This introduction reconceptualizes the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a pivotal arena of Cold War labour internationalism by narrating its history through the experiences of actors outside the traditional metropolitan core. It offers the first systematic synthesis of a dispersed body of scholarship on the WFTU, integrating work on communist internationalism, decolonization, gender, and trade union education into a coherent analytical framework. Methodologically, the introduction breaks new ground by adopting an actor-centred approach that foregrounds “subaltern labour leaders” from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and traces their trajectories across multiple scales, from workplaces and national centres to WFTU congresses and UN forums. Reconstructing key moments in the federation’s history, it highlights a polyphony of national internationalisms within a shared communist project and shows how struggles over gender, empire, and sovereignty intersected with, but were not reducible to, East–West bloc politics. In doing so, the introduction advances a more nuanced understanding of the WFTU as both an instrument of state socialism and a generative space for alternative visions of global labour solidarity.

This article reexamines the Ottoman Turkish term millet, which is supposedly central to understanding Ottoman governance over non-Muslim subjects. While scholars have largely assumed that the use of millet for non-Muslim collectives reflected top-down imperial control, this article challenges that premise by extensively examining how the term was employed in Ottoman documents from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The findings reveal that the extant understanding of millet as a rigidly defined, state-recognized confessional community lacks empirical support throughout the empire’s history. Instead, the term millet, as used in Ottoman documents, vaguely denoted a group of people who supposedly shared a common origin and culture, though not necessarily defined by a common religion or confession. Furthermore, millet’s use for non-Muslim collectives gradually increased from around 1805, not due to state imposition, but influenced by non-Muslim actors who responded to millet’s acquired distinction as a term denoting modern nationhood. Thus, this article contributes to revising the prevalent state-centric view of Ottoman history by demonstrating the participation of non-Muslims in the development of Ottoman discourse.

In the 1950s, Alan Durrant of the University College Wales began a series of experiments to investigate the inheritance of environmental effects in plants, forging an unexpected connection to the controversial hereditary theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Durrant’s work relied heavily on a specific fibre flax variety, Stormont Cirrus, developed in the interwar period in the UK for linen production. I investigate how the exigencies of the UK linen industry, along with Durrant’s training and institutional setting, formed the milieu that generated an unexpected outlier in British genetic scholarship during the Cold War. I supplement my text-based historical analysis by conducting experiments to re-examine the genetic constitution of the original Stormont Cirrus cultivar. These findings suggest that Durrant’s creation of alternative ‘genotroph’ derivatives by treating Stormont Cirrus plants with different soil nutrient regimes likely resulted from selection of pre-existing genetic variation present in the incompletely inbred parental strain, rather than being an example of inherited environmental effects. Inverting Durrant’s intention to interpret his results in the context of Lysenko’s work, my historical analysis of Durrant’s flax genotroph findings informs a reappraisal of one of the key experimental claims supporting Lysenko’s environmentalist concepts of inheritance.

Across multiple jurisdictions, Indigenous and ethnic communities have sought recognition and protection of the legal rights of rivers as part of broader activist agendas seeking greater legal and political control over their lands and resources. Yet the legal scholarship tracing these cases of ‘river rights’ has often ignored the role of activism in driving and shaping river rights frameworks, as well as the broader implications of these frameworks for community activist agendas. In this article, we examine two legal cases in which Indigenous and Afrodescendent peoples have used legal and extralegal strategies to secure protection for the rights of rivers: for the Piatúa River in Ecuador and the Atrato River in Colombia. In both cases, we find that communities are strategically leveraging river rights frameworks, alongside constitutional and human rights protections, to assert and enhance their territorial autonomy. While the project of recuperating territorial autonomy is incomplete in both cases, our comparative analysis confirms that these cases should be seen as incremental steps in a broader project of transforming community relationships with government institutions, local authorities, and the courts, enabling more pluralist territorial governance to emerge over time.

Ethical thinking can be pragmatically framed as striving for impact in improving the world, without relying on traditional moral language. Consciousness or sentience is central to anything mattering, but only suffering has an inherent urgency to be addressed. This call to action applies regardless of species or physical substrate. From a perspective on personal identity that recognizes separateness as an illusion, the most extreme suffering can be considered intolerable per se, not just for the physical being experiencing it. Prioritizing the prevention of such suffering is therefore rational. Strong, potentially competing intuitions, including the desire to thrive, must also be accommodated for an ethical framework to be viable, without the creation of happiness formally balancing out intense suffering that exists elsewhere. A framework termed “xNU+” captures these considerations. Suffering metrics such as Years Lived with Severe Suffering (YLSS) and Days Lived with Extreme Suffering (DLES), used alongside existing health and well-being metrics, would better track what matters, in humans and, using different methodologies, in other species and potential artificial sentient entities. The rapid, potentially irreversible, technology-driven transformations now occurring on our planet make it urgent that we embed a suffering-focused ethical framework in our governance and policy-making.

This article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites by exploring the trajectories of the members of the family configuration established by the matrimony formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira in the early 1590s. By analyzing the evolution of the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration between the 1590s and 1720s, the article probes how the early Luanda elites generated and mobilized social, economic, political, or symbolic resources that allowed them to establish ongoing partnerships with African, metropolitan, and Luso-Brazilian actors.

