This review essay critically examines three recent books on the digitalization and datafication of humanitarian action: #Help, Humanitarian Extractivism, and Technocolonialism. Each monograph offers a compelling analysis of the myriad ways that humanitarians’ use of digital technologies has reshaped governance and the international order, created new risks, and exacerbated power imbalances. Fundamentally, each book concludes that the various transformations technology has wrought in humanitarianism are, at best, unintended, inconsistent, or unfulfilled in their impact and, at worst, deeply problematic. Setting aside the books’ contributions, each leaves out two important elements. First, in selecting examples, the authors leave mostly unanswered the question of what, if any, positive impacts data and technology have had on or for humanitarian response and those whom it is intended to help. Second, each is mostly silent with regard to practical steps that can be taken to address its critiques, with only Technocolonialism offering three broad avenues for reform. In the context of the current crisis in the humanitarian sector, with the closure of USAID and dramatic declines in funding, there is a need for pragmatic options for the future that, by necessity, involve a creative reimagining of the digital infrastructures underpinning the humanitarian response.

This article examines how the socio-indexical meanings of dialects/style are reconfigured through two-way parallel migration in Ningbo-Fenghua, China, focusing on the socio-indexical (re)valuation of Putonghua, Ningbonese, and Fenghuanese. Using two-phase matched-guise experiments and interviews, the study traces how mobility patterns and generational positioning mediate these meanings. Results show that, while Putonghua retains institutional prestige, it is often regarded affectively empty. In contrast, Fenghuanese and Ningbonese carry ambivalent, shifting values. Fenghua-born migrants reframe Fenghuanese as a resource for expressing intimacy, trust, and regionalism, while non-migrants view it as outdated. Ningbonese occupies a middle-ground, indexing familiarity, respectability, or obsolescence depending on context. Notably, younger speakers collapse dialectal distinctions, reframing both as ‘old speech’ tied to generation rather than place. These findings challenge Global North models that link indexical revaluation to elite cosmopolitanism, showing instead how meaning-making in the Global South can also emerge through administrative restructuring, regional absorption, and long-standing mobility patterns. (Indexicality, social meaning, Ningbo-Fenghua, migration and language, language attitudes).

This article revisits the history of Muslim Turkish society, questioning its essentialist portrayal as a “religious society,” with religiosity narrowly defined through Sunni Islamic doctrines. It examines the content of Sunni folk Islam through the Mevlid, Karbala, and Ebâ Müslim books published by İstanbul Maarif Kitaphanesi until the 1980s, as well as their political appropriation by elite actors during the early Cold War period. I argue that Sunni and Alevi religiosity shared key elements beyond saint veneration, particularly praising the Prophet through Nur Muhammad, love of Ahl Al-Bayt, and mourning for Karbala. Using these books as religious media through a material approach to religion, I maintain that they made Muhammad and Ahl Al-Bayt “accessible,” “tangible,” and “sense-able” in the world in oral, pictorial, and scriptural forms. Since the publishers, editors, authors, readers, and listeners of these books were descendants of Turkish speakers dating back to the twelfth century, I propose the term “Islam in Turkish” as a conceptual framework to capture these shared elements. I argue that this concept, denoting a vernacular form of religiosity, has the potential to replace the modern category of Turkish folk Islam and contribute to global critical discussions on Islam.

This article considers the function of American food and its exchange at the time of the Allied occupation of Italy to revisit the complexity of the encounter with the local population. Through unpublished diaries and confidential reports of the Psychological Warfare Branch, as well as video materials, published interviews and published diaries, the article makes the issues around food central to the understanding of the dynamics of the Italian occupation. While contributing to the growing literature on food availability in the Second World War, the article expands in particular on the historic function of American comfort food and rations, to explore the experience of the Italian occupation through the interactions of gifting, bartering and black market trade. It illuminates the complexity of mutual perceptions shaped by hope, nostalgia, supremacy, and fairness. It concludes with a reading of John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, which, as a cultural product, brings together and makes valid for future generations, the contrasting image of a benign and a damaging occupation explored in the article.

This study seeks to elucidate the historical development and transmission of the traditions associated with the ‘Seven Sets’ through a cross-textual analysis of Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Gāndhārī sources. The Seven Sets comprise the four establishings of mindfulness, the four right endeavors/abandonings, the four bases of success, the five faculties, the five powers, the seven factors of awakening, and the noble eightfold path. The Eight-Set tradition emerged alongside the Seven-Set tradition by the second century, followed by the forty-one and forty-three dharmas contributing to awakening (bodhipakkhiya/bodhipakṣya) by the fifth century. However, the Seven Sets became the most dominant. Both the Vaibhāṣika and Mahāvihāra schools upheld the Seven Sets as the definitive framework for the dharmas contributing to awakening, rejecting any additional items. The Vaibhāṣika dismissed the forty-one dharmas as heretical, whereas the Mahāvihāra excluded the four meditations incorporated into the Eight Sets. After the sixth century, the Eight-Set tradition was subsumed by the Seven-Set tradition. No evidence supports the long-term survival of the other two traditions. The dominance of the Seven Sets reflects the transition in South Asian Buddhism from pluralism to doctrinal unity.

