This article builds on recent works which challenge the dichotomy between religion and modern urban planning. The article focuses on a case-study in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse during the nineteenth century. Over a period of 30 years, Catholic parishioners and clergy repeatedly petitioned the town’s Calvinist industrial and municipal elite for a church to be built in the paternalist cités ouvrières housing district, culminating in the eventual construction of the church of Saint-Joseph by 1883. Through a close analysis of the archival records of these petitions, the discussions they sparked and the shifting local and national political dynamics of the city, this article argues that religious groups used myriad tactics to engage in modern planning and that municipal authorities were won over by these tactics if they were politically expedient.

The late nineteenth-century harbour districts, or so-called ‘sailortowns’, are generally depicted as deterritorialized ‘enclaves’ of heightened globalized transience. However, these neighbourhoods were just as much shaped by semi-durable local labouring communities. This article studies lodging houses as facilitators of global and local entanglements in harbour districts from a socio-cultural perspective, with Antwerp in the late nineteenth century as a case-study. Analysing the spatiality, materiality, sociability and people of the lodging phenomenon, it reveals that next to the highly transient seafarers, sailortown accommodated a diverse yet largely local population of small entrepreneurs and their families right between transience and permanence.

This article compares how gender and pathologization were entangled in the laws on infanticide in Spain and the Netherlands in 1930–1960, as well as in court practices. Both countries knew lenient laws for women who killed their newborn babies. These laws themselves did not assume that these women were suffering from a mental disorder, even though they referred to emotional state. In Spain, where the notion of honor was more important in the law, from the 1940s a debate was held about the relationship between mental illness and infanticide laws in the context of the Franco regime's emphasis on pronatalism. While in Spain the institutional monopoly of the generalist forensic physician as preferred expert excluded psychiatrists, in the Netherlands forensic psychiatrists were more influential, and their role increased from the 1950s. The article argues that regardless of many differences in forensic and political culture in both countries infanticidal women were pathologized: in Spain mostly via some interpretations of the infanticide law, and in the Netherlands via forensic psychiatry. However, pathologization, we show, involved many lay actors such as lawyers, legal scholars, and probation services.

Although there are numerous studies showing the significance of clientelism in the electoral mobilization of the poor in Turkey, scant attention has been paid on the specific clientelistic strategies employed by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) among the Kurdish population in İstanbul. Addressing this gap, this study focuses on the AKP’s clientelist politics among Kurdish voters in Bağcılar, a lower-income district on the European side of İstanbul. Drawing on fieldwork, this study argues that the AKP successfully mobilizes Kurdish voters through machine politics and relational clientelism, which are facilitated by co-ethnic brokerage and intermediary linkages. By analyzing different modalities of Kurdish brokers – Kurdish (male) entrepreneurs, Kurdish housewives and Kurdish associations – the study discloses the intricate dynamics of the AKP’s clientelist–machine politics at the local level. It reveals that the AKP’s co-ethnic brokers not only distribute material benefits but also cultivate enduring personal relationships with Kurdish voters, providing problem-solving networks for the Kurdish poor in everyday life. The AKP’s co-ethnic brokerage relations foster trust, care, solidarity, and affectivity among Kurds. The study concludes that the AKP employs both material and symbolic dimensions of clientelism to mobilize the Kurdish electorate in İstanbul.

The mysterious disappearance of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror while searching for the Northwest Passage under the leadership of Sir John Franklin in the 1840s led to more than thirty different expeditions seeking to find the lost ships and their 129-man crews. It also fostered the first and only use of wild animals as a means of communication in such a rescue operation. Since covering the vast search areas was challenging, if not impossible during sub-freezing winter conditions, some of the would-be rescuers turned to Arctic foxes as couriers of information that they hoped might direct the lost explorers to safety. Based on excerpts from the participants’ diaries and published reports from the period, and on the physical evidence that survives, this paper describes the role Arctic foxes were asked to play in one of the greatest (unsuccessful) rescue efforts ever undertaken in the Far North.

Recently opened memorial museums and exhibitions in Croatia museumize the “Homeland War” of 1991 to 1995. This article examines the four major institutions, the Museum of the Homeland War in Karlovac as well as three sites in Vukovar: The Memorial Center for the Homeland War, the Memorial Hospital and the Ovčara Memorial Home. This first systematic site analysis compares 1) the overall narratives; 2) how enemy images from World War II are reactivated to demonize “the other”; 3) how women are represented in these war exhibitions; and 4) the topics that are left out. I argue that while there is still no national museum that includes war developments in all of the country, the two big institutions, the Museum in Karlovac and the Center in Vukovar, focus on the “defenders,” as the Croatian fighters are called – while in Karlovac strikingly marginalizing and at the Center completely omitting civilians. War here means (male) soldiers and weapons, while the other two institutions portray individual victims without discussing their biographies. In all sites, Serbs are depicted with reference to World War II: as Chetniks, running “concentration camps” who committed either “urbicide and culturocide” or a “holocaust” against Croats.

