The Iron Age shipwrecks of Agde K (Brescou Island, France) and Cabrera B (Balearic Islands), discovered in the 1960s, together yielded seven lead ingots cast in the large shells of Pinna nobilis molluscs. Lead isotope analysis later traced the ingots to lead sources in south-eastern Iberia. These ingots are reassessed here as evidence for the integration of coastal production strategies in Iron Age south-eastern Iberia, revealing material connections between metallurgy and coastal industries linked to the exploitation of Pinna nobilis, such as sea silk manufacture. This compelling example of reuse of materials from one industry in another attests to a circular economic activity that is likely to have had practical and environmental motivations. The author aims to promote the recognition of Pinna nobilis shell casting and similar reuse phenomena elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin.

The articles in this issue address and illustrate elements that are essential for furthering the current understanding of Russia's embeddedness in the international musical culture of the long nineteenth century: the exchange of musicians and repertoires; the social and political conditions in which these exchanges took place; the range of mediators, from aristocratic patrons to musical professionals; the methods of movement; and the ways in which Russia was imagined and experienced by foreigners.

In response to a forced labour review by the International Labour Organization (ILO) that threatened to turn into a formal international inquiry,1 the government of Qatar commenced an ambitious programme of labour reforms aimed largely at addressing concerns about its treatment of migrant workers. About 2.4 million men and women,2 an estimated 88.4 per cent of the small Gulf nation’s population,3 are migrant workers. It has the second largest known gas reserves in the world, and its airbases are home to the largest United States military installation in the Middle East.4 Yet, the small Gulf emirate garnered little international scrutiny until it was awarded in 2010 the right to host the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) men’s Football World Cup tournament in 2022.

Hun Chung argues for a theory of distributive justice – ‘prospect utilitarianism’ – that overcomes two central problems purportedly faced by sufficientarianism: giving implausible answers in ‘lifeboat cases’, where we can save the lives of some but not all of a group, and failing to respect the axiom of continuity. Chung claims that prospect utilitarianism overcomes these problems, and receives empirical support from work in economics on prospect theory. This article responds to Chung's criticisms of sufficientarianism, showing that they are misplaced. It then shows that prospect utilitarianism faces independent problems, since it too requires a threshold, which Chung bases on the idea of ‘adequate functioning’. The article shows that there are problems with this as a threshold, and that it is not empirically supported by prospect theory.

This article compares the nation-building processes in four well-established Eurasian de facto states. Although all four pursue a set of identity politics that would legitimize the separatist cause, comparing them reveals important differences in boundary-making strategies. While maintaining the image of the enemy parent-state and of an imminent external threat is a common endeavor, they face different challenges and thus have pursued different strategies of identity-building. Transnistria and Abkhazia are two ethnically heterogeneous entities while Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia are more homogeneous since (forced) displacements, mostly of non-titular ethnicities, took place. The Abkhazs, Ossetians, and Armenians claim titular status in their respective regions, but only the latter two have kin in neighboring countries with whom they want to unify. Meanwhile, the “Transnistrian people” is a newly invented construct. Despite their lack of international recognition, the article demonstrates that – apart from a special emphasis on cultivating the image of the “enemy parent-state” – the nation-building mechanisms in the de facto states do not substantially differ from the processes at work in other post-Soviet states presented in this Special Issue.

This paper aims to provide a new constitutional perspective on the Egyptian political process from the end of World War I to its independence in 1922. Egyptian historical research on the same period has been conducted mainly from a nationalist perspective. However, as Egypt had a long history of constitutionalism that had developed in unison with nationalism since the 1870s, Egyptian nationalists simultaneously desired to establish a constitutional system after achieving independence. Eventually, Britain unilaterally declared the independence of Egypt in 1922, which, despite its concern, included the introduction of a constitutional system into the country. The declaration was the product of secret negotiations between the British Special High Commissioner Allenby and Tharwat, an Egyptian nationalist politician. However, the idea of introducing the constitutional system was first publicly proposed in the preceding negotiations between Colonial Minister Milner and Zaghlūl, which facilitated Tharwat's negotiations with Allenby on this subject. While Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd, and the group including ‘Adlī and Tharwat were increasingly antagonistic, the establishment of a constitutional system had long been a common desire of all Egyptian nationalists who transcended their differences.

The Horn of Africa is the most conflict-ridden region in the African continent. Both inter-and intra-state conflicts have dominated the region. In a bid to check intra-state conflicts and accommodate ethno-national and religious diversity, federal or federal like models of governance have been proposed, discussed, and, in some cases, adopted across the region. Focusing on Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan, this article discusses the origin, reasons, and prospects of the federal idea in the Horn. The article argues that the major rationale for the federal idea in the Horn is the containment of communal tensions. Yet, the track record of federalism in alleviating communal tensions has not been encouraging. This is partly related to design issues that have undermined the efforts to use federalism to address communal tensions. More importantly, however, the commitment to genuinely implement the federal idea has largely been absent.

