The emergence of remotely operated vessels introduces new players, such as remote operators, into the shipping industry. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is working to incorporate these concepts into its regulatory framework. Given the significant responsibilities expected of remote operators, their liability for oil pollution and their role in marine environment protection require careful examination. The IMO is reviewing whether remote operators should be protected under the ‘channelling of liability’ provision in the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage 1992, which shields certain parties from negligence claims. While this provision may simplify the process of assigning liability, it has been criticized for weakening incentives to protect the marine environment. This article examines two options for the IMO: (i) leaving the status of remote operators undefined, allowing courts to interpret if they fall within the provision, or (ii) explicitly clarifying their status. The former is assessed through treaty interpretation and domestic case law, highlighting risks of legal uncertainty. The latter is explored by evaluating policy considerations and tools that could strengthen incentives for protecting the marine environment.

While David Benatar’s 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence remains the most influential formulation of contemporary academic antinatalism, numerous other iterations, both academic and nonacademic, have emerged since its publication. These newer forms reflect differing styles, motivations, and normative commitments across a range of issues, none more contentious than the question of what duties human antinatalists may hold toward nonhuman animals or life more broadly. This debate has produced a significant division within antinatalisms. Anthropocentric forms endorse the voluntary extinction of humanity while allowing other life to continue. Sentiocentric forms recommend the eventual extinction of all sentient life. While humans could voluntarily choose to cease reproducing, sentiocentric antinatalism implies, sometimes explicitly requires, active human intervention to end the reproduction of other sentient beings, potentially involving coercion or violence. This paper builds upon Patricia MacCormack’s critique of Benatarian antinatalism and efilism in her 2020 book The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. By widening the scope of inquiry to include multiple antinatalist traditions, the analysis maps how and why some formulations of antinatalism come to endorse forceful or promortalist positions aimed at achieving the extinction of certain, even all, species.

This study decomposes aggregate labor productivity growth in Turkey from 1999 to 2023 using a chain-linked gross domestic product (GDP) series with an exactly additive decomposition method. Traditionally, this growth has been decomposed into two components: productivity growth within sectors and labor reallocation across sectors. Using the chain-linked GDP series introduces a third component: changes in relative sectoral prices. Although these relative price changes cancel out at the aggregate level, they influence sectoral contributions to overall labor productivity by altering each sector’s weight in total output. Incorporating them, therefore, provides a more comprehensive view of sectoral dynamics by capturing their contributions to aggregate productivity growth. On average, the contribution of structural change slightly exceeds that of the within component. However, both the magnitude and composition of contributions vary considerably across sub-periods. During crisis years, structural change contributed positively while the within-sector component was negative. In contrast, during non-crisis periods, aggregate labor productivity growth declined because the structural-change component weakened persistently and nearly vanished after 2018, despite a positive though limited within-sector component. At the sector level, construction, finance and real estate, community, personal, and government services, and transport and communication largely account for the slowdown, while manufacturing’s contribution stayed steady; its composition shifted away from within productivity across periods.

The 1896 Bombay plague outbreak prompted the colonial government to recruit trained British nurses from England to serve the afflicted Indians of the Presidency. Studying this relatively under-explored aspect of British colonial nursing, this paper examines the politics of representation of the Western, non-military nurses serving the colonised Other through nineteenth-century periodical accounts and personal letters of a nurse stationed in Bombay. Owing to the popularity of British periodicals and the significant role they played in shaping public debates in the Metropole, periodical plague literature portrayed Western nurses as spokespersons for the Empire’s benevolent rule in Bombay. Contrarily, the intimacy and confidentiality of letter-writing allowed nurses to offer a more nuanced and critical account of life and work in Bombay. The paper contends that the non-military Western nurse’s medical career, mobility, and financial stability framed her multidimensional identity, which was further defined by the intersecting issues of race, class, gender and culture she encountered in Bombay. Comparing their varied portrayals in the periodicals and the letters, the paper argues that the politics of representation of women’s lives were influenced by both their sociopolitical subjectivities and the narrative forms through which they articulated their experiences.

Using a rich set of multilingual sources, this article traces the underexplored history of China’s involvement in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) from 1949 to 1966. It details the WFTU’s role in providing an institutional infrastructure for China’s international activism and documents the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ engagements with socialist internationalism and people’s diplomacy.

