The 1892 collision between the British merchant ship Ravenna and the Japanese torpedo boat Chishima generated a three-year legal debate over jurisdiction in territorial waters. Challenging the conventional notion that the coastal State enjoyed full sovereignty over its maritime territory, this article argues that contested jurisdiction in territorial waters was ubiquitous at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to imperialism, which played a pivotal role in transforming the coastal waters of semi-colonial countries into overlapping legal zones, political speculations and the absence of a uniform legal standard also put the coastal State's assertion of maritime sovereignty into question. On the one hand, semi-colonial states, such as the Meiji government, sometimes strategically avoided asserting maritime sovereignty when they deemed it appropriate for national interests. On the other hand, there was also a wide cleavage of opinions among Western powers regarding coastal jurisdiction. Scrutinizing the entangled currents of imperialism, political speculations and maritime laws in the Chishima case, this article contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the polycentric oceanic world by displaying the rarely discussed contested jurisdiction in territorial waters before World War II.

This article explores the Department of Education's programme of co-operation and rationalisation within the Irish post-primary school sector during the period 1966–70. Through a systematic analysis of government files and private convent archival collections, especially those of the Presentation Sisters, combined with oral history interviews, this study provides a unique insight into how co-operation and rationalisation in the post-primary sector were reconciled at ground level. It exposes the previously hidden history of voluntary secondary school authorities and the role they played in educational reform during the 1960s and explores how individual school authorities received, responded to and reacted to this new government initiative. To a large extent, the success of co-operation and rationalisation depended on the willingness of school authorities to accept and comply with departmental directives. This study, thus, expands understandings of the history of the Irish education system in general and of the reform period (c.1957‒72) in particular.

This article examines Catholic architecture in Ireland prior to the passage of An act for the relief of His Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects (10 Geo IV, c. 7), popularly known as the Act of Emancipation, in 1829. It focuses on one case study building — the chapel, now church, of St John the Baptist in Cashel, County Tipperary. Bringing together a range of documentary and visual sources, this building is analysed according to its site, its specific architectural stylistic features, and in relation to the social and liturgical contexts for its development. The article contributes to the ongoing reassessment of the impact of the penal laws and the varied experiences of Catholics through the late eighteenth-century period of relief and reform, through its spatial, formal and contextual close reading of one hitherto overlooked building. In doing so, it deepens understanding of how architecture was used as a statement of civic identity and political intention by Catholics of status and means. It also contributes to contemporary understandings of regional classicism and to the specific meaning of ecclesiastical architectural style in late-eighteenth-century Ireland across denominations. Finally, this article considers the treatment and ‘strategic forgetting’ of this period of pre-1829 Catholic building activity during the era of grand architectural expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.

In English testamentary history, there is a clear divide between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman testamentary practice, with the primary difference being that in the latter case, heritable land could not be bequeathed. Once the transfer of land required the livery of seisin, a practice introduced during the reign of Henry II (1154–89), it was not possible for a gift of land to take effect upon the death of the owner, and the royal courts did not consider the intention to dispose of a tenement, as expressed in a will, sufficient in itself to complete the transfer. Nonetheless, an examination of extant wills from the period 1180–1300 demonstrates that some testators (or indeed beneficiaries) may have thought that bequests of land were possible or even enforceable. How do these wills fit into the legal framework of the time? If a bequest could not be enforced in the royal courts, what reasons might someone have for attempting to make one, and how might they try to ensure that the bequest held?

This article uses inventory evidence for the possessions of households in later fifteenth-century County Dublin, an area largely characterised by rural settlement. Because household goods are often only indifferently recorded, its focus is less on individual cases than on larger patterns of consumption between social groups. In particular, by making comparisons with inventories from later medieval England and from the wine-growing Gers region of south-west France in the mid fifteenth century, it explores both how far evidence from County Dublin fits within and helps suggest wider European ‘peasant’ and ‘bourgeois’ patterns of consumption. By extension it explores the boundaries between the urban and the rural and how far a hybrid suburban identity can be discerned. In some cases a combination of close reading and statistical analysis is used to recover occupational identities, something that the source does not specifically record. The significance of the material culture of specific households is examined in two instances — one that of Lady Margaret Nugent, a wealthy and devout widow living in Dublin's St Michan's parish, and the other that of a couple who managed an inn located next to one of the city gates.

This article explores aspects of the organization of refugee education in imperial Austria during the First World War. Authorities in charge of refugees’ control and their eventual assistance interpreted access to education in two ways. First, it was an avenue of relief through schooling, aimed to counter the effects of uprootedness and, thus, safeguard some continuity in refugee children’s lives. Second, it was a way to ensure the making of productive and loyal citizens. In this context, this article looks at various policies regarding organization of schooling for displaced children. Moreover, it analyzes the ways language entered the realm of the refugee-focused classroom. Officials used schooling in refugee students’ vernacular to relieve the effects of their displacement and to reinforce ethnonational classifications of imperial subjects. At the same time, education through refugee children’s growing exposure to German language courses became a measure of a gradual inculcation of an imperial consciousness. Furthermore, it was a civilizing dimension of displacement management and, in this way, it became an avenue to consolidate a war-feeble state.

