In January 1922, Jessie Mackay represented the Self-Determination for Ireland League of New Zealand (S.D.I.L.N.Z.) at the Irish Race Congress in Paris. Irish people around the world were invited to attend this grand ‘family reunion’, where delegates discussed ways to assist the Irish revival, created an international organisation to connect members of the Irish ‘race’ and enjoyed exhibitions of Irish art, drama, music and dancing. Among those who assembled in Paris were delegates from Australasia who represented the S.D.I.L.N.Z. and the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Australia. These Australasian delegates played a pivotal role in keeping the congress on course. This article interweaves the history of the S.D.I.L.N.Z. with biographical details of Mackay's life in 1921 and 1922. Drawing on new archival research and material from New Zealand newspapers and periodicals, it adds to previous treatments of the congress by offering a distinct Australasian point of view. It investigates the S.D.I.L.N.Z. and why Mackay was chosen to represent it, how she contributed to the congress and what she made of proceedings.

Even under sakoku (policy of national self-isolation), Japan observed the outside world. The result of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 was to create or reinforce close engagement with the world by writers, artists, officials and diplomats alike. While the first foreign language of most Japanese was to be English, some were more conversant with French or Italian (and in many cases, as late as the 1930s, with German). There has also been a handful variously able to read, write or speak a minoritised language like Irish; or an immensely challenging language like Finnish.

The seventieth anniversary of the 1953 coup that toppled the government of Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran provides the opportunity to assess not only the history of Iran during Mossadeq's premiership and the consequential oil crisis, but also to examine Mossadeq's legacy, the oil nationalization, and the conflict between Iran and the West. Mosaddeq's personality and distinct profile, which continued to haunt the West for decades even after his death, contributed to the mythical place this affair has occupied in the Iranian national memory, but now, seven decades later, how do we use that period as a lens through which to examine other chapters in Iran's history? What can we make of the scholarship and sources about Iran before 1951 or after 1953? What is the impact of this affair on the collective memory of Iranians in and outside Iran as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century?

Why have scandalous sprees of lawbreaking by U.S. government officials proven so seductive yet so difficult to prosecute? This article takes the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan–Bush era as an instructive case study and red flag in the attitudinal erosion of the belief in the rule of law among American conservatives. Before the scandal broke, officials and legal counsels willfully mis-interpreted a clear prohibition to fund counter-revolutionaries and fabricated a post-facto presidential permission in order to sell weapons to Iran without congressional oversight. Congress's assumption that government officials would obey its statutes resulted in neither wrongdoing being punishable by criminal sanctions. Conservatives therefore argued that ends justified neglecting certain laws while also denying they had broken any laws. Prosecutors found themselves compelled to prosecute Iran-Contra's defendants over more prosaic crimes such as lying and stealing rather than more abstract and damaging ones. President George H. W. Bush's pardon of Iran-Contra defendants contributed to an impunity that further eroded the American rule of law to this day.

On May 17, 1924, Mohammad Mosaddeq stood up in the Majlis to complain about the government's inaction regarding a new oil concession for Iran's northern provinces. He could hardly have predicted the future course of his public life or how intertwined it would be with international questions about national sovereignty and natural resources. But he did know how he felt right then. The concession proposed for the Sinclair Oil Company was “of vital importance to the country and should no longer be delayed,” he said. “We should not come here only to take tea!”

A long history of political power struggles has shaped Iranian national identity. Each successive regime has sought to take control of Iranian political currents to reach its own objectives, and in the process has influenced Iranian identity in important ways. Few political figures in Iranian history have been as significant as Mohammad Mosaddeq in the shaping of Iranian identity, which he represents in ways that other political figures have failed to capture. His power to shape Iran's relationship with Western powers and his ability to project the image of Iran onto the world stage have enabled the endurance of his significance in the Iranian national psyche, which continues to show itself with his symbolic appearance in a range of political activities, including student rallies and public demonstrations.

This paper considers the interconnected practices of state formation, diplomacy, national identity and sport through an examination of ‘Irish’ involvement in the British Empire Games of 1930, 1934 and 1938. These events had a contradictory role in bolstering diplomatic relations between those who were committed to the empire but also in expressing the aspirations of those who sought independence from it, or a distinct identity within it. State formation and diplomacy played out in sporting contexts — which we term sportcraft — and this process was especially complex in post-partition Ireland. In the period under examination, a gradual but significant hardening of ideologies and identities occurred in certain sports on the island, notably athletics, mirroring the effects of partition and reflecting British and unionist political actions and sportive interests. Original archival and documentary material is presented from state archives in Dublin, London, Belfast and Ottawa, and from official sports collections in Birmingham, London, Stirling, Melbourne (Australia), Hamilton (Canada) and Lausanne (Switzerland). This demonstrates that by the early 1920s, government officials and sports administrators had already recognised the propaganda functions and utility of sport for state formation purposes and for issues of political control, jurisdiction and territorial boundaries.

It was not common for members of religious orders in the late middle ages to make a last will and testament because profession as a regular removed their testamentary capacity. This article prints the Latin text of the testament of Brother Diarmaid Ó Conchobhair, prior of Cloontuskert na Sinna, O.S.A., County Roscommon, drawn up in 1462 and proved a year later in London, along with a translation. It also offers a discussion of the testament, including Ó Conchobhair's stated intention of going on pilgrimage to Rome, in the light of other evidence relating to both its testator and to the monastic orders in general in late medieval Ireland and England.

The major project of Arab Nahda studies since the mid-2000s has been to develop an understanding of the Nahda that goes beyond the movement's own self-understanding; that is, beyond its rhetoric of “awakening” (the literal sense of nahḍa), national renewal, and rupture with the recent past. Scholars have approached this task in a variety of ways, notably by retracing continuities between 19th-century Arabic cultural production and that of earlier centuries; by analyzing the economic underpinnings of the culture of the Nahda and the salience of local class interests in its formation; by studying the relevance of transnational circulations of ideas; by investigating popular culture; and through detailed studies of individual figures and of subjective experience in the period.1 A central challenge in this reconceptualizing of the Nahda has been that of accurately identifying and explaining the shifts within the era; that is, in a way that neither simply reproduces the movement's conception of itself, nor fails to appreciate properly the social transformations of which the Nahda was a part. This challenge has been tackled with impressive results in certain domains of cultural production, notably the intersection between print culture and Islamic thought.2

This paper illustrates the heterogeneity of Islamic publics in early 20th-century Turkey by examining the life and thought of Ken'an Rifai, a Sufi shaykh and high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ottoman Ministry of Education. It argues that Shaykh Rifai endorsed state secularization reforms on religious grounds and shows how he reformulated Sufi Islam by imbricating Sufi ethics with other social imaginaries of the time through the lens of an upper-class bureaucrat. This paper contributes to Turkish studies by highlighting the previously overlooked role of elite Islamic groups who collaborated with the early republic. It also challenges the dominant paradigm of a binary opposition between the secular ruling elite and pious masses. Additionally, this paper offers insight into broader anthropological and historical Islamic studies by demonstrating the diverse ways Sufi traditions adapted to modern governance.