Critics argue that the politics of religious rights creates the problem of religious minorities instead of resolving it. The history of debate over conversion in India reveals that appeals to religious freedom can obscure and even suppress struggles against inequality and injustice.

This paper studies three thematic markers (TMs) in informal written French: pour ce qui est de, au niveau (de) and en matière de. We will demonstrate that they have different syntactico-semantic and discourse-functional properties and that the exact function of the TM construction results from the interplay between the inherent properties of the TM and the specific syntactic construction it appears in. We will demonstrate that TMs do not only introduce the aboutness-topics, but that they can also establish the frame in which the main clause holds or functions.

This study presents a variationist analysis of the expression of future temporal reference (variation between the inflected future and the periphrastic future) in a linguistically conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia, Canada. Results show that Acadian French is distinct from Laurentian French and that the Baie Sainte-Marie variety also differs from other Acadian varieties in some respects. A comparison of the distribution of variants and of the conditioning factors reveals that Acadian and Laurentian varieties have different future temporal reference systems. The Baie Sainte-Marie variety retains vestiges of earlier stages of the grammaticalization of one of the variants, the periphrastic future, not found in other Acadian varieties, thus supporting its characterization as a conservative variety.

The provincial press played a significant role in forming local attitudes and senses of civic identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local and regional newspapers often adopted a ‘boosterist’ language, a style that enthusiastically promoted the particular qualities of places. The persistence of boosterism into the early twenty-first century makes it a concept worthy of further exploration. This study considers just one ‘booster’, Bernard Samuel Gilbert, and his illuminating series of articles on Lincoln for the Lincolnshire Echo in 1914. His correspondence illustrates the contrasting stances towards improvement typically employed within the local press – including the boosterist alongside the more critical.

The religious revival that followed the collapse of the USSR provides an excellent opportunity to compare the dynamics of projects of religious freedom with those of religious repression. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, this article documents the contradictory effects that both repressive and liberal policies and laws have on religious expression. Thus, while Soviet anti-religious policies undeniably caused much suffering and hardship, religious repression also contributed to an intensification of religious experience among certain Muslim and evangelical groups. And while religious freedom laws expanded the scope for public religious organization and expression, they also produced new inequalities between religious groups, as the cases of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan demonstrate. Ultimately, the article shows that the effects of liberal and repressive laws are far from straightforward and need to be analyzed in relation to the social context in which they are applied.

This article examines the use of tradition by minority groups whose territorial incorporation into British Northern Togoland under UN trusteeship was marked by political exclusion. This contrasts with the more typical pattern of productive and inclusive relations developing between chiefs and the administering authority within the boundaries of what was to become Ghana. In East Gonja, marginalized groups produced their own chiefs while simultaneously appealing to the UN Trusteeship Council to protect their native rights. The article contributes to studies on the limits of the ‘invention of tradition’ by showing the influence of external structures on African agency and organization. As the minority groups sought UN support on the basis of their native status, the colonial power affirmed alternative versions of tradition that were perceived locally as illegitimate and thereby rendered ineffective.