This article analyzes tweets in the Turkish language from November 2020 to May 2021 in which Kurds are explicitly mentioned that feature negative animalization directed toward Kurds and pro-Kurdish organizations. It systematically compares ways of animalization attribution, to what entities the animalization is attributed mostly, and the attributors (actors) of animalization. First, it argues that animalizing dehumanization directed at Kurds in the data set principally occurs for attributing the lack of four human traits: agency, civility, morality, and rationality. Second, it shows in what different ways the lack of these traits is attributed to Kurdish people in general and to major pro-Kurdish groups such as HDP (the largest pro-Kurdish legal political party) and PKK (the largest pro-Kurdish armed group). Finally, it discloses three main political networks among Twitter users within the data set and characterizes how negative animal references to Kurds, pro-Kurdish groups, and each other were used by these actors. Thus, this research seeks to establish a framework to study other ethnic conflicts from the perspective of animalization and invites further research on whether the trends that were found imply a general tendency around the world.

This article seeks to discover how this contemporary Finno-Ugric identity has been politically instrumentalized and negotiated in Estonia. First, we look at how the Estonian state engages with the concept of Finno-Ugric world and inscribes it into Estonia’s foreign policy goals. Then, we delve into the role of Finno-Ugric traditionalism in Estonian populist and far-right discourses. Third, we discuss how local identity constitutes and cements community building initiatives and projects in the Seto region known for its local specificity and cultural peculiarity.

The goal of this article is to show Russia’s civilizational turn in the broader context of imperial nationalism. The “turn” is a manifestation of imperial nationalism that today feeds not only on political ideas and history but also on geography. In the mass perception, geography is seen as an objective, non-ideologized scientific discipline less prone to political manipulation. Because of this, it can be employed to influence the Russian self-identification process in a much more subtle and efficient way than references to the more abstract notion of civilization. This article presents the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) as an identity entrepreneur managed by the ruling elite with a well-developed regional structure. It functions as a community of imperial practice. With its discursive and material practices, the RGS contributes to reproducing imperial nationalism, including in its civilizational version. The RGS is the keeper of the imperial body. By referring to the imperial body, I mean not just the physical territory but also the ways it is imagined in discourse and made material in numerous practices.

The variability of adverbial placement in the modified infinitive construction (i.e. split infinitives vs. full infinitives with adverbial pre- and post-modification) has been widely discussed in the (American English) literature. Yet a convincing generalized explanation for the variation that simultaneously incorporates language-internal and language-external factors has yet to be found, particularly in English varieties that have not received as much scholarly attention as standardized varieties. This article investigates modified infinitive syntactic variation in Twitter-style Philippine English (PhE) using a 135-million-word Twitter corpus. It adopts a Bayesian approach in conducting a multiple multinomial regression analysis of the said variation, with the help of Deep-Learning-based demographic inference tools. Although the conditioning effects of some factors diverge from patterns discussed in prior work, the results generally show that language-internal (e.g. stress and rhythm, adverb type, adverb length) and language-external factors (i.e. time, age, sex, geography) jointly shape the choice to split the infinitive in this linguistic style of PhE.

In both Sweden and Finland, water law has traditionally provided strong protection for hydropower operations by issuing permanent environmental licences. This national protection has started to erode as a result of the requirement of the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) for permit reviews to improve the ecological status of rivers. In the light of this dynamic between European and national frameworks, this article compares the Swedish and Finnish implementation of the WFD regarding existing hydropower operations. Whereas Sweden has adopted comprehensive legislative and policy reforms that embrace a systemic perspective on reconciling hydropower with the current societal and ecological circumstances, Finland has relied on bottom-up collaborative processes at the grassroots level. The article shows that both approaches are problematic in so far as they push the boundaries of proper implementation of the WFD and, by extension, the achievement of the ecological objectives of the WFD in waters affected by hydropower. Our comparison highlights tensions between EU law requirements for formal legal effectiveness in national implementation, and the WFD's aspirations for adaptive river basin-based governance.

Using York during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a case-study, this article discusses a pivotal aspect of the development of civic administrative literacy: the inception of record-keeping. Previous historians have failed to note the evident advancement in York’s civic administrative literacy during the late thirteenth century, and they have usually dated the earliest surviving urban records to the mid-fourteenth century. By comparing different classes of civic and ecclesiastical records, this article reveals that York’s civic administration was in fact engaged in archival preservation from the late thirteenth century. In addition, by examining evidence that appears sporadically in royal archives, this article argues that the commencement of York’s urban archive was significantly influenced by the policies and archival activities of the royal government. Overall, this article aims to contribute to the literature on the early history of civic administrative literacy.

