This article examines how musical practices in 1970s Spain formed ways of imagining democracy and how they participated in the wider social struggle to define freedom and equality for the final years of Franco's dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. I shall analyse two case studies: a large-scale experimental art festival held in the streets of Pamplona in 1972 and a grassroots musical collective created in 1973 on the initiative of the composer Llorenç Barber. Drawing on previous studies on the relationship between music and democracy, participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, and the insights of political science and philosophy into democracy, I offer a critical reassessment of the Pamplona festival and explore the relationship between grassroots collaboration and ideas of participatory democracy, and analyse the significance of this relationship in 1970s Spain.

The opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 provided a spectacular climax for Samuel Huntington's third wave of democracy. It represented the triumph not only of a people over their oppressive regime but also, ultimately, of Western economic liberalism; the post-socialist democracy of German reunification was a singular one with consumerism at its core. In the early 1990s, many East German reform socialists resisted this inevitability, and exploited the temporary political and bureaucratic void that emerged in East Berlin as a space in which to imagine alternative democratic futures from the socialist past. In this article I explore the attempts by two very different East Berlin musical communities to incubate anti-capitalist worlds from the legacies – both official and unofficial – of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). First, I reflect on the autonomous musical worlds that were created by members of the GDR's alternative bands in occupied buildings in Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. Second, I consider the articulation by the ZwischenWelt-Festival, a reincarnation of the GDR's Festival of Political Song, of a more outward-looking future for East Germany, based on the ideals of international solidarity.

In 2004, Cape Town Opera mounted a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the former apartheid prison on Robben Island. Sponsored by Den Norske Opera, and endorsed by the South African government, the production was presented as a celebration of the country's tenth year of democracy. This article investigates the vision of democracy performed by Fidelio on Robben Island and asks how it interacts with the founding principles of the new South African political order. Situating the production within the context of contemporaneous debates about cultural identity and representation in a democratic South Africa, I argue that Fidelio on Robben Island performed a legitimizing function designed to endorse the validity of the state and of opera as a democratic cultural form.

The concept of a ‘safe harbour’ has been mentioned in several contexts during ongoing discussions around regulatory developments towards mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (mHREDD) which continue at international, European and national levels. This article analyses the concept of a ‘safe harbour’ and how it relates to human rights due diligence (HRDD) as described in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). It discusses examples of other types of safe harbours which were recognized in legislation and case law; considers that a safe harbour could result in a ‘tick-box’ approach; highlights the implications for access to remedy; and distinguishes a safe harbour exemption from a defence of having undertaken HRDD in accordance with an expected standard of conduct.

Agricultural practices are key for understanding socio-economic change, community organization, and relationships with landscape and the environment. Under the Roman Empire, cereals were vital for supplying urban and military populations, yet cereal husbandry practices within villa landscapes remain underexplored. In this article, the author applies new methods to analyse a large assemblage of charred plant remains from an area of chalk downland in central-southern England in order to evaluate changes in cereal production strategies over the Middle Iron Age to late Roman periods. Archaeobotany, carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, and functional weed ecology are combined to reconstruct crop husbandry practices, in order to establish the cereal production system of Roman villas and the preceding Iron Age settlements, and to consider the environmental and socio-economic impact of cereal production systems.

In recent decades, the rule of law has not been commonly associated with Afghanistan. Instead, its politics have been more likely to be framed in terms of lawlessness and ungovernability. But this trope does not do justice to Afghanistan's longer history of statehood or experiences of constitution-making. Over the course of the twentieth century, Afghan leaders drafted seven constitutions (in 1923, 1931, 1964, 1976, 1980, 1987, and 1990). These constitutions represented leaders’ attempts to assert their legitimacy and enforce their vision of an Afghan nation-state. This article sheds fresh light on Afghan elites’ top-down framing of Afghan national identity through ethnolinguism, exploring the legalization of Pashto as both an official and national language in Afghanistan's constitutions. Reformers intended Pashto to transgress community, kinship, and regional boundaries and act as a source of unity (though one in which ethnolinguistic minorities had little say). Tracing Afghanistan's constitutional history from 1923–90, this article reveals language as a constitutional arena for debating Afghan modernity and identity. As such, this article integrates Afghanistan into legal histories of South Asia while emphasizing how Afghan constitutionalists engaged in the process of law-making as a means of expressing Afghanistan's own independence and ideas of modernity.

The earliest pieces of knowledge and research on China in Poland reflected development of Sinological studies in Western Europe. Being located on the sidelines of trade routes through which Eastern ideas and goods reached Western Europe, Poles used to get their information about China mostly from intermediaries: medieval travelers, merchants, and envoys, and since the sixteenth century, letters, writings, and books by Jesuit missionaries. The Poles contributed the very first comprehensive description of Chinese flora, and were important in spreading mathematical knowledge among Chinese scientists. A Pole established Monumenta Serica, still published today, and another Pole applied formal logic to the research of Chinese classical texts for the very first time. Despite all that, regular Sinological research in Poland did not take off until the twentieth century, and even then it was interrupted by political upheaval in Poland and by researchers’ fight either for freedom or with ideology.

