Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders since 1870 is an impressive contribution to scholarly research on transnational activism. It provides a detailed and innovative study of the connections but also the divisions between individuals, groups, and organizations. Laqua's approach and analysis interrogate the connectedness, transience, ambivalence, and marginality of transnational activism. He explores the complex relationship of campaigners, campaigns, and causes that crossed national boundaries, building a rich analysis of these interactions.

This contribution engages with Activism across Borders with a particular emphasis on women, workers, and women workers. This perspective offers an analysis at the intersection of women's history and labour history. Among the themes considered are: campaigns that forged partnerships and amplified voices; women's transnational activism and national borders; and the divisions and differences among activists campaigning to improve working conditions.

This essay engages with Daniel Laqua's book Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023) from the perspective of a historian of both humanitarianism and youth. This short reflection therefore focuses primarily on the book's engagement with the topic of humanitarianism, before discussing an understated, albeit important, cross-cutting theme of the book: the significance of youth in transnational activism. It highlights a number of features of Laqua's book, for instance the merits of adopting a broad chronological approach. At the same time, the essay also uses the space to present a number of reflections on activism, from questions about the generational appeal of particular causes to the way in which particular figures might spark activism. It ends with some thoughts about the source base used to write such histories of activism.

Between 1881 and 1914, Hungarian governments established at least 36 agricultural colonies in today’s territory of Romania (nine new villages and 25 neighborhoods attached to existing ones). After 1894, a separate government fund was created for land purchases and the venture was entrusted to a Department of Colonization within the Ministry of Agriculture. This article gives an archival-based account of the political, financial, agricultural, and logistical aspects of the settlement program and compares it with its better-researched Prussian model. Investigating it as a series of interactions between settlers, the dedicated government agency, local potentates, and the surrounding population, it identifies structural impediments to the endeavor. Although there was a broad unity across political parties behind the idea of conquering new territories for the ethnic nation, the settlement program rested on a fragile consensus within the elite. Its expansion after 1900 was mainly due to Minister Ignác Darányi, whereas the steps of other high officials give nuances to Hungarian nationalities policies. When Prime Minister István Tisza dropped the program on the eve of the First World War, it was already in a state of hibernation because the governing party had realized that the settlers posed a political liability for them.

State violence against Belarusian women involved in protest activities after the fraudulent presidential election in 2020 and onward has been unprecedented in the country’s history. Women’s activism has challenged the patriarchal authoritarian regime, which was ill-prepared to deal with women. However, after a short period of adaptation by the repressive institutions, women became their “special clients.” With reference to gender-sensitive academic research, we investigate diverse forms of state violence against women and analyze how they perceive their experiences of incarceration for political reasons. This article is based on available datasets, a series of nine semi-structured interviews, and insights from participant observation. The research reveals that Belarusian women incarcerated for political reasons fall under the “demanding clients” category: they comprehensively challenge the state-sponsored brutal patriarchy and expect the repressive apparatus to meet their specific needs. These women experience multidimensional physical discomfort and psychological pressure, including targeted offensive and dehumanizing elements. At the same time, incarcerated women do not feel ostracized by society; they share the feeling that their “crimes” are supported by civil society, and they endure the pains of punishment as targeted violence from a state fighting cynically for its own survival.

An original, empirically rich, and analytically multilayered and provocative statement by Tomila Lankina, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia (2022) is a meticulous work of sociology focused on the exploration and elaboration of social mechanisms of resilience in a transforming polity and society. It is also an attempt to link the past, the 19th-century reform of the estate system in Russia, to the present, Russia’s failed democratization, by arguing that the social basis for democracy in postcommunist Russia was associated with the thin stratum of the more privileged, educated, and politically engaged members of the middle class who were able to build on the intergenerational capital and became “the silent custodian of institutions and values that nurtured the democratic promise of post-communism” (391). As such, it is a passionate statement against Soviet historiography that has been influential in shaping the mainstream Western understanding about the socially transformative nature of communism. The book goes against the received wisdom about the degree to which the Soviet society has been modernized and transformed through communist experience: “the narratives of grand revolutionary rupture,” as Lankina phrases it (394). Excavating specific family histories, Lankina shines light “on the ‘tectonic’ layers of skills, values, and occupational complexity” that underlay wealth-supporting strategies along with the pursuit of better education and the acquisition of better-paid jobs in the Soviet Union. The already privileged social groups—the urban and rural meshchane—were better “connected, networked and engaged” and therefore better-equipped “with the skills, tools, and capital” (393). The Soviet regime reincorporated these privileged professional groups into an elite layer (prosloyka) of the Soviet society, commonly known as Soviet intelligentsia.

