This article brings Cotterrell’s legal concept of community based on trust-based interactions in social life to expand the critical horizons of economic sociology of law (ESL) in its analytical, normative and empirical aspects for law and development in Africa. Dominant law and economics approaches sometimes see informal economic activity as an aberration and/or an obstacle in development. This article proposes an alternative way of looking at informality in development in Africa through the lens of ESL. As part of wider social life, economic life is about social interactions in production, exchange, distribution and consumption while legal life is about social relations in and under the law. Furthermore, ‘legal and economic life shape and are shaped by each other, as well as by the wider social, and more-than-human, world’. This calls for a framework that reconceptualises law in ways that are inclusive of the many state, social, economic and other normative orders such as informal economic activity in African societies that are continually interacting as part of wider social life.

Global Englishes, and within that the field of English as a lingua franca, is a huge and expanding area of research and pedagogy. This paper provides a sample of our beliefs about productive areas of research. The nine tasks presented suggest the importance of research in the areas of intercultural and digital communication, especially through the adoption of trans theories such as translanguaging, transmodality, and transcultural communication. Furthermore, concepts such as communicative competence will need rethinking to match the multilingual, multimodal, and multicultural resources that appear in such communication. The implications for pedagogy are extensive, including a re-evaluation of models and aims such as the (ir)relevance of the native speaker, global citizenship education, translanguaging, and decolonial perspectives, and approaches to both oral and written communication. Accompanying any changes in pedagogic practices must be changes in how we think about teacher education as well as assessment. Pedagogic research is crucial as there is a need to address the persistent gap between “real-world” translingual, transmodal, and transcultural uses of English and monolingual, Anglophone-orientated English language teaching models and approaches.

This article examines the diplomatic conduct of Gelasio Caetani during his tenure as Italian Ambassador to the United States in the early years of Mussolini’s government, highlighting his influence and decision-making processes. It investigates the reasons behind Mussolini’s choice of Caetani as his representative in Washington and analyses the major issues he confronted, ranging from foreign policy to Italy’s war debt stemming from the First World War, which Mussolini sought to address. Drawing on Caetani’s personal archive and cross-referencing primary sources from other collections, the study offers a comprehensive and nuanced account.

This article draws on Roger Cotterrell’s framework for the sociological interpretation of the concept of trust to expound on, via examples from an empirical project in South Africa, methods for the empirical study of an informal environmental economy. Three distinct challenges encountered during fieldwork on the informal waste economy in South Africa are used to make a case for more robust empirical research methods – positionality, observation and the production of a documentary film, a non-traditional output. Each challenge concerns the relationship of trust between researcher and research respondent. The article concludes that these challenges can be addressed and managed via the appropriate socio-legal methodological framework. The article’s findings will have relevance for those embarking on an empirical study of the informal environmental economy, and for those interested in socio-legal methodology more generally.

We have used a modern, medium-sized hovercraft to further explore air cushion transport in Antarctica. Hovercraft travel over hard-blown snow at safe cruising speeds of 40–60 km/h requires about 50% of the fuel consumption for hovercraft travel over a flat ocean surface. The Griffon 2000TD craft used here has an endurance of >1000 km with a 1-tonne payload (personnel and equipment). However, this standard craft, designed for operations at sea level, is limited to altitudes below about 700 m elevation by the decrease in air density. The hovercraft provides accommodation, communication and first aid facilities for its crew in the event of any weather or operational issues. Two safety features of air cushion travel in Antarctica stand out: (1) low ground pressure per unit area (15% of a human), and (2) the ability to freely cross open ice cracks of dimensions of a metre or more. The total considerations of fuel economy, safety and environmental impact suggest the surface of hard-blown snow in Antarctica provides the optimum conditions for air cushion travel on planet Earth.

This article examines how the participation and designations of the shared delegation of Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands to the Arctic Council have developed since the council’s establishment in 1996. Drawing on data from 223 meetings across all Arctic Council meeting types, we analyse participation patterns and delegation designations, linking them to shifting priorities and internal dynamics within the Kingdom. The delegation is unique for its frequent designation changes and documentation of nationality shifts. Our analysis shows that since 2013, designations have gradually standardised at ministerial and Senior Arctic Official (SAO) meetings, while at the working group level, designation practices are more fragmented. Denmark maintains the largest presence across all meeting types, but Greenland and the Faroe Islands have increased their engagement in specific groups in line with their foreign policy strategies. These developments highlight a broader rebalancing within the Kingdom, where Greenland and the Faroe Islands have strengthened their Arctic engagement and foreign policy agency.

This paper argues for the non-existence of God conceived as a perfectly just Supreme Lawgiver who holds all rational agents accountable for commands attributed through revelation. Unlike divine hiddenness arguments that appeal to God’s love, this argument examines the procedural requirements of perfect justice: just accountability requires that agents recognise the existence of the authority to which they are subject. If God justly holds all blameless, non-resistant agents accountable to revealed commands, such agents must believe they have adequate evidence that the Commander exists. Yet many conscientious agents, including canonised saints and sincere seekers, report lacking adequate evidence despite sustained, non-resistant effort. The resulting epistemic situation is incompatible with just accountability since no-one can be justly obligated to obey commands from an authority whose existence they cannot recognise. The argument concludes that no recognisably perfectly just Supreme Lawgiver exists who holds all accountable to revealed commands. The conclusion leaves open the possibility that a non-commanding deistic God exists, but argues that God as the revealed Commander whose justice is recognisably exercised does not exist. Abrahamic conceptions of revealed divine legislation, moral obligation, punishment, and forgiveness cannot be grounded in recognisably just divine authority.

