To what extent does refugee protection in Western Europe depend on the ethno-religious and gender identity of asylum seekers? This article examines how selective humanitarianism, shaped by the identity of asylum seekers and migrants, shapes their protection status. It offers an analysis of Germany’s response to Yezidi refugees, in comparison with that of France, in the wake of the genocidal campaign carried out by the Islamic State in 2014. Drawing on fieldwork that includes interviews with Yezidi refugees and stakeholders in Germany, we argue that contemporary asylum regimes operate through three interrelated mechanisms: the securitization of certain groups, selective humanitarian exceptions, and neoliberal selection criteria. The Yezidi experience illustrates how these mechanisms generate hierarchies of protection, wherein even recognized victims of genocide must meet increasingly economic thresholds to secure lasting refuge. While specialized programs for women survivors represent important humanitarian innovations, they often exclude male family members, thereby producing new forms of vulnerability. Struggling to align with dominant narratives of economically valuable migrants, Yezidis encounter a renewed form of liminality in Europe.

During the forty-thousand-mile voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–6) Charles Darwin compiled an extensive corpus of manuscript materials, containing a highly specialized chromatic vocabulary. Darwin’s dedicated use of binomial colour terms, such as ‘aurora red’, ‘orpiment orange’ and ‘gamboge yellow’, was the result of his regular consultation of a work popular among British naturalists: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) by Patrick Syme. A copy of this compact colour manual was among Darwin’s ‘most useful’ possessions on the Beagle. Now held in Cambridge University Library (DAR LIB T.620), Darwin’s copy of Syme’s book evidences both the difficulties of capturing accurate colour in exploratory natural history and the mechanisms by which this was attempted. Mining the Beagle archive for representations of coloured phenomena, this article reveals for the first time the extent of Darwin’s reliance on Werner’s Nomenclature for collecting and communicating chromatic data, across distance and against the fugitive, subjective and shifting nature of natural hues.

This article deals with the tuberculosis policy in Communist Bulgaria from the 1940s to the end of the 1950s. The focus is on the BCG vaccination as the major preventive tool. The article’s reconstruction of decision-making draws on evidence from archive records produced by the Bulgarian Ministry of Health. The main question guiding the research is how past Bulgarian experiences on the one hand, and international traditions, on the other, influence medical opinion and state policy towards tuberculosis and patients with tuberculosis. How did the Cold War context shape BCG vaccination policy? The author presents the story of the ‘Bulgarian’ BCG strain, which was made possible by the international research networks and travels of the Bulgarian scientist Srebra Rodopska (1913–2006). Her story has recently been rediscovered and made popular in Bulgaria, in the context of debates about COVID-19. This article aims to correct the public history narrative, which has thus emerged by placing the story of the BCG vaccine within its Cold War context. The author pays attention to dependencies between medicine and politics, and to the role of the state. Despite the popular story of Rodopska as the inventor of a ‘Bulgarian’ BCG strain and vaccine, what actually happened was that in Bulgaria of the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet strain and vaccine production technique were used. This was also due to Soviet pressure to follow the Soviet model of public health infrastructure.

Some philosophers and theologians argue that if God will save everyone, then earthly life is pointless. No matter how good earthly life is, heaven would be far better. So we would have been better off if God had started us off in heaven. I present and defend two objections to this argument. First, time on earth does not result in a deduction from time in heaven. Pick whatever amount of time you might wish to spend in heaven. You will spend that much time in heaven whether you are on earth first or not. Second, given origin essentialism, we could not start off in heaven rather than earth. Our very existence depends on our earthly origins.

The Kurdish movement in Turkey illustrates a complex struggle for political recognition and decolonization. The article examines this dual strategic orientation, focusing on the peace process initiated in October 2024 between the Turkish state and Kurdish representatives. Through a detailed and symptomatic reading of the two texts by Abdullah Öcalan, February Call and Perspektif, the article aims to demonstrate that the movement both interacts with the state to secure democratic prerequisites for political participation and continues to promote a radical critique of capitalist modernity and nation-state structures. Drawing upon Axel Honneth’s recognition theory and Étienne Balibar’s concept of “equaliberty,” the struggle for recognition is no longer seen just to result in a depoliticization through governmental control, but is rethought as building the capacity to stage an ongoing, performative process that manages the constitutive tension between equality and autonomy within Kurdish decolonial practice. This approach raises questions about how the movement navigates state structures while promoting alternative social institutions and epistemic spaces, including the problematic site of communes as a form of democratic autonomous experimentation.

