Over the past 20 years, the European Union (EU) has shifted the emphasis of its trade policy from multilateral agreements towards bilateral preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and, more recently, to unilateral policy instruments. In this article we analyze the EU’s growing ambitions in promoting environmental sustainability in the context of these shifts. We advance an analytical and a conceptual argument, focusing on a product group that is highly relevant to the EU’s green transition: aviation fuels. We argue that the increasing hardness and ambition of the EU’s environmental policy instruments on the sustainability of aviation fuels contributes to a trend of ‘unilateralization’ in EU trade policy. Our analysis further illustrates how the complementary qualities of hardness and ambition in the multi-, bi-, and unilateral EU instruments lead to their flexible combination in the EU trade policy mix. Based on these findings, we propose to describe and critically analyze the EU’s current approach as ‘flexilateralism’. The EU has changed from prioritizing multilateralism to a more pragmatic, flexilateral approach, rather than for fully fledged bilateralism or unilateralism. This is what the EU’s more assertive ‘strategic autonomy’ may be about: a flexilateral approach to better address issues such as environmental sustainability with the most useful combination of instruments available.

This article analyzes the application of environmental impact assessment as a tool for climate change mitigation from a global comparative perspective. It firstly confirms that, despite persistent resistance in a few jurisdictions, climate effect assessment is now widely applied on a global scale. Yet the article also shows that this practice has faced recurrent practical and conceptual issues, in particular, concerning the determination of the significance of a project’s climate effect and the assessment of indirect effects. Lastly, this article assesses how states have addressed these issues and identifies good practices. In doing so, the article illustrates the potential of functionalist comparative analysis in advancing our understanding of climate law and suggesting policy-relevant conclusions.

This study uses stable and radiogenic isotopic data from Chalcolithic (c. 3000–1900 bc) humans and animals recovered from the Rego da Murta dolmens (Alvaiázere, Portugal) to understand dietary and mobility patterns in the populations using these monuments. The results suggest diets based primarily on C3 plants and terrestrial animals, with some possible variation in protein intake by age or status. Analyses of 87Sr/86Sr values identify two individuals out of ten from Rego da Murta I and four individuals out of fifteen from Rego da Murta II as migrants. These data were compared to other Chalcolithic burials in south-western Portugal: while diets were found to be similar across the region, the very high 87Sr/86Sr values recorded for two migrant humans match no known settlement in the broader region. A recent mapping study of 87Sr/86Sr values in Portugal suggests their origins may lie to the north/north-east of the dolmens.

The essays that follow aim to capture aspects of the unique style of R.J. Morris, aspects which taken together represent the formidable legacy that he leaves to the global world of urban history.

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November 2023.

This article compares late Imperial Russia (1850-1917) and its successor states — post-revolutionary independent Ukraine (1918-1919) and early Soviet Russia and the USSR (1918-1923) — focusing on the conception and implementation of state policy toward the Jews. It argues that Russian Imperial, Ukrainian nationalist and Soviet socialist policies treated the Jews essentially as a distinct ethno-confessional or ethnic collective entitled to state protection and group rights, thus anticipating (in Imperial Russia) and de-facto realizing (in independent Ukraine and Soviet Russia) the rights of minorities stipulated in the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty and implemented by the Versailles system in interwar Europe. The article shows how by establishing and maintaining separate Jewish institutions (sophisticated state apparatuses staffed by qualified, dedicated Jewish bureaucrats), the states developed and even promoted a collective Jewish identity and collective Jewish rights, starting with state protection and official recognition of Judaism and the Jewish way of life in the late Russian empire, to state-sponsored Jewish national and cultural autonomy in the Ukrainian National Republic, to official recognition as a Soviet nationality, and territorial and semi-political autonomy in the USSR.

This article reflects on a little-told story of musical and cultural censorship: the Mexican government's 1996 destruction of the Foro Abierto, a 2,000-seater auditorium in the heart of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. The Foro Abierto was the home of an anarchist theatre group called CLETA, and was an important venue for a number of genre-crossing musicians. This venue was destroyed by the police just before CLETA was to inaugurate it as part of the rebel Zapatista movement. Several days later, a musician from CLETA was assassinated. Responding to the material turn in music studies, this article combines ethnographic and archival research to explore articulations between rubble and censorship. The venue's destruction disempowered and disarticulated CLETA, to the extent that an unsettling silence emerged about this act on the site of the venue itself. Equally, constructive responses to the complexities of censorship may also emerge from acts of material and ideational de-structuration.

This essay responds to Brack et al., ‘Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources’, which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, ‘Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)’. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague’s late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the ‘new genetics’ of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of ‘focalisation’ is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers’ reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague’s presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as ‘the Black Death’.

In this article, we present an exploration of the social meaning and functions of marketplace sounds – including language, yelling and hailing – in two adjacent, yet very different sites in Copenhagen, Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. We argue that the marketplace soundscapes played central functions as means of constructing customer-oriented semiotic spaces while negotiating territories and branding and selling products. Language by way of dialectal speech, yelling, street cries, cursing and swearing was an integral part of such processes. The two sites, by virtue of their physical placement in close proximity to each other, reinforced the contrasts between them, hence, co-constructing contrasting sonic territories – a concept which we employ and develop as part of the analysis. Central to our argument is that a sensory approach, including the sound of language, to a semiotic description of the urban marketplace requires a historical contextualization of the marketplace and its functions in the urban space, as well as of the life and culture of the marketplace vendors themselves; that is, the case in point, the female vendors from Amager and Skovshoved.