This article offers a nuanced examination of the complex identity dynamics among the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of British administration replacing Ottoman rule in 1878. The article draws attention to the profound impact of this historical transition on the identity formation processes of both communities. Despite the shared wartime experience of the First World War, the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus failed to construct a cohesive identity rooted in their common geographical space. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ambivalence, the article explores the complex process by which Cypriot communities sought to align their identity with larger nations, namely Greece and Turkey, rather than grounding it in their local context. The article contends that the genesis of their ambivalence can be traced back to 1878 when British administration replaced Ottoman rule on the island.

This article examines Putin’s expectations prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seeks to answer the following question: Why did Russia invade Ukraine regardless of the West’s threats of severe economic penalties raising the cost of an attack? I argue that the confidence in Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, despite his awareness that the stakes could go well beyond the borders of Ukraine and increase the cost of war for the Kremlin, was based on Putin’s calculations that the West would be reluctant to change or substantially displace established rich-get-richer economic structures and would not apply high costs on the Kremlin for military aggression against Ukraine in case of a successful blitzkrieg campaign. By utilizing an extended deterrence game analysis, the article demonstrates how Russia, Ukraine, and the West interacted in decision-making, taking into account the reactions and choices of the other players, and adds to the current body of knowledge by introducing an expanded approach to deterrence strategy based on economic interdependence and the scale of the anticipated conflict.

Focusing on the first decades of the twentieth century but acknowledging longer-term patterns of circulation, this paper discusses how cattle, historically occupying important meanings and roles in the lives of African agropastoralists, was commodified and marketed in southern Mozambique just as Lourenço Marques became the new capital of Mozambique. Highlighting the relations that consolidated between the capital and surrounding cattle-rich areas in a period marked by cattle disease but also the First World War and the Great Depression, the paper looks at the role of different agents and bodies involved in the emerging beef market. Ultimately, the paper shows how African agropastoralists, the main cattle producers in the region, resisted these conditions and tried to engage with markets on their own terms, even in the face of their dwindling control over the different factors that influenced the size and quality of their herds.

Christians talk a lot about humility. They also talk a lot about the kinds of radical faith that seem to fly in the face of intellectual humility. I explore how best to resolve this tension, from a Christian perspective. I argue that rather than prohibiting radical, ‘all-in’ faith or giving up on an intellectual humility requirement, Christians should conceive of intellectual humility as rooted in (non-)concern for one’s intellectual ego. This kind of intellectual humility is compatible with radical faith, but it also suggests a critique of some actual, ego-driven faith commitments.

Ridicule is often understood as an instrument used by an agent to accomplish a goal. This article, however, investigates ridicule as an indexical phenomenon, a social meaning activated for certain participants in particular situations. Through a detailed analysis of interviews with a scientist, this study shows how storytelling, stance-taking, and entitlement practices help shape the experience of ridicule and the situations where it occurs. The scientist experiences a joke about her research as ridicule when it is reported in the news but experiences the same joke as rapport when it is told by colleagues in the lab. The article demonstrates that the meanings and purposes of humor do not inhere in jokes, and joking rights do not inhere in people; they are negotiated and accomplished in interaction. Drawing on an indexical understanding of context, it further shows how the experience of situations shapes and is shaped by discourse. (Narrative, stance, entitlement, indexicality, humor, literacy, scientific popularization)*

The past decade has seen mass emigration of Hungarians from Serbia to the kin-state and Western European countries. This has resulted in new ways of understanding what it means to belong to the community, both empirically and in terms of theorizing it, and both for those in Serbia and those abroad. This article claims that there are virtual platforms where members of this ethnic community (re)create their identities, and that this happens through relating to certain common themes. For this reason, I analyze the common themes of two humorous Facebook pages – namely, rurality, food, language use, ethnic others, and crossing borders – popular among Vojvodina Hungarians. The article argues that these elements of identity connect members of the community who live in Vojvodina and those who have emigrated to the kin-state or diaspora. Therefore, in order to unpack the complex dynamics of identification of a national minority community with high diasporic tendencies, an approach that connects the above topics to the concepts of community, nostalgia, home, minority, and borders, and in more general terms the lens of national minority and diaspora studies is needed.

This article analyzes the key factors behind the securitization of Ukraine’s small ethnic Hungarian minority in recent years and how they affect local interethnic as well as interstate relations. It draws on elite interviews conducted in the Ukrainian-Hungarian borderland, and other sources including speech acts. Four underlying factors were identified. The first two are Hungary’s kin-state aid and dual citizenship law, which have empowered Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians, with the community appearing larger and potentially more threatening in the eyes of the majority population than its mere size justifies. The other two factors are Ukraine’s language policy and Transcarpathia’s future being subject of conspiracy theories in light of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, which have negatively affected interethnic ties, although somewhat less in the borderland than between Hungary and Ukraine at large. In Transcarpathia, our different informants had diverging perceptions of who is stirring tensions but agreed that actors from outside their region were to blame. Overall, what has emerged is a clash of Hungary’s kin-state politics and Ukraine’s nation-state-building efforts. The article ends with more general implications for kin- and host-state relations in times of conflict.