This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

In the afternoon 20 May 1916, Ernest Shackleton with Frank Worsley and Tom Crean unexpectedly arrived at the whaling station in Stromness, South Georgia after completing one of the most extraordinary journeys in the history of Antarctic exploration. There are numerous versions of what actually happened on arriving at Stromness, whom they met and what was said during this first encounter between the whalers and the explorers. There has also at times been a confusion about which whaling station and at which building they arrived. Despite the discrepancies between several accounts dealing with the Stromness arrival, there has been little explicit analysis to try to separate fact from fiction. Despite some attempts to get the records straight, books and other publications on Shackleton still appear where details on the arrival are marred by fiction. This paper, therefore, continues the search for a “sober” narrative of what happened that afternoon in South Georgia more than a hundred years ago. A main reason to revisit the questions surrounding the arrival in Stromness now is the renewed focus on the Stromness Manager’s Villa that was finally repaired and stabilised during the Antarctic summer 2025/26.

This paper examines competing treatments—surgery and radioactive iodine (RAI, I131)—for hyperthyroidism in the context of post-colonial Cold War nuclear science in Taiwan. Although the U.S.-led Cold War Atoms for Peace project pushed for the globalization of nuclear medicine, it had to compete with the Japanese colonial legacy in Taiwan (Republic of China). This government-in-exile embraced nuclear science and ushered in RAI with staged rituals. However, this modern procedure failed to overtake the surgical approach (thyroidectomy); in fact, as late as the 1990s, well after RAI had become a standard procedure throughout the world, surgery was still the major treatment option for this common disease in Taiwan. The tension between the global and the local is rooted in infrastructure as well as the materiality, regulation and availability of the Iodine 131 isotope, and, finally, the customary practice of the surgical tradition, established since the colonial period. Thyroid diseases, especially endemic goiter, were an important issue in colonial medicine, and the study, diagnosis, and treatments of thyroid diseases were an integral part of colonial surgeons’ identity. Surgical clinics had been a fixture of institutional medicine throughout Taiwan by the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, with the exception of a few prestigious hospitals in Taipei such as the National Taiwan University Hospital, most medical institutions and clinicians were not equipped to use isotopes. The availability of I131 was also limited, as the nuclear reactor did not become active until the 1960s. The preference for surgery thus points to the significance of material and social conditions of medical practice in Taiwan, amid the backdrop of the haunting images of the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on nearby Japan which the Atoms for Peace Project had aimed to overcome.

This article examines the 1928 German–Soviet Alai–Pamir expedition as a moment when different scientific traditions, political ambitions and bodily practices met in the high-altitude borderlands of Central Asia. Focusing on the mapping of the Fedchenko glacier, it argues that knowledge emerged not simply from instruments and protocols, but from the difficult encounter between bodies, technical tools and a resistant glacial landscape. The glacier thus became more than a physical object of study; it was an epistemologically charged terrain where ways of knowing were tested and made visible. German scientists, drawing on alpine traditions of glaciology, emphasized precision, discipline and methodological control. Soviet participants, by contrast, highlighted endurance, improvisation and collective struggle, casting physical hardship as proof of revolutionary commitment and shaping a distinctly ideological form of scientific masculinity. By tracing these entanglements of body, landscape and ideology, the article presents the expedition as an example of how science operates not only as a cognitive project, but also as a deeply embodied and politicized practice.

The increase in the mobilization power of public sector unions is one of the most puzzling features of twenty-first-century labor politics in both advanced and emerging market democracies. We posit that public labor mobilization is driven by economic, institutional, and political factors. Mobilization decreases during the expansionary phase of the economic cycle, when incumbents can placate public unions with state resources; when collective bargaining is mandatory; and when governments share a common partisan identity with a unified labor leadership, facilitating a “political exchange” in which union moderation is traded for wage and non-wage concessions. Based on a qualitative, subnational comparative case-study approach, we trace union organizational dynamics and coalition building process in Argentina’s education sector, and seek to identify their effects on teacher union militancy or moderation across the country’s provinces between 2006 and 2019. We illuminate the causal mechanisms and temporal sequences of union mobilization/moderation by examining both “typical” and “deviant” cases of our general theory

A new study of the trial of Jesus of Nazareth urges that we turn our attention to the broader imperial context of the trial. Jesus made the local elites in charge of the Roman Empire deeply uncomfortable, and their status as elites - rather than their religion - best explains their response to his ministry.