Non-compete clauses (NCCs) are widely used and discussed, but often too narrowly. While conventional accounts focus on the benefits of NCCs to employers, Harrison Frye has proposed that they can also serve employees by acting as a clear, costly signal. I argue that both views rely on an overly narrow analysis. A wider view shows that NCCs cause market failures, undermining their utility as protective or signalling devices. Because of these negative effects, I extend Frye’s account to argue that NCCs should be used only as targeted interventions under exceptional conditions, if they are used at all.

Building on the premise that etiquette (adab-ı muaşeret) is a crucial component in understanding Turkish cultural modernization, this article examines how the Turkish military incorporated Western manners during the Republican era. While the military’s role in supporting Westernization is well documented, less scholarly attention has been paid to the internalization and practice of Western cultural norms, particularly etiquette, within military circles. Conceptualizing manners as a disciplined and refined mode of conduct, this study investigates how Western etiquette was transmitted to military officers and integrated into their personal and professional lives. The article argues that, although military texts on etiquette presented Western manners as essential to social status and modernization, their implementation was characterized by selective adoption, ambiguity, and even resistance. These texts, often compiled by officers themselves, reflect both a desire to assert cultural authority and the complex, negotiated process of Westernization. Drawing on two primary sources – etiquette manuals and officers’ self-narratives – the study illuminates the contested and dynamic nature of adopting Western norms. This dual approach highlights the formation of a cultural identity among officers marked by eclecticism and ambivalence, revealing broader tensions within the Turkish modernization project.

Perry Hendricks (2025) argues that theism is not only compatible with what he calls ‘pointless atheism’ (instances of non-resistant non-belief that do not serve a greater good) but also makes it expected. His case combines the Responsibility Objection (RO) – the view that God permits non-resistant non-belief because it’s required for theists to bear responsibility for bringing others into relationship with God – with a William Hasker-inspired argument concerning motivation and rationality. Hendricks’s core argument can be expressed in two distinct yet interrelated ways: a ‘motivation’ formulation and a ‘rationality’ formulation. I examine each in turn. I argue that, even granting (RO) and the rest of Hendricks’s assumptions, each formulation fails. (RO), together with a few further assumptions to which Hendricks also seems committed, leads to conclusions that undermine rather than support his argument. Thus, we have at least as much reason to reject as to accept his conclusion, and without further clarification and support, his case remains incomplete.

For decades, the study of Chartism has been one of the most vibrant fields of modern British history. Indeed, this nineteenth-century radical movement was a major empirical focus for proponents of the so-called linguistic turn that has exerted such a major influence on the discipline. Interest in the Chartists does not abate, with valuable recent studies all combining—to greater or lesser extent—close attention to Chartist verbal and symbolic forms of communication with novel thematic concerns. However, more remains to be said about the language of Chartism, the topic that provided the original impetus for so much subsequent work. Specifically, the generally accepted argument that languages of constitutionalism and democracy were inextricably intertwined can be questioned, a task made easier by digitization of key organs of the Chartist press. This article revisits this intertwining in the pages of the Northern Star from the movement’s beginnings in the late 1830s to its disintegration in the late 1840s. It commences with results of a quantitative analysis of Chartist discourse and reconsideration of the relationship between the constitutional and democratic idioms in the movement’s early phase. Four factors are then discussed, which help explain the increasing prevalence of the language of democracy through the 1840s: heightened social conflict during the general strike of 1842; Chartist engagement in formal politics; international developments; and the crisis of 1848. However, despite the dominant linguistic trend, connections between democracy and social class, forged in the early 1840s, were not immutable but contingent.

Three motor sledges were taken on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to Antarctica in 1910. They performed poorly, making only small contributions to the polar journey and making no contribution to the expedition’s scientific programme.

The motor sledges have received little attention from historians and researchers. No definitive work has been published. The purpose of this article is to provide an authoritative, reliable and complete history of Scott’s Antarctic motor sledges.

This article studies Belton Hamilton’s concept for a “chain track” vehicle, then traces its development path through two prototype vehicles and two snow trials in Norway. The outcomes of the snow trials and associated recommendations are reviewed. The article then considers Scott’s detailed plans to reach the South Pole and his instructions to the Motor Party in pursuit of that goal. Four major problems that prevented the motor sledges from satisfying Scott’s instructions are identified.

