The English invasion of Ireland is of central importance to the interconnected histories of Britain and Ireland. Yet there is still disagreement over the agency of its ultimate sponsor, King Henry II. This article argues that from the very beginning of his reign as king of England, Henry utilised a rising tide of intolerance among Europe’s clerical elite for those holding non-standard beliefs and customs to secure reluctant papal approval for an invasion of Ireland. Once that invasion finally got underway a decade and a half later, members of his court portrayed Henry’s firm rule as the necessary precursor to the reform of Irish religion and culture. This propaganda sought its justification in the intellectual and cultural flourishing of the twelfth-century renaissance, which provided European commentators with newly-revived models of logic and classification. In was also carried out amidst Crusade-inspired justifications for the violent subjugation or killing of religious non-conformists. The essential point, however, is that these clerical descriptions did not necessarily reflect contemporary secular opinion. When works written for secular audiences in the vernacular are analysed, they present a much more nuanced image of Ireland and the Irish. Gone are the references to civilising or reforming missions, and the clear sense of cultural superiority. What remains, however, is the fundamental belief that strong, centralised order is required for the successful running of society. This is what the English invaders told themselves, and this is what informed the first generation of settlement in Angevin Ireland.

Events since 2011 replaced earlier discussions about authoritarian stability in the Middle East with new ones about the meaning of democracy and the nature of revolution. The experiences and debates of Egyptians in the last six years also raise important questions around citizenship and the nature of political community. Just as there have not always been nation-states, there have not always been feelings of membership, identification, and activity associated with them. Citizenship and political community are frequently discussed in relation to secularism and religion and relative to an argument that the affective claims of Islam are incompatible with the modern presumptively secular state. I argue, however, that the shoring up—or disintegration—of nationalism and citizenship are shaped by the imagination of everyday individuals and state elites.

This article analyzes the microprocesses that imbue bread with meaning and the macropolitics that shape its subsidized provision. It begins by outlining bread's multiple forms of value and significance, some easily quantifiable, others not. It problematizes the predominant approach to studying moral economies before putting forth an alternative framework. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Jordan, the following empirical sections examine the different ways in which bureaucrats, bakers, and ordinary citizens portray the government's universal subsidy of Arabic bread. I unpack the diverse opinions encountered in the field and discuss their links to the Hashemite regime's polyvalent legitimating discourse. The article then dissects the politics of provisions that contribute to the bread subsidy's paradoxical persistence. It concludes by considering the relationship between moral economies, opposition politics, and authoritarian power in the context of Jordan's ongoing food subsidy debate.

Beginning in the second decade of the 19th century, Egyptian agriculture began a process of transformation from basin to perennial irrigation. This shift facilitated the practice of year-round agriculture and the cultivation of summer crops including cotton whose temporalities did not match that of the annual Nile flood. One facet of the perennially irrigated landscape was an increase in the prevalence of the parasitic diseases bilharzia (schistosomiasis) and hookworm, the symptoms of which came to constitute normative experiences of the body among those engaged in perennially irrigated agriculture. Male agricultural laborers, who most often performed the work of irrigation, were at the greatest risk of infection. This article considers the significance of agricultural labor in the continuous making and maintenance of perennially irrigated agriculture and the role of parasitic disease in producing temporal experiences of this labor.

Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has deprived an increasing number of British subjects of their citizenship. This policy, known as “denaturalization,” has been applied with particular harshness in cases where foreign-born subjects have been accused of terrorist activity. The increase is part of a global trend. In recent years, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands have either debated or enacted denaturalization statutes. But Britain remains an outlier among Western democracies. Since 2006, the United Kingdom home secretary has revoked the citizenship of at least 373 Britons, of whom at least 53 have had alleged links to terrorism. This is more than the total number of revocations by Canada, France, Australia, and Netherlands combined. These developments are troubling, as the right to be secure in one's citizenship has been a cornerstone of the postwar European liberal political order, and of the international community's commitment to human rights.

A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person's private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person's basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name 'perspectival diversity'. This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by enlarging the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society.