Approaches to creativity commonly distinguish between F-creativity (rule-compliant use) and E-creativity (rule-breaking use). This dichotomy in part stems from a focus on grammatical constructions (‘nodes’) at the relative expense of their connections (‘links’). We approach creativity and productivity from a link-based perspective in Usage-Based Construction Grammar, and assume that productivity pertains to a unit’s inventory of links, while creativity pertains to the creation and maintenance of links. These assumptions are showcased using the into-causative (He talked me into going, They scared us into working harder). The construction is productive because it hosts a large inventory of verbal slot-fillers (talk, scare). Conversely, these slot-fillers themselves are creative because they can establish and maintain links with a construction that is not their primary host. This property is not linear: we assume that the slot-fillers’ ability to occur in unusual constructional environments reflects their general ‘creative potential’ to form and maintain (new) links within the network. In data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), we find weak, but consistent correlations between verbs’ association with the into-causative and (i) their semantic and syntactic compatibility with the construction, and, crucially, (ii) their general flexibility and ability to establish and maintain links.

This article examines land disputes in Epetedo, a Lagos neighbourhood established in 1862, to explore how city dwellers interpreted their past and defined their area’s identity. After its establishment, Epetedo became the centre of conflicts over the ownership of its 21 compounds. From 1927 to 1947, two factions produced competing historical narratives in an effort to change property laws and disseminate their quarter’s history. Drawing on disputants’ records like petitions and letters, I demonstrate how residents articulated the meaning of a neighbourhood through historical writing, as well as through their socio-political and spatial engagements.

In this article, the author examines the influence of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical ideas on Hans Kelsen’s early theory of international law. He situates Kelsen’s work within the post-World War I context, where Kant’s vision of perpetual peace significantly impacted the creation of international organizations. The article delves into Kelsen’s seminal work “Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts,” exploring how Kelsen’s pure theory of law parallels and diverges from Kant’s concepts. While Kelsen’s ideas were shaped by Kantian philosophy, particularly in promoting a lawful international order, Kelsen transcended Kant by developing a more rigorous, epistemologically grounded legal theory. The author argues that Kelsen’s adaptation of Kantian principles reflects both a continuation and transformation of Kant’s vision, tailored to the political and cultural challenges of early 20th-century Europe.

This article examines the practice of post-mortem examination in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). The professional medical logbooks kept by ship’s surgeons as part of their mandated practice reveal that they turned to pathological anatomy to diagnose their patients – a technique typically associated with French anatomy during this period. I show that these post-mortem dissections blended medicine and surgery together by correlating clinical signs and symptoms of disease with pathological manifestations of disease in the bodies after death. This article also considers the medical culture that existed on these ships that enabled this research, specifically how captains, officers and crew responded to, and interpreted, such medical enquiry on board. By resituating the naval ship as a site of medical experimentation and enquiry, I explore how naval surgeons participated in medical research within the Royal Navy and used the ship space to engage in pathological anatomy before their British civilian counterparts flocked to French hospitals after the wars.

From global tourism and free movement to refugees and climate-related displacement, human mobility is both a driver and an effect of what we think of as globalisation. Yet, the role of international law in constituting human mobility remains critically undervalued. In this contribution, we call for a radical rethinking of the role of international law in shaping our globe through the tenets of the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences. More specifically, we argue for the adoption of a mobile ontology of international law, which pits the constant flow of persons, goods and capital against dominant globalisation narratives predicting the end of place to take a focus on re-territorialisations of power. Taking human mobility as our starting point, we first show how mobility has been central to the foundation of key building blocks of international law. Second, we turn to the example of the global tourism regime to explore how law recursively disperses mobility around the world. Third and finally, we argue that the relationship between international law and human mobility is co-constitutive, as constant shifts in mobilities create unexpected effects, which in turn prompt further evolutions in law. We conclude by reflecting on the space for empirical and critical investigation that may open up by re-imaging (international) law as quintessentially mobile.

In this paper, we dissect how different regimes of labour were crucial to the success of the British and Brazilian expeditions which observed the 1919 total solar eclipse in Príncipe and Sobral. We connect regimes of labour with degrees of invisibility and discuss plausible justifications for various absences/presences in the written records. We discuss reasons for the inclusion of Cottingham, the artisan–technician expert on clockwork mechanisms, into the teams; the entanglements of forced labour with scientific and technical work in Príncipe; and the various regimes of labour in place at Sobral. We argue that the impact of various regimes of labour in Príncipe and Sobral cannot be confined to the provision of infrastructural support, but include critical location choices, the possibility of scientific success during the observations themselves, and the processing of plates following observations.

A review of Joel Cabrita’s biography of Regina Gelana Twala.

This introductory article challenges foundational assumptions that structure how international legal theory conceptualizes “the Global.” The prevailing approach remains anchored in a Eurocentric legacy that conflates the earth with a geometrically spherical, chronometrically linear, and cartographically fixed model of space and time. This triad has rendered “the Global” an ostensibly objective terrain—embodied by an iconic World Map of states that is presumably atheoretical and transhistorical. I argue this is a form of “misplaced concreteness,” which constrains international legal thought as it confronts increasingly fluid and non-contiguous patterns of global ordering that have become difficult to visualize via the reigning cartographic imaginary. Further, it ignores how “the Global” was constructed by multiple and intersecting types of power, which together manifested demarcations, borders, territories and states as proclaimed mimetic reflections of planetary reality. As contemporary challenges—ranging from e.g. climate change to cyber governance—create trans-territorial or planetary scales of consequence, time is ripe to unfold international legal theory beyond the legacy of a priori conceptualization. Accordingly, the special issue encourages bottom-up, practice-oriented approaches, inviting international lawyers to explore how global spatiality and temporality are actively (re)produced across diverse legal contexts—from mobility regimes and global value chains to counterterrorism forums and planetary systems. Rather than treating “the Global” as a fixed totality or singular map, this special issue reframes it as a historically engineered concept, shaped by ongoing practices of geo-political, geo-economic and legal world-making.