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that, in French as in other gender-marked languages, masculine generic terms tend to induce a male bias in the readers’ mental representations of the person referred to. The current study investigates whether this bias extends to hybrid nouns, a particular class of nouns with a fixed grammatical gender that can refer to either a man or a woman (e.g. “une personne”, ‘aFEM personFEM’, or “un individu”, ‘anMASC individualMASC’). We used a sentence evaluation paradigm where participants had to judge the acceptability of a sentence describing a character of a specific gender, either male or female, following a context sentence containing a hybrid noun. The results revealed that masculine hybrid nouns yielded faster processing of male continuation sentences, with response times 130 ms shorter than for female continuations on average. In contrast, no such difference was observed for feminine hybrid nouns. These results point to an asymmetry in the processing of grammatical gender: while feminine hybrid forms do not influence gender representation, masculine hybrid forms tend to elicit a male bias.

This article offers an overview of the statuary dedicated to Cavour erected in Italy during the first 50 years after unification (1861–1915), focusing on the most significant cases. Promoted by moderate circles close to the former prime minister, the construction of public monuments to the so-called ‘‘weaver of unification’’ responded to the requirements of patriotic education. Pursuing a policy of unveiling monuments throughout central and northern Italy, liberal elites sought to strengthen the population’s sense of national identity, while simultaneously promoting the memory and myth of Cavour as a founder of the unified state, champion of liberty and master diplomat. This was no easy task, given Cavour’s limited popularity, and it involved citizens’ committees, mayors, and accomplished artists in an effort to establish an effective and enduring iconographic model.

This study examines the complexity of public opinion on abortion in Argentina following the landmark 2020 legalization. Moving beyond binary “pro-life” versus “pro-choice” classifications, we analyze attitudes through the lens of value conflict and ambivalence within a contentious policy domain. Drawing on original survey data (N = 1,021) from May–June 2022, we utilize a heteroscedastic probit model to estimate both the direction and variance of responses across seven scenarios, ranging from historically established grounds to voluntary interruption. Findings reveal that while consensus is high for historical grounds, ambivalence peaks in voluntary scenarios, driven significantly by the interaction between conflicting core values: the sanctity of life and bodily autonomy. Crucially, this value conflict generates measurable response instability even among citizens with firm opinions, challenging the narrative of a rigidly polarized society. Results demonstrate that legislative resolution does not erase moral tension, suggesting democratic discourse must account for citizens’ cognitive complexity rather than reducing public opinion to absolute alignments.

The article explores the development and functioning of the Dopolavoro ferroviario (DLF), a Fascist leisure organisation for Italian railway workers. Although originally created as part of the Ferrovie dello Stato (State Railways), the DLF was rooted in a longstanding tradition of workers’ associations and became a means of managing leisure time, offering educational, welfare and recreational activities. Through its cultural and educational programmes, sporting activities and organised tourism, it sought to regulate collective behaviour and promote a model of sociability aligned with fascist objectives. At the same time, the DLF offers valuable insights into the tensions between consent and dissent, highlighting both the regime’s ability to penetrate the railway sector and the persistence of spaces of autonomy and resistance. Drawing on original research, the article argues that the DLF served as a laboratory for political and cultural socialisation, the legacy of which – stripped of its ideological framework – continued to shape Italian society in the republican era.

Historians of the Second International have researched extensively the differences among and within member parties in terms of tactics, ideology, and national circumstances. This article illustrates the practice of socialist internationalism by examining how Austrian Victor Adler and Belgian Emile Vandervelde were able to mediate those differences through carefully crafted congress resolutions on three of the most important issues – ministerialism, socialist revisionism, and international conflicts – at the 1900 Paris, 1904 Amsterdam, and 1907 Stuttgart international socialist congresses. Both leaders played vital and complementary roles – the Adler-Vandervelde dynamic – elevating their effectiveness in forging socialist unity primarily between French and German socialism.

We present results from a qualitative analysis illustrating how people handle criticism in a workplace environment, including both the production of and responses to criticism. Our data comes from responses provided by 80 participants in a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) in French. In the scenarios, relative power (equal vs. hierarchical) and social distance (close vs. distant) were manipulated. Our analysis focuses on three recurrent patterns. First, we illustrate how criticism and replies to criticism are the product of several speech acts, in line with the concept of speech act set. Second, we argue that criticism and replies to criticism are both impacted by external and internal downgrading and upgrading strategies. Third, we give examples of how pronouns can be used to increase or decrease the level of politeness. Our findings provide new insights into the preferred linguistics strategies for criticizing and responding to criticism in French.

Skibbereen has become a byword for famine, frequently appearing in academic literature on humanitarian disasters — but almost always as a symbol of Irish victimhood. By contrast, this article seeks to demonstrate that the town of Skibbereen was a centre of agency and innovation with far-reaching impact throughout Ireland and beyond. It examines the hands-on efforts of local people to take charge of a dire situation, highlighting three key aspects inadequately considered by previous research. First, a Skibbereen deputation to London played a crucial role in establishing the British Relief Association, the major voluntary aid effort at the time. Secondly, a soup house founded in Skibbereen became the model for the most effective governmental relief effort in Ireland. Thirdly, Skibbereen was the home of an elaborate emigration scheme to rescue starving individuals that was launched early and sustained for a long time. This article reveals a significant disparity between the widely accepted image of Skibbereen as a place of passive suffering and the lesser-known agency and innovation of its people. Ultimately, this case study not only sheds light on the recipient perspectives and complexities of humanitarian aid, but also serves as a testament to the resilience and resourcefulness of local Irish leaders.