands are affected by wind energy projects. Applying a rights-based approach and drawing on three landmark court rulings involving the struggle of Indigenous communities against the development of wind energy projects, the analysis explores the insights provided by the cases for clarifying the responsibility of business actors involved in developing such projects. It examines how Indigenous Peoples’ rights are frequently marginalized or overlooked in the planning and siting of wind energy projects and the need to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples throughout a project in order to attain a transition that is just. Based on the analysis, we argue for a rights-based approach as the theoretical framework and analytical tool to advance justice in the green transition and a means to articulate the responsibilities of corporate actors within that context.

This article examines the intersection between forced labour, supply chain risks and environmental, social and governance concerns that pose a threat to the ‘Just Transition’. It addresses how states, businesses and other stakeholders drive or fail Just Transitions and why. Through an application of a ‘policy currents framework’ to the case study of solar panel supply chains originating in China, we analyse states, international organisations and civil society organisations’ framing of modern slavery issues in the context of the ‘Just Transition’. We focus on the framing of challenges and solutions to the nexus of forced labour and climate change. We draw attention to the fact decarbonisation risks are being achieved at the cost of labour rights abuses within supply chains, question whether the concept of renewable sources is ‘Just’ and provide a series of recommendations for stakeholders.

The transition to renewable energy models to tackle environmental degradation and climate change is one of the most important topics on the international agenda. The energy transition requires a system that is decentralised and democratic, depending more on local energy ownership and the genuine participation of the affected stakeholders. Although different states face various economic and cultural challenges, a common challenge is making the transition as inclusive and equitable as possible so that everyone can benefit equally. The article focuses on South Africa, acknowledging its special place among the Global South countries due to its history and the dependency of its economy on coal. Taking the South African experiences as an example, this article aims to show how the energy transition processes can be more inclusive and just, allowing the affected parties to participate at all levels of the just transition processes and making their voices heard.

This introduction to this special issue of Modern Italy explores how the emphasis on fascism in recent scholarship and public discourse risks its mythification and cultural rehabilitation, and urges a rebalancing of historiography to highlight the pivotal role of the Italian Resistance in shaping Italy’s democratic identity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation and the thirtieth anniversary of Modern Italy, the issue examines lesser-known aspects of the Resistance, such as marginal groups, gendered experiences and transnational perspectives. Contributions include studies on Roma Resistance fighters, the Catholic underground press, American soldiers of Italian descent, and women in the Liberal Party. The articles emphasise the liminality and creative potential of the Resistance as a transformative period that redefined political and cultural identities.

This article reviews the evolution of the representation of Italy’s ‘Catholic partisan’. In essence, this involved adaptation of the model of the Catholic soldier, who was able to kill out of love and ‘without hatred’, to the context of a civil war. With particular reference to the case of the central Veneto, this examination looks back to earlier Italian experiences during wartime to help explain how Catholic activists and the partisan groups linked to the Catholic world addressed the key issues of the legitimation of Resistance violence and the control of its use. It emphasises the disparity between the rhetoric directed at containing the violence and the realities of guerrilla warfare. The article goes on to analyse the different models of the ‘Catholic partisan’ put forward in the immediate postwar period (1945–1950): the ‘Catholic soldier’, with his military bearing; the ‘pure martyr’, who never initiated violence; and the ‘devout partisan’, who managed to restrict his use of violence, assessing its costs and benefits, and was characterised by his inclination to forgive and, especially, to kill as little as possible. The conclusions consider how a particular rhetoric helped to shape the narrative of the active involvement of Catholics in the Italian Resistance.

This paper examines so-called active participles in three languages with different morphological systems (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English and Hebrew). Based on a range of morphological, syntactic and interpretational diagnostics, I argue that these elements are uniformly deverbal adjectives. This result challenges a substantial body of work claiming that active participles show an adjectival/verbal ambiguity, but it is in line with Bešlin (2023), which analyzes passive participles as deverbal adjectives. Importantly, deverbal adjectives may denote predicates of properties or predicates of eventualities (events or states), depending on the characteristics of the verbal structure they embed. If these conclusions generalize to other languages, then there is no need to assume that (verbal) participles constitute a separate grammatical category, which is a desirable theoretical outcome. The results presented in this paper argue for an architecture of the grammar in which there is no one-to-one mapping between an item’s syntactic category and its meaning.

