This article traces the origins and evolution of the Shanghai Bund within a comparative framework of transimperial urban forms. Existing scholarship has offered divergent interpretations – imperial metropolitan precedents, cross-colonial transfers and local antecedents – which this article argues are complementary rather than contradictory. It further moves beyond broad regional claims through specifying concrete cases supported by new archival evidence. Drawing on records mainly from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, The National Archives in the UK and contemporary newspapers, the article shows how Singapore’s Boat Quay, Calcutta’s Strand Road and London’s Thames Embankment were selectively appropriated to meet shifting sanitary, political and economic needs. Localized over successive decades, these borrowings crystallized into a Bund form – landscaped, monumental, with a financial core and technologically modern – that became a model for other treaty ports and was reproduced across the imperial world and beyond. The Bund’s history is thus a microcosm of the circulation and remaking of ideas within the wider networks of the British Empire.

The concepts of ‘dangerous’, ‘celebratory’, and ‘hegemonic’ multilingualism provide a valuable heuristic to explore language ideologies within supranational organizations like the United Nations. Adopting a critical stance in relation to the functions and values assigned to multilingualism and applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examines three ideological manifestations: verbalizations, metapragmatic acts, and linguistic practices in United Nations debates on the 1995 multilingualism resolution. The study analyses how member state representatives index their ideological stance: metadiscursively via verbalizations within the context of language policy debates, via acts of voting, and via their use of multilingualism as positioning devices within these debates. Unlike previous investigations of language ideology which have predominantly and exclusively focussed on discursive analyses of texts, this article forwards a tripartite analytic framework. We argue that this model serves to afford a holistic examination of practised and stated attitudes towards multilingualism, which in turn have consequences for language policy outcomes. (Language ideology, language policy, multilingualism, United Nations)

Golden Dawn (GD), Greece’s most prominent far-right political organization, strategically utilized antisemitism as its core ideological principle rather than a marginal prejudice or rhetorical device. This article argues that antisemitism served primarily as an epistemological conspiratorial framework central to GD’s ideological worldview, providing a coherent interpretive lens through which all political, economic, and social phenomena were explained as elements of a singular Jewish-orchestrated plot. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of over 10,300 GD publications spanning 1993 to 2020, the study illustrates how this epistemological master frame enabled the party to unify diverse domestic and international issues, from foreign policy tensions and immigration debates to economic crises, under a consistent antisemitic narrative. Additionally, by explicitly employing Holocaust denial, endorsing Nazi symbolism, and openly propagating antisemitic conspiracies, GD deliberately violated post-Holocaust European norms. This normative transgression was integral to the party’s identity, positioning it in overt defiance of mainstream moral and political boundaries. The article thus demonstrates how GD’s antisemitism functioned not merely as a rhetorical provocation but as the foundation of a comprehensive ideological system that consciously challenged established European taboos. These findings also suggest broader implications for understanding the role and adaptability of conspiratorial antisemitism and normative transgression in other extremist ideologies beyond the Greek context.

The urban authorities of early modern Dutch cities employed a broad variety of public servants to manage the urban administration and provide public services relating to health, security, education, and entertainment. Neither part of the governing elite nor members of the guilds, these urban officials are of interest to historians of both work and governance. This article demonstrates that studying these public servants might yield valuable insights into premodern attitudes to work, especially public work. Using applications for employment in public office as well as petitions for improved remuneration, we analyse the value public servants of early modern Dutch cities attached to their professional activities. The town of Zwolle (c.1550–1700) serves as a case study, shedding light on the conditions under which people decided to work in urban public services. In their competition for the town’s salaried offices, candidates demonstrated considerable individual initiative, ranging from unsolicited applications to proposals concerning their personal value for the civic community. Similarly, officeholders demanded proper remuneration befitting the value of their work and their services for the town’s common good.

This article deals with the domestic politics of Estonia and Latvia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It studies the cases of the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) and Latvia’s National Alliance (NA). This piece concentrates on the cases of EKRE and NA with an interest in these parties’ formation processes, outlooks on identity politics, their stances vis-à-vis the EU and developments in international politics, and their relations with other political actors in Estonia and Latvia.

EKRE and NA anchor their ideological prerogatives in the longer trajectories of ethno-nationalism in Estonia and Latvia. However, whereas NA transformed into a party of the national conservative right, open to cooperation with centrist and centre-right partners, EKRE has remained a party of the radical right with a staunchly anti-systemic rhetoric and agenda. This particularity is largely to account for NA’s convergence with Latvia’s major parties on the increased securitisation of relations with Russia and EKRE’s divergence towards a rhetoric that urges a prioritisation of the national interest and a “pro-peace” stance vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.

The study of legal change at local levels in this forum opens new windows onto the legal landscape, especially because they explore ground-level legal change that reveals far more innovative and incremental shifts in law and legal understanding than is visible at higher altitudes.

This article reviews Martti Koskenniemi’s To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1780, Dannelle Gutarra Cordero’s She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World, and James Q. Whitman’s From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World. These authors raise fundamental questions about what was going on and what was or is at stake in the legal theorizing, argumentation, and adjudication that characterized the immediate prehistory of the nascent US constitutional order.

It is often thought that compulsory retirement funding gains support from paternalistic considerations. This paper examines this claim. I argue that compulsory retirement funding is more coherent when understood as an attempt at temporal smoothing than counterfactual insurance. An implication is that any paternalistic case for retirement funding faces problems that are more severe than they would be if compulsory retirement funding were insurance. I label these the problems of ‘inverted bias’ and of the ‘arbitrariness of income from labour’. The paper then makes some suggestions about how these points about paternalism bear on the problem of justice in retirement funding.

