In today's Europe, commemorations can be times at which to affirm international reconciliation, based notably on the knowledge produced by historians who are becoming progressively cosmopolitan. However, commemorations are also used by national-populist political parties for electoral purposes and can lead to tensions with neighbouring states. This was the case in Trieste in September 2019, when the city council executive (controlled by a right-wing national-populist coalition) decided to erect a statue of Gabriele D'Annunzio, 100 years after he had occupied the nearby city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in Croatia. This commemoration led to a series of debates among historians, especially in Italy. Based on a critical discourse analysis and an interdiscursive approach to narratives produced by historians for colleagues and for the broader society, the current research investigates the use of cosmopolitanism in the field of history when in parallel a commemoration is coordinated by national-populist forces in a public space.

Debt imprisonment was one of the tools a creditor had to enforce a debt. When creditors believed that their debtors were defaulting, they could imprison debtors to ensure they would not disappear and debts would be settled. As a practice, debt imprisonment was never fundamentally challenged in the Middle Ages though the way it was executed did come under scrutiny. In the city of Bruges, the city magistrate regulated the practice. As debt imprisonment was an essential part of the commercial framework in Bruges, the city tried to avoid princely interference. However, merchants could also complain to princely courts about their imprisonment. If the city hesitated to address unjust practices in the existing framework, it risked losing these cases to princely courts. As princely institutions increased their control over debt imprisonment, the city government kept the mechanism of debt imprisonment while, for example, Antwerp sought alternative tools for creditors. The adaptations that did happen in Bruges were not the result of the requests of merchants, but a means of rather safeguarding its own jurisdictions from princely courts.

The centenary of the March on Rome has prompted Modern Italy's Contexts and Debates section to focus on the public uses of history in reference to interwar Fascism. We are looking into the ‘Past, Present, and Future of the Italian Memory of Fascism’, to borrow the title of Guido Bartolini's interviews that were published in our issue 27 (4), 2022. While commemorations and anniversaries shouldn't inherently influence academic research agendas, a broader understanding of public memory can help us to understand the current political mood in Italy. For example, it can explain why the centennial and other comparable ‘fascist’ anniversaries now have little meaning for most of the Italian public and are scarcely addressed by politicians. Indeed, most Italians seems to suffer from political amnesia. The condition is so serious that not even a dramatic occurrence such as the victory of the proudly post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party at the election of September 2022 has proved able to cure it. Happening just a few days before the centenary of the March on Rome, the electoral results were surely expected to elicit a strong reaction by left-wing politicians and intellectuals – perhaps a mass demonstration, like the one that took place in Milan on 25 April 1994, in the aftermath of the first victory of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, when another post-fascist party, Alleanza Nazionale, took power. Yet nothing of that sort has happened in 2022. Why?

Literary culture after 1945 took shape in a context where a handful of colonial empires were replaced by (at present count) nearly two hundred sovereign nation-states whose domestic politics, foreign policy, and cultural life were profoundly shaped by their relationship to the Cold War superpowers. One of the striking features of the historiography of this post-1945 world is that its two most salient themes—the Cold War, and decolonization—have so often been treated in isolation from each other. Postcolonialism and Cold War studies have, as Monica Popescu tells us, followed “separate, largely non-intersecting paths” (6). Yet even a superficial summary of the key geopolitical developments of the postwar period suggests that the Cold War and decolonization are not just interconnected, but mutually determining. When you take into account the decolonizing world, in some places afflicted by devastating proxy wars in this period, it must be said (it has often been said) that the Cold War was cruelly misnamed. This dual history has shaped our political language. A term like the West, as it is used in academic debates as well as in political, journalistic, and policymaking fields, developed its particular set of associations by contrast with the communist Eastern bloc on the one hand and with the (post)colonial global south on the other. Yet these two versions of the non-Western don’t always line up: although anticolonial movements often sought to align themselves with the international communist movement, many proudly independent postcolonial nation-states were explicitly anti-communist (like the neoliberal regimes in Singapore and South Korea). Other postcolonies grappled with the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China as a colonial power.

In a landmark Fatwa, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority—The Council of Senior Scholars—declared the Islamic permissibility of oocyte cryopreservation. The fatwa sanctioned the retrieval, preservation, and future use of oocytes, ovarian tissue, and whole ovaries from cancer patients receiving gonadotoxic interventions. Although momentous, the fatwa’s specification of cancer patients effectively rendered this technology unavailable to others to whom it may be similarly beneficial, including patients with other medical conditions or patients seeking elective cryopreservation. This article argues in favor of widening reproductive choices through expanded access to oocyte cryopreservation in Saudi Arabia—regardless of the underlying cause of infertility—on three grounds: the technology’s compliance with Islamic law, as a matter of fairness in medical practice, and as a means to support the well-being and flourishing of Saudi women within the context of a national societal and economic transformation strategy closely linked to their success.