This article examines ways in which slaves and missionaries used public declarations before witnesses to carve out a distinctive space of legal proceedings in pursuit of emancipation in western Tanzania. This way of pursuing emancipation shows slaves deploying their intellectual creativity and cultural knowledge to shape the German and British colonial legal systems. Interviews provide evidence that these public declarations drew on long-standing practices of oathing in western Tanzanian societies, while administrative sources indicate that oaths had been used in Islamic legal practice. Both mission and administrative sources show that these public declarations became a fairly routine means to facilitate slave emancipation between about 1907 and the 1920s. They were seen as legitimate by both (ex)owners and (ex)slaves, and were welcomed by officials as they mitigated tensions between owners and slaves, and between slave owners and missions. This legal practice was not codified in either the gradualist German-era laws on slavery or the more proactive abolitionist laws enacted by the British. It was a bottom-up innovation, developed in a context in which effective emancipation depended on drawn-out struggles and negotiations over personal autonomy and malleable social norms.

Based upon archival and newspaper sources, this article explores the relationship between the notoriety of South Fort George, Fort George, and Prince George (the Georges) in British Columbia's northern interior, and the sense of self and place for residents on the eve of World War I. The investigation of Harry Porters’ Christmas Eve murder glimpses gender, class, and ethnic sensibilities linking the region with the rest of the province and nation, along with the British Columbia Provincial Police force's reliance on peace keeping in an era that was beginning to reassess what professional policing might entail. The result demonstrates that while the Georges imagined themselves as resting on the periphery of the white settlement frontier, the evidence indicates that in seeking acceptance by opinion leaders elsewhere in the nation, locally self-identified respectable people eagerly embraced the norms of post-Edwardian Canada. That the Georges tawdry reputation persists into the early twenty-first century suggests that the resilience of this notoriety reflects forces at play well-beyond British Columbia's northern interior. Framed in this fashion, the Christmas Eve murder sheds light on the legacies of reputation on the white settlement frontier, the influence of gender, class, and ethnicity in the construction of crime, and the evolution of professional policing.

Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for Aelita remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings Aelita's cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.

The trend toward the “humanization” of international law reflects a greater emphasis on individuals rather than simply states as objects of concern. The advance of human rights law (HRL) has been an important impetus for this trend. Some observers suggest that humanization can be furthered even more by applying HRL rather than international humanitarian law (IHL) to hostilities between states and nonstate armed groups, unless a state explicitly declares that it is engaged in an armed conflict. This essay argues, however, that a court should not defer to a state's characterization of hostilities, but should base its analysis on whether hostilities meet the criteria for an armed conflict. Applying HRL to hostilities that effectively are an armed conflict but not acknowledged as such risks diluting the legitimacy and normative force of HRL. On the one hand, if a court applies conventional stringent HRL standards, this body of law may be seen as unrealistic and is likely to be ignored. On the other hand, a court that adapts HRL standards to armed conflict may need to take a consequentialist approach at odds with HRL's deontological foundations. Clearly differentiating between HRL and IHL may thus best promote the humanization of warfare.

The claims of those who are compelled to migrate are, in general, taken to be more urgent and pressing than the claims of those who were not forced to do so. This article does not defend the moral relevance of voluntarism to the morality of migration, but instead seeks to demonstrate two complexities that must be included in any plausible account of that moral relevance. The first is that the decision to start the migration journey is distinct from the decision to stop that journey, through resettlement; the latter may involve voluntary choice, without that voluntarism impugning the involuntary nature of the former. The second is that the migration decision of the individual might be voluntary, even while that individual's family or social network might be compelled to insist upon some particular individual member's migration. That is, the fact that any particular person might be free to refuse migration does not contradict the fact that the group in question does not have the effective freedom to avoid the migration of some group members. Once these two complexities are understood, I argue, the moral relevance of voluntarism in the ethics of migration becomes more complex and nuanced than is generally understood.

Events in recent years have underscored the dependence of the liberal international order (LIO) on the domestic fate of liberalism in countries like the United States—where, according to critics such as Mark Lilla and Francis Fukuyama, liberals have imperiled themselves through an unwise embrace of identity politics. These critics argue that identity politics undermines solidarity and empowers the illiberal right, and that it should be rejected in favor of a unifying creedal nationalism based on common liberal values. This analysis, I argue, overlooks the fact that “common” creedal values have expanded in American history when their meanings were being controversially reinterpreted from identity-based perspectives. If American liberalism is to emerge from its current crisis, it will need to incorporate the claims of identity into a sense of national belonging that can resist the authoritarian, ethnoracial nationalism promoted by the LIO's enemies. The likelihood that such a process will be controversial is reason for liberal critics of identity politics to consider how the claims of identity might be an asset, not an obstacle, to revitalizing liberal democracy against its challengers.

The concept of voluntariness permeates the ethics and politics of migration and is commonly used to distinguish refugees from migrants. Yet, neither the precise nature and conditions of voluntariness nor its ethical significance for migrant rights and state obligations has received enough attention. The articles in this collection move the debate forward by demonstrating the complex ethical judgments involved in delineating voluntary from forced migration and in drawing out its political and institutional implications. In addition to highlighting the interplay between the voluntary and nonvoluntary elements of migration over time and across different sites of the migration journey, they provide a nuanced account of the various conditions of voluntariness and they challenge common ideas about its normative political consequences.