Democracy today means liberal democracy. Exclusively. And ‘the crisis of liberal democracy is not necessarily a crisis of democracy as such’. This is the starting point of Philip Manow’s new book, Unter Beobachtung. Die Bestimmung der liberalen Demokratie und ihrer Freunde (‘Under Surveillance. Defining liberal democracy and its friends’). The German political scientist contends that through the new, exclusive understanding of democracy as liberal democracy, politics has been ‘suffocated’, and this largely contributed to the success of populism. In this review I argue that the populist promise for the rebirth of politics is dishonest, and I point to an underestimated consequence of liberal depoliticisation: rights inflation.

The article analyzes ethno-demographic trends in the contemporary Russian Federation, first of all, from the point of view of the probability of the development of separatist aspirations in ethnic autonomies within it. In recent decades, due to the shrinking opportunities to maintain the identity of indigenous peoples, assimilation processes have intensified among many of them (primarily the peoples of the Finno-Ugric group, as well as peoples whose is subjected to persecution in Russia, such as Ukrainians). Because of the assimilation, the share of the Russian ethnic majority in the country’s population is growing. At the same time, in the national republics of the North Caucasus and Siberia, the number of indigenous peoples is growing. In general, there is a process of ethnic separation: “Russian” regions are becoming ethnically more and more “Russian,” while 13 out of 21 republics are getting more and more “non-Russian.” Russian aggression in Ukraine also increases the likelihood of destabilizing Russia in the future, as the ideology of the “Russian World” politicizes inter-ethnic relations within Russia itself, making ethnic minorities second-class citizens.

In this article, some recent objections to prioritarianism are critically discussed, pertaining to, respectively, competing claims and impersonal value. The competing claims objections are due to Michael Otsuka and apply to non-risky, or certain, outcomes. Otsuka argues that prioritarianism fails to fully cater to competing claims when it comes to large losses, rank-switching and saving large numbers of people. The impersonal value objections are due to Martin Hanisch and amount to arguing that it is not only egalitarianism that involves a commitment to impersonal value, so does prioritarianism. In the article, prioritarianism is defended against these objections.

This study investigates evidential meanings, referring to the information sources available to the speaker (i.e., direct witnessing, report, or inference), expressed through syntactic and lexical strategies in French. Across three experimental studies, we examined French subordinate structures, including complement, relative, pseudo-relative, and infinitive ECM clauses, that encompass perception or reporting verbs. We used witness rating, information source identification, and discourse completion tasks administered to a total of 221 French speakers. The results show that (i) infinitive ECM clauses are unambiguously associated with direct witnessing; (ii) pseudo-relative and relative clauses with voir are, though less strongly than infinitive, associated with direct witnessing; (iii) although still being sometimes used in reference to direct witnessing, complement clauses with voir are primarily suitable in inferential contexts based on resultant states; and finally (iv) complement clauses of dire are associated with reported sources. Our results show that indirect evidentiality is marked by complement clauses only, whereas direct evidentiality distributes over infinitive ECM, pseudo-relative and relative clauses with no significant difference between the two types of relatives. We conclude that indirect evidentiality in French is syntactically associated with one type of subordinate structure, whereas direct evidentiality is not.

Through the example of Romania’s divergence from Soviet refugee policy in the case of the 1971 East Pakistani refugees, this article suggests that great powers face barriers to persuading even weaker states within their orbits of influence to acquiesce on issues of refugee politics. Responses to refugees touch sensitive state concerns about sovereignty. Aiding refugees can be an implicit condemnation of the state from which refugees flee. States that want to avoid the microscope of international opinion looking inside their own domestic human rights contexts will be hesitant to scrutinize another state, even in the context of a great power proxy conflict. As Romania sought to leverage favorable economic agreements, including with Pakistan and India, its position on the East Pakistani refugees reflected a hinge approach that attempted to balance political and economic relationships on both sides of the conflict. Small states use diplomatic entrepreneurship to work between larger powers as they pursue their own strategic goals. This article uses archival, diplomatic documents from Bucharest, some of which had never been accessed prior to this research. The article contributes a small state’s perspective based on diplomatic correspondence by its own officials and in its own language.

Michael Otsuka, Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey have proposed competing claims egalitarianism and hybrid egalitarianism in their attempts to justify giving priority to the worse off, especially in cases involving risk. However, neither view adequately explains why it matters that some are worse off than others. And combining these accounts within a broader egalitarian theory or modular principle is problematic. I sketch an alternative version of egalitarianism and compare it with competing claims egalitarianism, hybrid egalitarianism and restricted prioritarianism.