In 2018, David Laitin and Pål Kolstø engaged in a discussion at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held at Columbia University, New York. The panel was a 20-year retrospective on Identity in Formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the Near Abroad (Laitin 1998).

Biber Deresi is an open-air site located on the Assos/Behram, Çanakkale coast, associated with river systems and raw material sources. The site’s particular importance is owed to the discovery of the most extensive Lower and Middle Palaeolithic assemblage yet identified on the Aegean coast of Türkiye. The lithic assemblage is characterized by a significant number of large cutting tools, including handaxes, cleavers, and trihedral picks, as well as pebble core tools, which are predominantly chopping tools. Flakes produced from both unprepared and prepared cores predominate. It is evident that, during the Pleistocene low sea level period, the region had a continuous connection with Lesvos and, via the eastern Aegean islands, with mainland Greece. Biber Deresi is identified as a key site, facilitating hominin movement and communication between Asia and Europe, and providing a novel contribution to the Palaeolithic map of the Aegean.

Political discourse is a persuasive device used to gain public support, and official counterterrorism narratives are no exception. Drawing on theoretical convergence between Critical Terrorism Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in their understanding of discourse as a persuasive tool, this research aims to demonstrate the utility of discourse analysis in deciphering the political ideology sustaining official counterterrorism rhetoric. Through quantitative diachronic observation of key terms (terrorism, separatism, and extremism) and the systematic codification of Xinjiang White Papers (2003–2019), this research applies van Leeuwen’s (2008) model of social practice analysis, participant representation, and legitimation categories to reveal the specific rhetoric tools ultimately aimed at securing the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) political legitimacy. This article builds on CDA theory by linking discourse and political practice, reflecting on the pragmatic consequences of implicit power structures within official counterterrorism discourse, involving in this case the CPC and ethnoreligious groups in Xinjiang.

Language variation (specifically: optionality between different ways of saying the same thing, as in check out the places vs check the places out) tends to be considered abnormal, suboptimal, short-lived, dysfunctional and needlessly complex, especially in functional or cognitive linguistic circles. In this contribution, we are assessing these assumptions: does grammatical optionality increase the relative complexity (or: difficulty) of language production? We use a corpus-based psycholinguistics research design with a variationist twist and analyse SWITCHBOARD, a corpus of conversational spoken American English. We ask if and how grammatical optionality correlates with two symptoms of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). Our dataset covers 108,487 conversational turns in SWITCHBOARD, 22 grammatical alternation types yielding 57,032 optionality contexts, 589,124 unfilled pauses and 43,801 filled pauses. Analysis shows that overall optionality contexts do not make speech production more dysfluent – regardless of how many language-internal probabilistic constraints are in operation, or how many variants there are to choose from. With that being said, we show how some alternations in the grammar of English are more prone to attract or repel production difficulties than others. All told, our results call into question old dogmas in theoretical linguistics, such as the Principle of Isomorphism or the Principle of No Synonymy.

The article examines a set of nouns which can be interpreted as questions on the degree to which some property holds and can be paraphrased by clauses introduced by how + Adjective, in some interrogative contexts. This subset of nouns is shown to clearly differ from (traditional) Concealed Questions. Nouns that allow the concealed degree reading (DCQ nouns) are argued to share specific semantic features: only nouns that can denote eventualities involving (intensional) gradable states can have degree concealed question readings. The concealed degree reading is shown not only to result from lexical semantic properties of nouns and from the semantics of the predicates that select them, but also to depend on contextual parameters, which can disambiguate concealed question readings.

France ceded territorial claims to Newfoundland to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, but French fishermen retained rights to operate seasonal cod fisheries along a stretch of coastline known as the French Shore. The treaty was one of several laws formalizing the property regime based on the commons that emerged among European fishermen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Several demographic and geopolitical changes converged after the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) to raise the question of whether French fishing rights on the French Shore were exclusive or concurrent with British fishing rights on that coast. Treaty and customary law seemed at odds on this question, forcing fishermen, merchants, naval officers, and ministers to articulate what constituted property and how property should be conceived if an interimperial commons were to work. The conflicts that transpired highlighted how they answered these questions differently. Agents of the state tended to promote the commons while some British subjects tried to create a real property regime from below. Disputes over real property formation on the French Shore show another dimension of the early modern enclosure process, demonstrating both the role of the commons in empire and the challenges of resource management in an interimperial space.

