A key question in the theory of migration and in public debates on immigration policies is when migration can be said to be voluntary and when, conversely, it should be seen as nonvoluntary. In a previous article, we tried to answer this crucial question by providing a list of conditions we view as sufficient for migration to be considered nonvoluntary. According to our account, one condition that makes migration nonvoluntary is when people migrate because they lack acceptable alternatives to doing so. In this article, we take the opportunity to further explore and clarify this crucial condition. More specifically, we focus on two main sets of questions. First, we ask whether migration is always voluntary when it serves goals that are voluntarily chosen, and whether those who decide to migrate voluntarily but only have the option of choosing among a limited set of dangerous, harmful, or illegal means for doing so, can be said to be forced to choose those means. Second, we ask whether what counts as “nonacceptable” alternatives should also include cases in which people could have their needs and fundamental rights met, but at the cost of betraying their moral principles or conceptions of the good.

Over the course of 2021, several local councils across the island of Ireland introduced motions recognizing the ‘Rights of Nature’. To date, little research has been conducted into these nascent Rights of Nature movements, even though they raise important questions about the philosophical, cultural, political, and legal drivers in pursuing such rights. Similarly, much remains unclear as to the implications of such initiatives, both in their domestic context and for Rights of Nature movements around the world. This article contributes to addressing this gap by exploring these themes through an analysis of interviews with key stakeholders conducted across the island of Ireland in June 2022. In particular, it explores the impact of international movements, colonial legacies, cultural heritage, and years of inadequate environmental governance, in motivating local councils to pursue a Rights of Nature strategy.

Climate change challenges the means of subsistence for many, particularly in the Global South. To respond to the challenges of climate change, countries increasingly resort to resettling those most affected by land erosion, heat, drought, floods, and the like. In this article, I investigate to what extent resettlement can compensate for the harm that climate-induced migration brings. The first harm I identify is that to individual autonomy. I argue that climate change changes the options of those affected by it to the point that the decision to migrate can no longer count as a voluntary one. In some cases, I argue, the conditions of climate change coerce individuals. Second, I suggest that climate-induced migration severs the ties to territory, explaining the constitutive nature of such ties for accounts of individual autonomy. Third, I argue that severing ties with a traditional and historical territory challenges the capacity to imagine a future for individuals. I conclude that resettlement, even if actively planned and chosen, possibly providing gains in individual well-being and human flourishing, nevertheless harms individual autonomy interests.

This review essay contrasts two of the most notable recent contributions to literature on space and society: Daniel Deudney's Dark Skies (2020) and Brian Patrick Green's Space Ethics (2022). The Green volume is a course textbook, geared to giving students an overview of some of the key ethical issues concerning space and how the arguments on these matters are shaping up. Its aim is to provide an overview rather than a specific line of argument. Deudney's text, by contrast, is an example of a book proposing space skepticism. It argues that we should relinquish many of our current ambitions for space expansion on the grounds that they will increase the already significant degree of extinction-level risk that we face. The essay marks the distinction between these texts by contrasting normal- and special-domain approaches. Normal-domain approaches seek to extend familiar ethico-political issues into the discussion about space expansion without regarding space expansion as the road to utopia or extinction. Special-domain approaches hold to some such optimistic or pessimistic view. The essay goes on to highlight the way in which Green's text would benefit from more social critique, along the lines of Deudney. Ultimately, the normal-domain approach presupposed by Green and rejected by Deudney is upheld.

What shapes a country’s foreign policy formation in times of crisis? This article explores the factors that were behind the response of Ukrainian decision makers in their relations with Russia and the European Union during the annexation of Crimea between February 21 and March 26, 2014. I view Ukraine’s foreign policy through the lenses of an analytical framework inspired by game theory, where the decision-making process is divided into four parts—information about others’ preferences, trust in interlocutors, everyone’s payoffs, and resources. This article employs a rigorous qualitative thematic analysis of 38 elite interviews, numerous primary documents, and media reports. The core finding suggests that the uncertain times and unpreparedness of Ukrainian decision makers obstructed them from a comprehensive analysis of the environment and formation of the country’s foreign policy strategy, which, consequently, facilitated Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