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Montreal in November 2025.

This article estimates separate individual and partisan incumbencyeffects in Uruguay’s regional elections (1971–2020). It contributes tothe limited evidence on incumbency effects in developing countries andto the emerging Differences-in-Discontinuities (Diff-in-Disc)literature, which addresses endogeneity and disentangles candidatefrom party effects within the same institutional setting. Exploitingconstitutionally mandated term limits and strong electoralenforcement, we identify clean causal effects using close electionsunder open and closed races. Results show a large and statisticallysignificant individual incumbency effect of approximately 74%,alongside non-significant partisan effects. These findings suggestthat incumbency in Uruguay is primarily personal rather thanparty-based. The results contribute to debates on personalization ofpolitics, proportional representation, and institutional developmentin Latin America, highlighting how strong democratic institutions cancoexist with highly individualized electoral dynamics.

Do voters take into account the deaths of family members and close friends when evaluating the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—particularly when that response is problematic or even negligent—as in the case of Mexico under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) administration? Using data from the 2021 Mexican Election Study, this research shows that opposition partisans who lost close friends or relatives to COVID-19 are more likely to evaluate the government’s response to the pandemic negatively. In contrast, National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) partisans do not hold accountable their co-partisan government. They are no more likely to evaluate the government’s response negatively, even when they experience the same losses. Experimental evidence further shows that MORENA partisans do not lower their evaluations of government performance after being informed about the country’s high COVID-19 mortality. They are also more likely to underestimate the number of COVID-19 deaths in the country, even after being presented with official mortality figures. These findings underscore how partisanship can cloud accountability, leading some voters to dismiss objective information and to judge government performance primarily through the lens of partisan loyalty. Partisanship can distort the accountability mechanism at the core of retrospective voting even during a major health crisis.

This article brings critical human rights scholarship into the intersex sphere to unearth the potential limitations of the growing deployment of human rights to improve the health care experiences of intersex people. It traces the changing tactics of intersex activist groups and identifies three tendencies – reformism, coerciveness and juridification – that may be brought by the intersex movement and international agencies embracing human rights as the vernacular. This article argues that the dominance of the human rights approach, while allowing the intersex struggle to gain legitimacy, visibility and recognition, risks fuelling a depoliticised framework of remedicalisation and increased penality. It deflects attention from the endeavour of interrogating the social and cultural foundations rendering intersex variances a deviant form of embodiment.

Pleasure is widely thought to have intrinsic value. However, this thesis has been threatened by the argument that pleasure is a mental state that essentially involves the subject’s conative attitudes. Its value, then, would be subjective. Though the existing version of the argument can be resisted by simply rejecting the attitudinal theories of pleasure on which it is based, I will develop a new and more general version based on the reasonable hypothesis that the phenomenal character of pleasure is reducible to a physical or functional property. If this new version is convincing, then the most promising way to secure the intrinsicality of the value of pleasure and to escape all versions of the subjectivity argument might be to embrace a non-reductionist account of pleasure and its value.

Since the 1920s, the workers’ movement has been crucial in linking international communism with colonial liberation. From the 1950s, communist trade unions and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) played a key role in this process. The WFTU forged ties with Afro-Asian unions to challenge Western powers with an anti-imperialist platform. Decolonization opened new opportunities for European workers in their anti-capitalist struggle, prompting unions such as the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and Italian Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) to build relationships with unions in newly independent African nations. Their focus was mainly on North and West Africa, where socialist movements emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The CGT and the CGIL established solid links with trade unions in Guinea, Mali, and Ghana. Their views, shaped by their affiliations with the French and Italian communist parties, were not consistently aligned. The CGT maintained a Eurocentric approach to African socialism, while the CGIL, aligned with the PCI, supported a “staged” revolution in Africa, where the working class did not occupy a position of leadership. The CGIL and PCI emphasized the role of peasants and workers in building socialism through a “social revolution” that could strengthen the socialist bloc. These differences created tensions in African trade unions and the FSM, leading to the marginalization of the CGIL’s approach. Nonetheless, Italian unionists gained support from African unions and joined the CGT in mediating for workers in Guinea, Mali, and Ghana.

Many believe that relationships can make a constitutive difference to the moral status of paternalistic treatment. For example, it is often assumed that it’s easier to justify paternalizing a spouse than a stranger. But although this thought is widespread, there exists no detailed account of how relationships could mitigate paternalistic complaints. The aim of this paper is to develop an account of this phenomenon, drawing on the work of Margaret Gilbert and the notion of joint commitments. According to the resulting view, close relations can constitutively mitigate paternalistic complaints by rendering paternalistic interference consistent with the will of the paternalized agent.