Between 1898 and 1923, a series of disputes erupted among fishing communities in the British Gold Coast Colony (modern-day Ghana) following the introduction of larger and more productive sea fishing nets. All along the coast, fishers debated the environmental and economic consequences of adopting the nets, which debates shifted across African and colonial forums. Focusing on these disputes, this article interrogates the ways in which sites of fishing innovations and experimentation became sites of intense conflict and negotiation throughout the Gold Coast Colony as different groups debated and contested technological change. In the process, voices advocating for caution within the fishing industry were effectively marginalised through the manoeuvring of net advocates while the introduction of colonial arbitration within the realm of fisheries offered new challenges to the authority of African leaders within the marine space.

The regulation of groundwater remains underdeveloped globally and often lags behind the domestic governance of surface water. As a result, groundwater is often subject to unfettered extraction, uses, and contamination. A clear understanding of ownership is central to the success of domestic regulations. However, the types of ownership regime in place in nations around the world are poorly documented in the academic literature. This study addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of domestic groundwater ownership regimes across ten jurisdictions in nine countries spanning five continents. It identifies three dominant models of groundwater ownership: private ownership, public ownership, and non-ownership with public oversight. It then examines how these ownership doctrines impact key dimensions of groundwater governance, including the nature and transferability of the ownership right, the level of government at which regulation takes place, implications for rights of use, and interactions with customary and Indigenous rights. Doing so offers unique insight into how nations with different legal traditions, governance structures, and customary practices address the ownership of groundwater resources. It also suggests that different ownership (and non-ownership) models can have distinct implications for other aspects of groundwater governance.

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are essential for green energy technologies and defense systems, yet global supply chains remain concentrated in China. This has intensified geopolitical competition for alternative sources, positioning the Arctic as a strategic frontier, as retreating ice exposes mineral deposits. A comprehensive discourse analysis of strategic documents, scholarly literature, and media sources from 2010 to 2025 reveals a dramatic shift from geological characterization and economic speculation to urgent securitization and strategic alliance formation. Academic research has evolved from establishing natural baselines to governance and social conflict analysis. Media coverage of REE in the Arctic peaked in 2025, with rising emphasis on governance, sovereignty, geopolitics, and Greenland’s strategic position. Critical gaps persist in addressing Indigenous rights, holistic impact assessments, and Arctic-specific innovation. Sustainable Arctic REE development requires integrated frameworks that balance geopolitical imperatives with environmental protection and Indigenous self-determination, preventing the region from becoming a sacrifice zone for global decarbonization.

This article will use the records of the Slave Compensation Commission to examine how women experienced and negotiated property- and slave-ownership in nineteenth-century Britain. Demonstrating that women played a crucial role in facilitating the transmission of wealth rooted in enslavement into metropolitan society, it will show how they utilized, manipulated—and were restricted by—the financial mechanisms and legal frameworks that underpinned the British economy. Women’s engagement with the compensation process illustrates both the economic opportunities open to middle- and upper-class women in the early nineteenth century and the ways that female property ownership was mediated and constrained. But we cannot elide the nature of this particular form of “property.” These women were significant players in a system dependent on the violent exploitation of other human beings. The article shows the different ways that British women claimed enslaved people as property: how they used racialized violence to negotiate and wield power in a patriarchal society and to claim, establish, and reinforce their own potentially precarious positions. In doing so, it demonstrates the importance of interrogating the complex nexus of power relations—gendered, racialized, and classed—that shaped how female property- and wealth-holders thought, acted, and behaved in nineteenth-century Britain.

This talk examines how corpus linguistics and artificial intelligence treasure the potential to reshape contemporary language learning ecologies. It argues that the rapid normalisation of generative AI has intensified the need for pedagogical models that combine low-friction access to language support with transparent methods grounded in attested usage. Drawing on ecological perspectives and recent empirical research, the talk shows how AI-driven environments expand opportunities for language learning while creating risks related to opacity and over-reliance. Corpus linguistics, data-driven learning and corpus literacy offer a complementary foundation by providing traceable evidence, reproducible analyses, and practices that foster learners’ critical judgement. Two convergence scenarios are proposed: AI as an extension of DDL, and corpus literacy as the operational core of critical AI literacy. Together, these scenarios illustrate how open-box pedagogies can reconcile responsiveness and accountability, ensuring that AI-mediated learning remains anchored in transparent processes and empirically grounded language knowledge.

This study conducted an approximate replication of Teravainen-Goff (2023) to validate the Intensity and Perceived Quality of Engagement Scale for university students in the Japanese EFL context. Teravainen-Goff (2023) developed this scale based on an action-oriented definition of engagement and proposed a novel approach to measuring engagement among secondary school language learners in the UK. The study identified an 18-item, five-factor structure from a pool of 36 items through exploratory factor analysis (EFA). In this replication, we examined the validity and reliability of Teravainen-Goff’s scale in a different context, focusing on the replicability of the EFA results. We undertook this replication because engagement is context-dependent and EFA results can vary across samples. We compared the factorial structure with that of the initial study while modifying the target language and participant demographic. Results revealed a 22-item, six-factor structure with good fit. Although the same underlying factors emerged, several notable differences were observed. This approximate replication provided stronger evidence for the psychometric properties of the scale in a new context. Transparent documentation of modifications to the initial study and systematic comparison offered a promising approach to building robust evidence for engagement research and improving the rigour of questionnaire-based research overall.