Several conclusions are drawn. It is apparent that the vehicles were flawed from the outset by poor engineering decisions about track design, engine power and carburetion/airflow. It is unlikely that experimentation or minor refinement in the Antarctic would have produced vehicles reliable enough to make a major contribution to the polar journey.

Author of Il Regno del Sud (1946), an influential first-hand history of the Kingdom of Italy that was set up in Allied territory after the 1943 armistice, Agostino degli Espinosa did much to shape Italian memory of the Allied occupation of Italy. In this article I examine for the first time degli Espinosa’s doubts about Italy’s postwar future, which appear in the margins of his history, and which come to the fore in his fiction. I argue that the critical re-evaluation of the work of this emblematic but understudied figure can shed light on Italy’s divided memories of the Second World War and the Allied occupation.

This article examines women’s storytelling and nanga (harp) performances in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury western Uganda to investigate how these songs shaped community identity and norms. Drawing on musical recordings, archival sources, and interviews, this article demonstrates that these performances functioned as important public histories, teaching audiences about past famines, droughts, climate change, and cattle events. These narratives both chronicled regional histories and provided the shared intellectual material from which community norms and a shared identity could be articulated. Extant scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on how male intellectuals contributed to ideas of race, nation, or ethnicity. This article thus provides an important alternative by showing how women produced histories that contributed to group identity—yet this historical production occurred through musical performances rather than in books, tracts, or petitions. In doing so, this article reintegrates western Ugandan women into narratives of imperial encounters and intellectual history.

In 1782, Zhang Peifang, then serving as magistrate in Sizhou, Anhui, returned briefly to his family home in a small village in central Shanxi. While there, he visited a local temple, the Guangyu Shrine, where villagers typically made prayers concerning childbirth, and then penned an inscription in which he makes an elaborate argument about the identity of the temple goddess. Zhang’s stele inscription is an interpretive powerhouse of classical erudition, but moves to a surprising conclusion that reveals complex issues of agency imbricated into the scholar-official’s role as negotiator between the canonical values of the imperial state and the informal institutions and practices of local communities. The inscription records valuable details concerning local religious practices and gender roles, analysis of which can provide nuance to our understanding of the dynamic social tensions below the surface of Watson’s “standardization model.”

This article examines the experiential and perceptual environment in which social encounters between soldiers and civilians occurred in Allied-occupied Italy (1943–45) and its enduring impact on the lives of those who experienced it. It does so by applying Mary Louise Pratt’s theoretical framework of the ‘contact zone’ to the case of occupied Italy and by exploring it through the lens of oral history sources. The critical analysis of interviews with Antonio Taurelli, an Italian teenager in 1944 who fought with American soldiers, and Harry Shindler, a British veteran who married an Italian woman during the war, sheds light on how ordinary individuals shaped their own experience of occupation within the contact zone as well as on the life-changing impact of their encounters with ‘otherness’. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the social experience of the Allied occupation of Italy and the impact of military-civilian encounters in occupation environments more broadly.

During the Second World War, Allied-occupied Italy became the setting for a wide range of intimate encounters between local women and the occupiers, especially American soldiers. These relationships – ranging from romantic and consensual to transactional and coercive – reflected complex interactions with perceived ‘otherness’ and exposed tensions around race, gender, and power. US authorities, concerned about its social, cultural, and political implications, monitored ‘fraternisation’ closely. This article explores these dynamics by examining US Army marriage regulations and oral history interviews with Italian women who married American soldiers. Women’s experiences – shaped by region, class, and individual circumstance – represent a spectrum ranging from disillusionment to long-term partnership. These narratives offer a complex portrait of gender relations under occupation, revealing how military policy also intersected with and shaped the everyday lives of women during occupation.

Legal waivers embedded in corporate settlement agreements are commonly framed as neutral devices of dispute resolution. They promise finality, prevent double recovery and manage litigation risk. Yet in practice, waivers function as structural tools of accountability avoidance. This article examines the use of legal waivers within operational-level grievance mechanisms, focusing on three dimensions: the UNGPs’ procedural formalism, the cost dynamics of corporate settlements, and the opacity created by confidentiality provisions. It argues that the UNGPs’ emphasis on process legitimacy neglects the substantive consequences of waivers, that cost volatility incentivises their routine use, and that confidentiality provisions entrench information asymmetry while obstructing judicial oversight. The article concludes by advancing a hybrid regulatory model which prohibits blanket confidentiality of terms governing settlement agreements and advocates for greater transparency through a differentiated disclosure regime and increased judicial scrutiny by domestic courts.