Approximately five centuries of the involvement of Portugal in Antarctic regions is described. Discoveries, the sealing and whaling industries, and modern developments are discussed.

In this article, we introduce the concept of politics of comparison in tourism development, looking at how comparison contributes to shaping and making sense of tourism development in Greenland. Decision makers and operators in Greenland foresee tourism growth as new transatlantic airports are set to open by 2024. To navigate an uncertain tourism future, many look towards neighbouring Iceland, who experienced exponential growth in international tourism arrivals between 2010 and 2018. In this North Atlantic reflection, comparison also works as a tool to understand tourism, positioning Greenland as a potential destination and deliberating about the future of tourism in the region, while also bringing forth competing logics and trajectories of development. Thus, comparison serves to engage with the meaning and value of tourism, seeing it not only as a pillar of the economy but also as a force affecting landscapes and communities. We argue that the comparisons made by tourism actors work epistemologically – creating knowledge of ‘what is’ – as well as ontologically, forcefully interfering with and producing tourism realities.

This paper examines the production of Arctic governance expertise, understood here as the specialised knowledge through which international cooperation is regulated in the region. Instead of presuming that such expertise is created primarily in the capitals of Arctic states, I ask a more open-ended question: where specifically does that process take place? I argue that Arctic governance expertise increasingly operates in a transnational and networked fashion: an array of think tanks, foundations and events like conferences are as important as the obvious places like foreign ministries and universities. It is a quasi-diplomatic social field characterised by blurry boundaries between different states, professions and institutional settings: between government and academia, legal and political fields, public and private sectors. The paper foregrounds that field of expertise as an object of study.

Previous experimental work on the processing of clausal ellipsis with contrastive remnants shows a Locality preference – DP remnants are preferentially paired with the most recently encountered DP correlate in the antecedent clause, even in the presence of contrastive prosody or semantic bias favouring a non-local correlate. The Locality effect has been argued to arise from the language processor consulting (default) information-structural representations when pairing remnants and correlates, yet direct evidence for the information structure hypothesis for Locality has been difficult to obtain. Estonian is a flexible word order language that optionally marks Contrastive Topics (CTs) syntactically, while allowing for the linear distance between a CT subject correlate and remnant to be held constant, in order to rule out a Recency explanation for the Locality effect. In an eye-tracking during reading experiment with case-disambiguated subject and object remnants in Estonian, we see asymmetries in the Locality preference (i.e. object advantage) following canonical Verb-second antecedent clauses and subject CT-marking Verb-third clauses. This provides novel evidence for fine-grained information-structural representations guiding the processing of contrastive ellipsis.

Wealth differentials in archaeological sites are a frequently studied topic, but social differentiation approaches are rarely applied to different contexts within a wider territory, especially in Portugal. In this article, the authors discuss the differences in wealth and inequality through the consumption of tablewares from fifteen sites across Portugal dated from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries ad. The archaeological evidence derives from two types of contexts: secular (houses and dumps) and religious (female and male religious institutions). Using a statistical similarity method to compare different consumption patterns in each context, the authors discuss how this can help us understand wealth differences in distinct social environments.

The study compared the syntactic complexity and the use of logical connectors in summaries written in French by two groups of students: speakers of French as first language (L1) and peers in a French-immersion program (L2) from grade nine to university. Both L1 and L2 groups of university students demonstrated more general complexity in their written summaries than less mature writers. However, the use of phrasal elaboration was apparent just at the upper secondary and university levels with L1 students. Both groups generally tend to overuse causal connectors while underusing additive and adversative connectors compared to the author’s use in the source text. Yet both groups employ significantly more adversative connectors just at the post-secondary level. The only difference observed between L1 and L2 writers was in the diversity of connector words used in the summary, with the former group using a richer, more diverse vocabulary. Several measures for succinctness differentiated L1 and L2 students in early secondary with the latter group condensing the source text less than L1 students. Correlation analysis suggested that many measures of syntactic complexity and connector use are inextricably linked.

The ordinary city of Bir al-Saba’, situated within an urban world stretched across southern Palestine, has a story to tell, of dramatic spatiotemporal transformations, presence and absence, capture and resilience. Such connected urban history is profoundly shaped through the world-making relations of those who lived and dwelt within the always-becoming material and ideational spatial geography of the Naqab. Research gathered from diverse archival sources and interview data offers insight into the voices, actions and imaginaries of the Saba'awi as they worked the shifting assemblages of this landscape between 1840 and 1936, making Bir al-Saba’ a thick multiscalar cosmopolitan place of meaning and opportunity.