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.

This study promotes replication research as a methodological approach that is needed in order to compare earlier and more recent analyses of digital discourse. When much of the existing research was conducted, the primary means of communication included the use of a computer keyboard, (presumably) less bandwidth, and fewer devices. However, with an increase of the range of device types, the study of diacritics deserves another look within the Digital Media landscape. The present study examines the variable use of diacritics in synchronous (i.e., real-time) French chat discourse. We have replicated a study with different data sets from the same chat corpus, which is composed of data from a European chat server. We have also compared the data from the 2008 half of the corpus to data from the same chat channels collected in 2016 (just over 60,000 words in each half of the corpus, which included a total of 7,569 tokens that were coded). Our analysis of the 2008 corpus showed that one main finding was not the same as ours (from a different part of the 2008 corpus). Moreover, a diachronic analysis (2008 vs. 2016) revealed reversed trends between the two age-based channels (i.e., 20s vs. 50s).

Phrase-final fricative epithesis (PFFE), often indicated in informal writing with a final -h or -ch, e.g. beaucoup_h, oui_ch, is a sociophonetic variable of Hexagonal French in which utterance-final vowels give way to intense fricative-like whistles. Production research has found PFFE to be used at equal rates among men and women, and perception research has found that native French speakers perceive it to mark either formal speech or intense affect. This research furthers the special issue’s line of inquiry on French variation in forms of digital media by extending the analysis to a sociophonetic variable with a robust life on Twitter. The study compares the pragmatic value of tweets containing PFFE with previously described values and then examines interactions of gender, hostword phrasal location and lexical frequency on its realization. 96.8% of PFFE occurrences in the 2060-token corpus were classified into the pragmatic categories of Formality and Intense Affect. Results suggest that PFFE has become a salient enough sociophonetic variable that 21st-century French users represent it graphically in their tweets, however, its usage is structurally more permissive than in spoken language, signaling that it has taken on an iconic value in digital spaces.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Bissau-Guineans fought a bloody war for independence. Typical narratives of the war emphasize the ethnic dimension of the liberation struggle, with Balanta freedom fighters opposing Portuguese-allied Fulbe. This dominant narrative is open to question, as it ignores the war as a ‘social condition’, and the role that local circumstances played in determining collaboration with the Portuguese, fighting in liberation militaries, or fleeing to neighboring states for personal safety. Oral and archival evidence suggests a more nuanced perspective that blurs the binary nature of this dominant narrative along ethnic fault lines, viewed as either resistance or collaboration. The argument presented in this article allows us to move past defining the war along ethnic or regional lines, and instead urges a view of the conflict as a complex, fractured experience for all Bissau-Guineans, shaped by the particularities of local circumstances.

Climate emergency declarations occupy a legally ambiguous space between emergency measure and political rhetoric. Their uncertain status in public law provides a unique opportunity to illuminate latent assumptions about emergencies and how they are regulated in law. This article analyzes climate emergency declarations in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It argues that these climate emergency declarations reflect back a set of paradoxes about the legal regulation of emergencies – paradoxes about defining the emergency, how time regulates and contains emergency power, and who gets to respond to the emergency and how. These paradoxes challenge long-held and over-simplified assumptions about emergencies and allow us to see the complex ways in which public law regulates emergencies – a necessity in a climate-disrupted world.