This article attempts a reassessment of the political aspirations within Agha Shahid Ali’s poetics through a close reading of The Country without a Post Office. Although Shahid’s formal innovations have often been prioritized over his political commitments within scholarly evaluations of his work, I contend that in this collection, Agha Shahid Ali practices a “poetics of rupture”: holding themes of coherence and disruption, continuity and breakage, the global and the local in sustained tension with each other throughout the volume. Forged through a political commitment to represent Kashmir in crisis, his poetics of rupture is simultaneously formally founded on breakage and discontinuity, and itself ruptures, as I eventually propose, the very binaries (poetics versus polemics, personal versus political, local versus global) that shadow political poetry. I demonstrate the specifics of Shahid’s poetics of rupture through an analysis of his work with literary allusions and poetic forms. Eventually, this article contends that recognizing the political import of his poetics of rupture has consequences for our recognition of the crisis in Kashmir itself and the ethical and formal possibilities surrounding the representation of this crisis.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.

Behavioural techniques or ‘nudges’ can be used for various purposes. In this paper, we shift the focus from government nudges to nudges used by for-profit market agents. We argue that potential worries about nudges circumventing the deliberative capacities or diminishing the control of targeted agents are greater when it comes to market nudges, given that these (1) are not constrained by the principles that regulate government nudges (mildness, sensitivity to people’s interests and public justifiability) and (2) are often ‘stacked’ – they come in great numbers that overwhelm agents. In addition, we respond to possible objections and derive several policy suggestions.

This article uses the French Rassemblement National (RN) as a case study to examine how the populist radical right (PRR) prepares for a world after COVID-19 dominated by climate change concerns. Research suggests that certain measures introduced to contain the virus – such as the establishment of strict border and travel restrictions – may legitimize the PRR’s protectionist and anti-immigration agendas, yet few have examined whether or how PRR parties have used COVID-19 to promote their environmental agenda. If anything, the expectation has been that the pandemic would hurt the PRR precisely because its effects, unlike climate change, cannot be dismissed as a “hoax.” This view overlooks not only the “environmental turn” recently taken by several PRR parties but also the possibility that public awareness of the causal link between climate change and COVID-19 may work to their advantage. The analysis presented in this article highlights this possibility, showing that the RN used COVID-19 not only to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment but also to bolster its self-image as a champion of environmental protection.

In Gévaudan varieties of Occitan (Gallo-Romance), exceptionless syncretism between preterite and imperfect subjunctive forms arises in the first and second person plural (e.g. faguessiám [faɡeˈsjɔn] ‘do.pret/ipf.sbjv.1pl’, faguessiatz [faɡeˈsjat] ‘do.pret/ipf.sbjv.2pl’). Reconstructing the historical emergence of this syncretism pattern reveals that it is crucially dependent on multiple and diverse implicational relationships of form, inferred and productively exploited by speakers: in particular, inherited identity between preterite and imperfect subjunctive stems, and identity between imperfect indicative forms of èstre [ɛsˈtʀe] ‘be’ and preterite or imperfect subjunctive desinences. The observed developments support a view of inflectional analogies as informed by intricate paradigmatic and implicational structure of the type proposed within ‘abstractive’, word-based theories of inflection.

Normative welfare economics commonly assumes that individuals’ preferences can be reliably inferred from their choices and relies on preference satisfaction as the normative standard for welfare. In recent years, several authors have criticized welfare economists’ reliance on preference satisfaction as the normative standard for welfare and have advocated grounding normative welfare economics on opportunities rather than preferences. In this paper, I argue that although preference-based approaches to normative welfare economics face significant conceptual and practical challenges, opportunity-based approaches fail to provide a more reliable and informative foundation for normative welfare economics than preference-based approaches. I then identify and rebut various influential calls to ground normative welfare economics on opportunities rather than preferences to support my qualified defence of preference-based approaches.

This paper presents an alternative epistemic worldview of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights (CR2R) as a norm. It examines how an Afrocentric interpretation of the CR2R norm can contribute to a relational system where corporations promote human rights in African host communities. It uses an African norm — Ubuntu — to reframe and reinterpret Pillar II in Afrocentric terms. It argues that this reframing is important for three reasons. First, Ubuntu reframing increases the CR2R norm’s intelligibility in Africa because it clarifies and contextualizes the term ‘respect’ used in Pillar II. Second, reframing the CR2R norm through Ubuntu fills the ethical gap in the interpretation of the CR2Rnorm. Third, an Ubuntu-inspired interpretation insulates the CR2R norm from some scholars’ critique that the CR2R norm’s scope is narrow because it only encourages MNCs to avoid infringing on the human rights of others without prescribing positive obligations. This paper then examines channels through which Ubuntu can influence the CR2R norm.