After 1960, against the backdrop of the Sino–Soviet split, the WFTU became a platform for Chinese dissent against pro-Soviet positions. After a decade of mutual collaboration, China’s position changed dramatically and relations with the WFTU were eventually halted in 1966 due to developments in the international communist movement and the radicalization of China’s internal and external politics. By focusing on the WFTU, the article highlights the possibilities (and constraints) presented by Soviet-backed international organisations for China’s foreign relations, illuminating broader issues related to China’s socialist internationalism, labour diplomacy, and transnational networks during the early Cold War.

This paper explores sentiocentric antinatalism, which is based on two principles: (1) prevention of the emergence of pain and (2) antispeciesism. It argues that the notion that all sentient creatures, including humans, should not be born presents an unsolvable paradox; the paradox is that the antinatalists who attempt to eliminate all births of sentient creatures must bear the obligation to survive for the purpose of preventing the emergence of all other creatures in this world. There are four phases to their attempt, and corresponding to them, there are four obligations that antinatalists should bear in pursuit of their ultimate mission. In the last part of this paper, the paradox of antinatalism is compared to the paradox of time travel, and their similarities and differences are discussed. In addition, antinatalists’ obligations are discussed in terms of supererogation.

This paper examines a previously unnoticed ‘split’ construction in Greek, where a possessor that originates in a PP occurs together with the P separated from the possessum. I show a correlation between the availability of this split and the interpretation of a PP. This finding poses a challenge to PF-based accounts of splitting, particularly those that assume distributed deletion (e.g., Fanselow and Ćavar 2002; Fanselow and Féry 2006, Bondarenko and Davis 2023, Murphy and Wilson 2025 i.a.). Such accounts require additional mechanisms beyond those independently required by a syntactic account and fail to predict the distribution of split constructions. Instead, I propose a purely syntactic analysis that accounts for splits in Greek based on a correlation between the interpretation of a PP and its merge height (e.g., Cinque 1999, Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 2007, Schweikert 2005). These findings together with additional theoretical considerations will be shown to provide strong support for the elimination of distributed deletion as a mechanism in natural language.

Wills have lent themselves to more performative possibilities than any other legal document. They have been engraved, painted, written about and sung. Yet within legal scholarship these representations have been overlooked. Interpreting the Reading of the Will widely, this article demonstrates the tenacity of the will on artistic imagination and, at the same time, its starkly shifting functions and audiences. Adopting a chronological approach, it examines church monuments from the sixteenth century, nineteenth-century ‘realist’ paintings and novels, twentieth-century crime fiction, comic operas and figurative domestic porcelain, and more recent gritty and glamorous TV soaps and contemporary performance art. Aided by scholarship across a wide range of disciplines, it argues that this diverse work mirrors and illuminates historical, political and sociological debates about the public and private nature of inheritance. In a hyper-visual world, it makes a case for taking artistic endeavours seriously within legal scholarship and pedagogy.

The closed method for the treatment of compound fractures of the limbs emerged and popularised during the interwar period. The historiography on this procedure sustains an essentially Anglo-Saxon narrative focusing on contributions by the American surgeon Winnett H. Orr during the First World War and the Spanish Josep Trueta during the Spanish Civil War and his exile in Britain. This paper aims to ‘open’ this story by reconstructing the early work of another Spanish surgeon: Manuel Bastos. Although originally an army medical officer, Bastos specialised in the treatment of limb fractures in a dual military-civilian context. On the one hand, during successive assignments to the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, he familiarised with the management of gunshot wounds. On the other hand, he specialised in the treatment of tuberculosis humerus fractures in children at the Instituto Rubio in Madrid. The visit to Spain of the Argentinian surgeon Pedro Chutró, who had acquired a great prestige in First World War Paris for his approach to fractures and osteomyelitis, and the escalation of the Moroccan campaigns to the so-called Rif War (1921–27) gave Bastos the opportunity, the idea, and the courage to develop a closed treatment of humerus fractures in soldiers. Chutró’s influence on Bastos persisted in the context of the Hispano-Americanist policy embraced in mid-twentieth-century Spain. Ultimately, this study questions the understanding of the closed method as a single, univocally traceable procedure, suggesting instead parallel versions emerging in different sites and transforming themselves and influencing each other as they circulated globally.