Tomila Lankina’s The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, is a very powerful and thought-provoking book. It contains a bold argument, exhibiting the author’s erudition across several disciplines, as well as an unusual richness of empirical evidence and an exquisite prose style. The book delves into the intricacies of social resilience in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Contrary to the notion that the Bolshevik Revolution served as “the great leveler,” Lankina demonstrates the enduring presence of Tsarist-era estates within the social fabric throughout the Soviet era and even into the post-Soviet period. The estates encompassed a system of legal classifications that stratified Russian imperial society into distinct categories: aristocracy, clergy, merchants, and meshchane (petty bourgeoisie), as well as peasants. Lankina’s primary focus lies upon the meshchane, an estate that, by the twilight of the tsarist regime, accounted for approximately 10 percent of the empire’s total population.1 Within Lankina’s narrative, the meshchane emerged as an imperial middle class – comprising individuals such as small shopkeepers, rentiers, doctors, teachers, engineers – who mostly resided in urban centers and towns. Many among this group hailed from ethnic and religious minority backgrounds, including Jewish, Polish, German, Old Believers, and others.

Non-Archimedean population axiologies – also known as lexical views – claim (i) that a sufficient number of lives at a very high positive welfare level would be better than any number of lives at a very low positive welfare level and/or (ii) that a sufficient number of lives at a very low negative welfare level would be worse than any number of lives at a very high negative welfare level. Such axiologies are popular because they can avoid the (Negative) Repugnant Conclusion and satisfy the adequacy conditions given in the central impossibility result in population axiology due to Gustaf Arrhenius. I provide a novel argument against them which appeals to the way that good and bad lives can intuitively outweigh one another.

This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers—Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming—who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies—Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.—when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.

The article analyzes the contemporary material, political, and symbolic construction of Hamburg's free port, zooming in on its festive opening in 1888, when Kaiser Wilhelm II visited to perform this ceremonious act. Asking why the “Speicherstadt” (warehouse city) was right away dubbed a “city” even though this was an exclusively commercial space devoid of inhabitants, the article uses this case study to argue that process concepts like “urbanization” frame our perspectives in ways that eclipse how older ideas about urbanity still defined a late-nineteenth-century political imaginary. The article shows how the opening ceremony, staged as an imperial adventus, alongside the “Speicherstadt's” neo-Gothic red-brick architecture, made recourse to established cultural forms that historians and other commentators often deem premodern. To counteract the prospect that port expansion could turn Hamburg into a working-class city, Hamburg's bourgeois merchant elite tried to construct the free port as a global urban bourgeois space embodying the city's history and its longevity as a space of urban trade privilege. The latter had erstwhile been defined by Hamburg's city walls, which, as the article argues, were symbolically rebuilt in the form of the Speicherstadt. The latter was the “city” into which this modern-day imperial adventus led.

Medical trainees (applicants, students, and house officers) often engage in global health initiatives to enhance their own education through research and patient care. These endeavors may concomitantly prove of value to host nations in filling unmet clinical needs. At present, healthcare institutions generally focus on the safety of the trainee and the welfare of potential patients and research subjects when sanctioning such programs. The American medical community has historically afforded less consideration to the ethics of engagement by trainees from the United States in nations known for serious human rights transgressions. This essay examines the ethics of such endeavors and argues for increased consideration of these broader considerations when trainees engage in global health work abroad.

Batteries containing cobalt will play a central role in the global transition to cleaner energy. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, the negative human rights image of the minerals sector in the DRC, and the emergence of an inaccurate and exploitative “blood cobalt” narrative risks harming small-scale, ‘artisanal’ producers who rely on this industry for their livelihood. The DRC government, civil society and small-scale producers already have a roadmap for ending child labour and improving working conditions. Countries and companies whose economies and business interests rely on these precious natural resources should engage with this roadmap rather than disengaging from the country’s mining sector altogether.

With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. Thus, we conceive ourselves “in the image of our machines,” and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, the present book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses the new technologies only as means instead of submitting to them. The book offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism in various areas of science and society. As an alternative, it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. This general concept is applied to issues such as artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday life. The book thus applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to current scientific, technological, and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society’s development in the twenty-first century.

During the 1660s and 1670s, the Ottoman Empire reached the peak of its expansion with military invasions of Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary, parts of central Europe that had traditionally been regarded as beyond the Porte's horizons. Many Ukrainians and Hungarians welcomed the Ottomans as liberators; they saw the sultan as a more benevolent ruler than the Russian tsar, the Polish king, and the Habsburg emperor. This article reconstructs the political, social, and religious dimensions of pro-Ottoman hopes as well as the popular revolts that resulted from these hopes. Comparing Ukrainian and Hungarian engagements with the Ottomans reveals the divergent and overlapping aspects of a largely forgotten historical reality, that is, the quest of many Orthodox and Protestant Europeans to consider a Muslim alternative to the Christian empires that oppressed them. The article draws on a treasure trove of little studied sources, both archival and published, in multiple languages.