Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach.

Young activists who took part in South Africa's Black Consciousness movement challenged the apartheid status quo with their bold calls for black psychological liberation. This article uses new evidence to elucidate the work these youthful activists did in health and economic projects in the rural Eastern Cape that, in part, upheld certain customs. The article also brings young professional women into the history of African youth, arguing that the involvement of professional black female activists changed the way activists and villagers perceived the abilities and roles of young black women.

The nationalistic fervour that greeted Ghana's performances in the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa powerfully evoked memories of an earlier period in the history of the Ghanaian state that witnessed Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, draw on the game as a rallying point for nation-building and pan-African unity. This article uncovers this history by analysing Nkrumah's overt politicisation of football in the late colonial and immediate postcolonial periods. This study not only makes a novel contribution to the growing historical and social scientific literature on what is arguably Africa's most pervasive popular cultural form but also deepens our understanding of one of the continent's most significant political figures.

This paper develops the concept of peripheral governance as a kind of legal transnationalism that is being generated by responses to outward travel for health care. I argue for a recuperation of the ‘peripheral’ in order to think through the ways in which marginal actors and marginal objects contribute to transnationalism. The paper draws on the idea of networked governance, nodal governance in particular, to capture governance mechanisms that have emerged in response to outward flows for health care. Peripheral governance comes into being through the cultivation of dependency on core provision of health care in other jurisdictions and by focusing domestic provision on those services (information, counselling, check-ups), which lie on the margins of health care. Peripheral governance has four key technologies: non-development, exit, use and return. These technologies illustrate how state agencies may actively mobilise the peripheral as they claim to address local needs through participation in the regulation of cross-border health care. In so doing they configure a conception of the peripheral that does not want to become core, participates in transnational networks on its own terms, and focuses on marginal objects of health care. I develop this account of peripheral governance through a critical reading of the strategies that the Irish Crisis Pregnancy Agency has adopted in response to women's practices of travelling for abortion care.

By highlighting a large number of recent studies mainly based on empirical methods, the aim of this paper is to emphasise and illustrate the rising influence of legal sociology in France today, and the interesting results produced. More generally, it is noteworthy to emphasise the growing importance of law and legal domains as a topic of great interest in French social sciences in general. It remains an open question whether this trend is linked to the ‘judicialisation’ of French politics and society and its influence over the academic field, or, alternatively, to the growing capacity of social scientists to resist the monopolistic claim of French academic lawyers on the analysis of legal subjects and to develop their own. Nevertheless, those trends converge towards a better knowledge of French legality, relevant from a national perspective, as well as to assess its contribution to socio-legal knowledge in general.

It is often claimed that France is a particularly purist country; the Académie française is seen to be representative of a purist outlook and popular works such as Étiemble's attack on English influence Parlez vous franglais? (Étiemble, 1964) have served to bolster this view. However, this claim has not been empirically verified. In order to determine whether or not the rhetoric around purism in France matches the reality, we developed a questionnaire to investigate whether or not ordinary speakers of French in France are purist, taking the theoretical framework in George Thomas's Linguistic Purism as a base (Thomas, 1991). This questionnaire was distributed online to a random sample of participants in France. To contextualise the findings, the questionnaire was also distributed to French speakers in Quebec. The results of the study show that, contrary to expectations, the French respondents display only mild purism and the Québécois respondents are more purist in the face of English borrowings (external purism). However, the French respondents are more concerned with the structure or ‘quality’ of the French language itself (internal purism) than their Québécois counterparts. This study also highlights some problems with Thomas's framework, which requires some modification for future research.

There is now a well-established ‘spatial turn in law’. However, it remains oriented towards notions of space rather than law. How, then, to capture both the spatiality of law and the legality of space? This article draws on Bruno Latour's concept of the legal construction of the ‘social’ to explore the assemblage of the city of law. It shows how law functions as a particular form of association in urban life by tracing two key forms of urban legal association in London, the city of law. The first form is ‘legal ordering’. This seeks to order urban life through domination, and includes citadel law, police law and laws of exception. The second is ‘legal consociations’, which build new forms of urban life, such as urban rights, the rights of the city and the right to the city. Finally, the article explores the creation of a spatial justice that can build more just legal associations.

This article concerns the legal issues that surround the prohibition of doping in sport. The current policy on the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sport is underpinned by both a paternalistic desire to protect athletes' health and the long-term integrity or ‘spirit’ of sport. The policy is put into administrative effect globally by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which provides the regulatory and legal framework through which the vast majority of international sports federations harmonise their anti-doping programmes. On outlining briefly both the broad administrative structures of international sport's various anti-doping mechanisms, and specific legal issues that arise in disciplinary hearings involving athletes accused of doping, this article questions the sustainability of the current ‘zero tolerance’ approach, arguing, by way of analogy to the wider societal debate on the criminalisation of drugs, and as informed by Sunstein and Thaler's theory of libertarian paternalism, that current policy on anti-doping has failed. Moreover, rather than the extant moral and punitive panic regarding doping in sport, this article, drawing respectively on Seddon's and Simon's work on the history of drugs and crime control mentality, contends that, as an alternative, harm reductionist measures should be promoted, including consideration of the medically supervised use of certain PEDs.