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.

This article is part of Religious Studies’ new initiative to publish a series of interviews with distinguished philosophers of religion. Each interview explores the personal and academic background of the interviewee and discusses their core philosophical views. The aim is to inspire students and scholars and to provide an overview of some of the most important works developed by contemporary philosophers of religion. In the first interview, Max Baker-Hytch interviews Richard Swinburne, covering such topics as his upbringing, his days as a student in Oxford in the 1950s, and his views on natural theology, the problem of evil, and the mind-body problem.

The 2022 war in Ukraine has produced the biggest virtual humor archive in the history of wars. We argue that Ukrainian war humor is a form of civic activism in the name of Ukraine’s sovereignty. This civic activism is defined by resistance, solidarity, vigilance, and dedication to victory. The war humor circulates locally as well as on a global stage. It expresses the government’s positions and the people’s voices and empowers those affected by this war. Ukrainian war humor documents experiences of war realities; provides moral commentaries and emotional and aesthetic interpretations; and articulates visions for the future of Ukraine as a sovereign European state.

Why did Vladimir Putin order the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, despite numerous warnings from Western countries about the consequences of such an action? This article argues that misperceptions about having the upper hand vis-à-vis Western countries, formed and proliferated among the Russian leadership, emboldened the Kremlin to launch the military invasion of Ukraine, assuming that the West would stand down in the face of the attack. Based on a detailed analysis of Russian elites’ discourse through the theoretical lens of interdependence studies, this study demonstrates that Putin miscalculated Western resolve largely because of two key misperceptions. First, Putin’s elites were convinced that the West was asymmetrically dependent on Russia, viewing it as a strategic resource that would tie the hands of Western and EU countries, eventually making them accept the outcome of the war. Second, the Kremlin believed that Ukraine occupied a secondary role in Western interests that would further limit the West’s involvement in the conflict, as it would not risk exposing its dependence on Moscow for the sake of an issue that, in the Kremlin’s eyes, was marginal to European and American security.