In recent years, scholarly research has highlighted the valuable insights that can be gained from analysing government policies on prostitution. This becomes an even more pertinent issue when the period under consideration is the Fascist ventennio, when Italy was governed by a deeply patriarchal and anti-feminist regime. Drawing on unpublished archival material, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of the regime’s position on prostitution. In an attempt to present themselves as progressive, Fascist authorities opted to ‘tolerate’ prostitution for the sake of public health and order rather than authorise it. Mussolini thus made strategic use of brothels, entrusting them with the role of safeguarding not only health and safety, but also the ‘defence of the race’, in both the home country and the colonies. Within this regulated system, which was entrusted to police officers and doctors susceptible to corruption, prostitutes were considered inferior and repressed. However, the severe restriction of freedoms and rights affected all women.

This article examines the rise and global influence of sericulture experimental stations from 1869 to 1900, framing them as an international ‘World Wide Silk Web’. Focusing on the Padua sericulture station as a case study, the essay traces how these stations initially emerged in response to the pébrine epizootic that devastated silk production across Europe and Asia. It argues that the adoption and diffusion of Louis Pasteur’s preventive method against pébrine owed less to individual scientific discovery than to the collective work of these stations. Sericulture stations became hubs of techno-entomological knowledge, by blending traditional practices with new methods, creating knowledge commodities, and disseminating technical knowledge. Operating at the intersection of national interests and international collaboration, stations exchanged expertise, materials, knowledge and innovations while supporting local silk industries. In contrast to models of knowledge movements that focus on imperial extraction, this article highlights the asymmetrical yet polycentric nature of this network, shaped by economic partnerships, scientific authority, geopolitical aims and international contexts.

This study examines how two French and two U.S. companies engage in self-praise in press releases. Drawing on politeness theory and previous research on press releases, it focuses on salient forms of self-praise (sentences containing at least one intensified subjective or objective linguistic element) and explores how these are pragmatically mitigated.

The results show several shared tendencies across the French and U.S. corpora. Roughly half of all salient self-praise remains pragmatically unmitigated, while explicit self-praise clearly dominates. Mitigation strategies mainly operate through shifts in perspective, including third-party praise, self-quotation, and several forms of implicit self-praise that redirect attention to benefits for third parties, product qualities, or emotional stances.

Despite these similarities, cross-cultural differences emerge. U.S. press releases contain a significantly higher density of self-praise markers than French ones, suggesting a greater tolerance for assertive self-promotion. Differences also appear in the use of point-of-view distancing and self-quotations. Overall, the findings suggest that the modesty principle operates not only in interpersonal facework but also in the management of professional face in institutional communication.

Although Turkey’s authoritarian turn is often interpreted as a reaction to the Gezi resistance of 2013, this article argues that its foundations were laid much earlier through the gradual accumulation of infrastructure and legal frameworks. Rather than emerging as a sudden response to dissent, Turkey’s networked authoritarianism must be understood as the outcome of long-term infrastructural decisions that have extended through successive waves of privatization, legal control, and market consolidation. Drawing on a cartographic ethnographic methodology, this article maps the entanglement of media ownership, regulatory centralization, and expert discourse, as reflected in the Internet Conferences of Turkey (INET-TR) conferences, to show how early quiescence and missed interventions enabled a gradual shift toward centralized control. Unlike fully nationalized Internet models, Turkey’s approach is hybrid and strategic: it maintains international connectivity and commercial integration while exercising tight control over domestic information flows through a combination of layered legal and technical instruments. This historical context complicates linear narratives of rupture and resistance, demonstrating that authoritarian consolidation in digital infrastructures is not only about state repression but also about infrastructural and institutional standardization of control.

This article reveals an untold transnational history of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legal transplant of maternity protection from Europe and the United States. Article 49 of the Chinese Constitution stipulates that the state shall protect mothers. However, this clause also includes an obligation to practice the family planning policy, which is notorious for forced sterilizations and abortions. Why does a clause meant to protect mothers come with controls over reproductive autonomy and potential harm to mothers? This article argues that the combination of the protection of mothers with family planning policies emerged through the malleability of maternity protection within the CCP’s legal framework. This malleability originated from the evolving interplay between the political challenges—both international and domestic—the CCP encountered and the diverse backgrounds of mothers directly affected by this legal principle. Maternity protection proved an effective vehicle for the Party to address challenges across contexts by reconstructing its functionalities. This article identifies three ways in which the CCP interpreted maternity protection to further its political agendas: political movements, public health, and birth control. These interpretations aligned with the political challenges of expanding influence, ensuring wartime survival, and consolidating the socialist regime, as well as with the targeted audiences of urban workers, rural peasants, and socialist nationals.