While scholarship on “women's liberation” under historically existing socialism focuses on heroic women making inroads into male-dominated domains, this article explores a previously overlooked group of women in socialist China. Known as jiashu in Chinese, these women are the female dependents (wives, mothers, and in-laws) of both male and female employees in a workplace. Specifically, it centers on the experiences of the jiashu of textile workers in the city of Zhengzhou from 1949 to 1962. It argues that, despite being portrayed as “parasitizing” off formal workers, jiashu performed a wide range of work, both paid and unpaid, inside and outside the household. Similar to their counterparts under capitalism and other state-socialist regimes, these Chinese women's unpaid domestic work sustained the daily and generational reproduction of the labor force and was thus essential to industrial accumulation. Moreover, jiashu also worked on the shopfloor and in collectivized service facilities as paid laborers. Such remunerated work also subsidized accumulation, and the resistance from these women contributed to the eventual collapse of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This research advances the field in two ways. First, it expands theories about the relationship between women's work, social reproduction, and capital accumulation to include work that is both reproductive in nature and remunerated – a previously understudied form of labor. Second, while existing literature focuses on structural analysis and explains why women's work is functional to accumulation, this study gives equal attention to women's agency, showing how interactions between the two shaped historical trajectories.

This article discusses houses on the periphery of Barcelona and in particular in the El Carmel neighbourhood, which were built by poor country-to-city migrants from southern Spain in the post-World War II period. They were constructed following two typologies: barracas (sheds), one-storey huts on an irregular street plan, and coreas (‘Korea houses’), more formally looking one- to three-storey structures lined up on orderly laid-out streets. Based on archival documents, contemporaneous publications and interviews with former autoconstructores (self-builders), the article analyses both social conditions and physical structures. While these buildings were often unauthorized and constructed by informal means, they were just as often built with the landowner’s consent, involving architects and building professionals, and retroactively legalized. The article concludes that in this respect Barcelona’s ‘informal neighbourhoods’ in fact straddled the realms of the formal and the informal, to the extent that the habitual distinction between formal and informal architecture has to be considered inadequate.

William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his ‘instruments’, as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of ‘territorial natural history’, indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles.

Between 1964 and 1969, the Ford Foundation developed the Community Facilities Program in Chile, which articulated technical and financial assistance in the field of architecture and the training of local experts, in addition to its action in the renovation of state structures related to housing and urban planning. In this context, the design strategy introduced innovations based on architectural research that were a pedagogical novelty, which contributed to the discussion on the role of technical assistance in the Southern Cone, redefining the relationship between philanthropy, state and University.

By exploring how the taxation of sex work is interpreted and explained, this article aims to expand theoretical and empirical understandings of tax imaginaries – the collectively formed meanings ascribed to taxes, taxpaying, and the purposes they serve – and how gender is mobilised in their construction. It argues that tax imaginaries created and circulated through online expert commentaries on the taxation of prostitution in Italy discredit sex workers through well-established stigmatising gendered tropes, trivialise the predicaments that they face as taxpayers, and ignore or dismiss systemic ambiguities and discriminations that disadvantage sex workers as citizens. Old prejudices against sex workers are thus reinforced and new ones constituted through these tax imaginaries, while the social inequality and marginalisation experienced by sex workers is obscured.

The principle of filial piety underpinned both parent–child relations and, more broadly, Qing legal and social order. Entering the turbulent years of the Qing–Republic transition, filial piety went through substantial changes. Drawn from the local legal archives in Jiangjin county, Sichuan, this research traces the transformation of filial piety in legal practice during the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that two overlapping processes—legal reforms and nation-state building—synergized to restructure the meaning of filial piety from a largely integrated principle in Qing, which bridged the gaps between filiality and loyalty to the emperor and between personalized morality and imperial state legitimacy, to divergent new interpretations of filial piety, including the individualist filial piety, nationalist filial piety, legal filial piety, and sentimental filial piety. Each new interpretation inherits only part of its original meaning and incorporates newly introduced legal knowledge of legal equality and property ownership. The article concludes that various, sometimes contradictory interpretations of filial piety indicate the Republican legal reforms as an in-between, dynamic spectrum of legal change with vigorous negotiations among different legal actors and knowledge regimes.