In Vietnam, for a long time, family is considered as being significant for economic, instrumental, social, emotional, and care support for older adults due to strong filial piety, high family values, low institutional coverage, and limited social services, given that the majority of older adults are living in family-based communities. Recently, due to increasing migration, nuclearization, and individualization in Vietnamese families, there is an increasing withdrawal of family caregivers from caregiving to their parents and there seems to be confusion and tension of roles and supports among family members. Meanwhile, Vietnam is observing changes in demographics and family structure, which is linked to an increase in the number of elders in need of care, drop in fertility rate, resulting in a shrinking supply of family caregivers. This article examines the economic dynamics of ageing with limited family ties by examining the formal care services and demographic changes in order to investigate raising social problems towards elder population. It also explores how older adults from varied living backgrounds in Vietnam restructure their lives in terms of acculturation, re-establishing kin networks, psychological well-being in contemporary Vietnam. It demonstrates how Vietnamese elders actively engage in unpaid work within family and community environments, such as housework and childcare, shaped by cultural norms of familialism and filial piety, with regional variations in the north emphasizing stronger familialism and economic motives, and the central coast showing more individualism and sentimental values.

Tomila Lankina has written a pathbreaking book. Impressively combining theoretical ambition, sensitive attention to historical detail, and the skillful use of multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia brings the study of Soviet history squarely back onto the agenda of contemporary comparative social science. For those of us who have spent much of our careers trying to explain to academics and policy makers alike why the story of the rise and fall of the USSR still matters for understanding our contemporary world, Lankina’s book is both welcome vindication and a reason for real optimism about the future of social-scientific inquiry. This is, simply put, the best book I’ve read about the Soviet system and its legacies in many years.

Accounts of the factors that led to the drafting of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have focused on Congress' failures to levy taxes, regulate commerce, and provide security against internal unrest and foreign encroachments. Left out from history are the attempts of the founders to force Britain to return thousands of escapees from slavery they sheltered. Patriot state leaders tried to coerce the return of all fugitives from slavery evacuated with the British army by blocking payment of debts to England in violation of the Treaty of Paris. Such actions ultimately caused the breakdown of the agreement and exposed the structural inability of the Congress to enforce the terms of a duly ratified treaty over intransigent states. Ultimately, the issue of the “carried off” and with it the nation's ability to conduct foreign policy, was the paramount issue that could only be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of the federal structure of government.

Shift is an input–output mapping where a feature or autosegment loses its underlying associations and surfaces with different associations. In Harmonic Serialism, shift can either be analyzed as a multi-step process or a single-step process. While Gietz et al. (2023) argue for the latter, this paper refutes their arguments and provides evidence supporting a multi-step analysis of shift. Specifically, it demonstrates that shift in Kibondei and Halkomelem, the languages analyzed by Gietz et al. (2023), does not require a single-step shift operation and that the analyses they present are empirically inadequate. Typological modeling not only reinforces the result that a single-step shift operation is superfluous but demonstrates that grammars with such an operation undergenerate with respect to the attested typology.

British army officer Charles Warren's archeological excavations in Jerusalem in the late 1860s on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Scottish artist William Simpson's paintings of those activities articulated a new kind of imperial space: the underground empire. The imperial underground was a place that had not yet been conquered and where the British had limited visibility. In contrast to picturesque and panoramic views that created an illusion of order and omniscience, Simpson's sketches depict an imperial presence that was confined, constrained, and in danger of collapse. Yet as the British began to probe this subterranean frontier, they turned the underground world into a place not just of darkness and danger but of exploration and excitement. In the process, Warren's work and Simpson's portrayal of it helped lay the foundation for Britain's eventual conquest of Palestine during the First World War by burrowing beneath Jerusalem's dilapidated Ottoman present in search of its ancient and Judeo-Christian past. Jerusalem was not the only node in Britain's nascent underground empire—British work there occurred alongside the construction of sewers and railway tunnels in London and the mining of gold and diamonds in Australia and South Africa—but it was in Jerusalem that an imperial underground was first and most fully articulated, a space that embodied both the precariousness and the potential of Britain's embryonic efforts to establish a presence in the Middle East.