Between the arrival of firearms in Japan in 1543 and the crushing of the Shimabara rebellion in 1638, Japan transformed from a fractured country in a permanent state of war into a centralized, peaceful era. However, this was only possible thanks to several transformations made by the Tokugawa regime, not least the firearm itself. The copious amounts of firearms existing in Japan became a domesticated and common element of the Edo period and were prevalent in the country’s transformation. Rather than being just tools of war that could menace the shogunate, firearms gained a range of roles, from tools to regalia, depending on their owners’ social and political context, which sheds light on their social environment.

Dans cet article, nous abordons la connaissance géographique de l’Afrique centrale aux 16e–18e siècles. Notre attention est portée sur les références aux lacs Zembre et Zaïre dans les sources écrites et cartographiques des 16e et 17e siècles. L’hypothèse avancée ici est qu’il s’agirait des lacs Tumba et Maï-Ndombe (ex-“Léopold II”) situés en amont de la région comprise entre le fleuve Congo et le Bas-Kasaï, en République démocratique du Congo. Malheureusement, ces indications géographiques ont été perdues par les différents auteurs anciens qui associaient ces lacs au Nil et à la région est-africaine. Ce nouvel éclairage sur cette énigme cartographique permet de souligner que l’espace géographique compris entre le confluent du fleuve Congo et la rivière Kasaï était connu au royaume Kongo, puis en Europe, avant les explorations de l’époque moderne qui ont conduit à la colonisation de l’Afrique centrale.

While much has been written about William Blackstone, the jurist, politician, and legal writer, this article provides a critical new understanding of Blackstone, the husband, friend, and investor. It considers Blackstone’s legal and economic actions as well as ideas, analyzing his strategies for managing family wealth and comparing them to the strategies employed by a member of his extended family who was a Jamaican planter. Here, the article contributes to recent scholarship on the global dimensions of English and British legal history. It offers a fuller account of Blackstone’s proximity to the colonial plantation economy by investigating how economic change and imperial controversies impacted his personal and professional life. It also exposes Blackstone’s conventionally masculine bias by detailing the different ways in which he privileged male interests when making personal investment choices and when coming to judicial decisions about women’s property claims. A gendered ideology, which positioned male authority as central to the success of the household, state, and empire, furnished the framework within which Blackstone justified the operation of law and directed his own actions as head of his family. Placing Blackstone’s jurisprudence and experience within the contexts of patriarchy and colonialism, the article sheds new light on this influential figure, showing how he embodied the core features of an eighteenth-century family man and shaped modern ideas about male authority, property, and power.

This article investigates how feminist praxis in Turkey incorporates refugee women into their advocacy practices, and uncovers the extent to which these interactions expose the boundaries of solidarity. Anchored in Gramscian political theory, it asks whether feminist activism continues to operate as an inclusive counter-hegemonic political sphere, and the degree to which refugee women are incorporated within it. Drawing on interviews with feminist- and migrant-led non-governmental organizations in Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that interactions with refugee women frequently unfold through short-term, humanitarian-oriented, project-funded initiatives rather than collective practices of solidarity. These dynamics highlight tensions between the emancipatory claims of feminist politics and the selective solidarities that take shape under conditions of intersecting inequalities and governance frameworks. Rather than offering a definitive critique of feminist politics, the article treats the question of refugee women as an analytical lens through which the constraints of solidarity within contemporary feminist politics in Turkey become visible.

David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (2006) presents a view that came to be known as antinatalism: the claim that it is always wrong to have children, because life is bad, death is bad, and the only way to avoid both is never to be brought into existence. Benatar argues that his two-barreled—or “bipolar”—pessimism is not limited to humans but applies equally to all sentient beings. This extension, however, is prone to producing theoretical confusion. The anti-reproductive view laid out in the book is coherent as a form of human antinatalism, but Benatar’s own caveats prevent it from developing into the radical sentiocentrism it seems to promise.

The article investigates the formation of an industrial workforce in Săvinești, a major center of Romania’s socialist chemical industry. Based on archival sources and oral history interviews, it examines how proletarianization was not fully realized but instead developed as a deliberately maintained dual condition. Industrial employment was combined with long-term commuting, ties to subsistence agriculture, and uneven access to urban housing. Such arrangements reflected the socialist state’s efforts to expand production while managing limited infrastructure and demographic realities. By situating this case within wider debates on proletarianization under socialism, the study offers a more grounded account of class formation in Eastern Europe.