This article seeks to analyze the project for the international convention on the protection of minority rights, which was proposed by André Mandelstam at the Institut de Droit International (IDI) in 1928. In this project, the author used the concept of non-territorial autonomy borrowed from the works of the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. A Russian international lawyer in emigration, André Mandelstam had initially been involved in the implementation of elements of non-territorial autonomy to protect the Christian population of the Ottoman empire. Mandelstam’s proposed convention assumed that personal autonomy, reduced to the protection of minorities from cultural and linguistic assimilation, would be a compromise between protecting minorities and preventing them from undermining the unity of the state. However, the demand for international protection of minorities was not accompanied by any enforcement mechanism. The project underwent serious revisions as it was discussed by a group of international lawyers. In its final version, the text retained only those of the original articles, which referred to individual human rights. Thus, Mandelstam’s attempt to make his convention acceptable for all participating states resulted in omission of the very concept of personal autonomy in the final version of the proposed document.

This special issue of the Journal of Chinese History is dedicated to the studies of family relations. This introduction gives a brief survey of recent scholarship, puts the seven articles in this issue into conversation with each other, and identifies four main themes that emerge from this collection of essays.

This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare administrations to identify daily practices of resistance among Belgian ‘welfare bureaucrats’ who interrogate the new welfare and immigration law reforms that further restrict migrants’ access to social assistance. The contestation strategies are used to circumvent and sometimes break the formal and informal policy guidelines while still allowing them to perform and remain loyal to the state and to higher principles such as a commitment to the fundamental right to human dignity. Three main contestation strategies are identified: failing to provide certain services to demonstrate the absurdity of certain guidelines, writing reports against the administration and in favour of the user, and encouraging litigation against the federal agencies that employ them. These strategies show Belgian welfare workers’ commitment to providing a form of public service that aligns with their professional ethos rather than enforcing specific government policies.

Drawing on ethnographic research across two street-level bureaucratic institutions in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 2010s, this paper traces the causes and implications of the politicisation of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianisation. It argues that politicisation of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored further to reveal how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian pressure as well socio-legal destabilisations to preserve their institutional ethos. To this aim, I demonstrate how bureaucrats get politicised in response to authoritarian policies and, in turn, labour to uphold the rule of law despite politico-legal risks. The paper particularly focuses on how bureaucrats weave political solidarity and circulate anti-government discourses and how they use their knowledge of the legal-regulatory repertoire and archives to deter and ‘correct’ unlawful practices through their everyday work. The paper generates insights into the fashionings of political subjectivities and agency by bureaucrats through their labouring in the face of authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. In doing this, my objective is to shed light on the everyday workings of authoritarian state and to get a better picture of the way the law is ‘made real’ (Latour, 2002) across mundane encounters between bureaucrats and the citizenry.

It has been argued that science diplomacy (SD) helps avoid or mitigate conflicts among stakeholders in the Arctic. Yet underlying some of these well-intended and sometimes successful initiatives is a one-sided understanding of SD. The most recent literature takes a more differentiated approach towards the means and ends of SD. It shows that international scientific interaction is shaped by the twofold logic of competition and collaboration. Instruments of SD can be meant to serve national interests, collective regional goals or global agendas. The present paper disentangles these confounding discourses of collaboration and competition based on a conceptually enhanced SD framework. It analyses Arctic strategies and two cases of Arctic SD, the Agreement on Enhancing International Arctic Scientific Cooperation and research activities on Svalbard, to reveal the mechanisms of collaboration and competition in the sphere of international science in relation to security, environment and economy. By pointing out where and how science is currently being used in the Arctic, this article provides (a) a systematic overview of the state of SD in the region and (b) a tool for policy-makers and scientists to assess what impact different facets of SD have in Arctic politics.

Drawing on the work of Donaldson and Walsh, this article explains why for-profit companies in industries denominated by intrinsic values such as health, education and justice, have heavier responsibilities when it comes to honouring the human rights reflected in their industry identity. Optimized collective value, the overarching aim of any system of business, is defined in terms of the satisfaction of intrinsic values, a definition that gives special meaning to firms operating in industries themselves defined in terms of intrinsic values. Nor are such companies’ responsibilities to human rights, such as the right to healthcare, conveniently reducible to the ‘enlightened’ pursuit of profit. For example, a pharmaceutical company such as Pfizer or Moderna may be required to make its COVID-19 vaccine more accessible to COVID-19 victims in developing countries at the expense of optimizing profits over the long run. Such companies have a special and mandatory correlative duty to honour the right to healthcare that derives from their corporate constitutional purpose.