It has been shown in the literature that the preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, found in a number of languages (especially verb-/head-final ones), can result from different syntactic configurations. In some languages (e.g., in Hungarian), immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement). In others (e.g., in Turkish), preverbal foci remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement), to allow for the focus–verb adjacency. We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in situ ones, based on their prosodic requirements. Specifically, we show that both types of foci require alignment with an edge of a prosodic constituent but differ in the directionality of alignment (right or left). Our analysis rests on bringing together two independent existing proposals, Focus-as-Alignment and flexible Intonational Phrase (ɩ)-mapping. We show that this approach makes correct predictions for a number of unrelated Eurasian languages and discuss some further implications of this approach.

There have been strong proponents and opponents in academic debates about the use of social science in legal practice. However, in such academic discussions, little attention has been paid to what legal practitioners think about social science and its use in law. The present study shows that legal practitioners have complex views about social science. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it shows that there are five ideal-types of ‘social science consciousness’: enthusiast, pragmatist, indifferent, critical optimist and opponent. The paper shows what the implications are for law and social science, as well as a new research agenda on social science consciousness.

This paper examines a series of consonantal alternations conveying ‘affective’ meanings in the South American language Mapudungun (Catrileo 1986, 2010, 2022). The processes target the rich four-place coronal inventory of the language by shifting consonants in root morphemes to palatal or dental articulations. The palatalisations are cross-linguistically common in implying small size, tenderness, closeness, and politeness (e.g. [naʐki] ‘cat’ [ɲaʃki] ‘kitty’); however, the effects of dentalisation are more unexpected, implying distance, abruptness, sarcasm, and rudeness (e.g. [naʐki] ‘cat’ [n̪aθki] ‘damned cat’). While speakers evidently seem to assign sound symbolic value to the alternations, the patterns do not align neatly with cross-linguistically expected ‘synaesthetic’ correspondences, particularly to do with size symbolism and acoustic frequency (Ohala 1984, 1994). Based on historical metalinguistic commentary and corpus data, I argue that the Mapudungun alternations are long-established in the language, showing a variety of lexicalised forms, and being deeply grammatically entrenched both in their semantico-pragmatic implications and their morpho-phonological structure. As such, any sound-symbolic patterns are fundamentally subordinate to the grammatical architecture. I propose that a more parsimonious analysis of the patterns is an autosegmental one, where floating evaluative morphemes (diminutives and augmentatives) spread [distributed] and [anterior] feature nodes to the target coronal consonants, along with their language-specific pragmatics.

This article examines the role of British imperial constitutional law in the Zionist campaign against establishing a Legislative Council in Palestine during the early 1930s. At the time, the British government sought to introduce limited self-government in Palestine through a parliamentary institution that would include both locals and British officials. However, the Zionist leadership opposed this initiative, fearing that a representative institution reflecting the country’s demographics would threaten the development of the Jewish National Home. This article explores the Zionist engagement with the British imperial constitutional experience within its campaign against the Legislative Council, emphasizing the strategic application of British constitutional law by two Zionist officials, Leo Kohn and Chaim Arlosoroff. Through this case, the article highlights the influence of British constitutional law on interactions between national movements and the British Empire. It argues that the British imperial system offered an adaptable and flexible political framework. The Zionists’ attentiveness to this flexibility not only sheds light on the interplay between Zionism and the British Empire during the mandatory period but also underscores the place of constitutional flexibility in political debates within the British Empire.

This article analyses the development of Arthur C. Clarke’s (1918–2008) persona as the ‘prophet of the Space Age’, focusing on its relation with his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. Unlike many space personas, Clarke was not an astronaut or a political leader, but a writer and advocate for space technology who developed a global reputation as an authority on the future. In 1956, Clarke relocated from his native England to the former British colony of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This article examines how both Clarke himself and a wide range of organizations, nations and individuals, including many from Sri Lanka, contributed to the creation of a global ‘prophet’ persona. This includes Clarke’s public life in Sri Lanka, which came to embody the earthbound, satellite-focused space future he promoted. This persona was in turn used to project commercial and moral justifications for space technologies, especially through Western lenses and for Western audiences, but in numerous ways gave Sri Lanka an active role in the global Space Age.