After the fall of the socialist regimes in South and Eastern Europe socialist statues and monuments were either removed, dislocated, or resignified. Several performance practices have been employed to engage with these statues and monuments. Focusing on the role played by artistic memorialization in the processes of dealing with the communist past, this article uses the concepts of “performative monuments” (Widrich) and “memory events” (Etkind) to analyze several examples of what can be called “performative monuments events.” As many statues were removed, the statues witnessed performative practices in the process of their elimination. The monuments that were conserved were dislocated and exhibited as part of “sculpture park museums” and observed nostalgic, ironic practices of tourists that perform the memory of communism by interacting with the monuments. This article analyzes several examples in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania of socialist monuments that have remained in place or that have been dislocated and resignified by contemporary artists using performative practices of memory events that engage monuments. This exploratory research argues that artists, through their “performative monuments events,” try to bring the people back to replace the statues with “living statues” and to question the absurd megalomaniac monuments using metaphorical, material instruments.

It is morally negligent or reckless to believe without sufficient evidence. The foregoing proposition follows from a rule that is a modified expression of W. K. Clifford's ethics of belief. Clifford attempted to prove that it is always wrong to believe without sufficient evidence by advancing a doxastic counterpart to an act utilitarian argument. Contrary to various commentators, his argument is neither purely nor primarily epistemic, he is not a non-consequentialist, and he does not use stoicism to make his case. Clifford's conclusion is a universal generalisation that is in a precarious position because of potential counterexamples. But the counterexamples do not preclude a rule against going beyond the available evidence and it is worthwhile making a moral case for such a rule.

This article focuses on the controversy over whether complex numerals in English are constituents. Contra the traditional view (e.g. Hurford 1975; Greenberg 1990 [1978]), the cascading structure proposed in Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) maintains that cross-linguistically a complex numeral does not form a constituent to the exclusion of the NP complement. The derivation of an additive complex numeral, e.g. twenty-two people, thus involves an underlying source form with a nominal conjunction, e.g. twenty people and two people. Based on the argumentation established in He (2015) and He et al. (2017) supporting complex numerals as constituents in Chinese and minority languages in southern China, this article first demonstrates that the non-constituency analysis is not viable for English, as the underlying forms of additive complex numerals may be ill-formed and also not semantically equivalent to the surface forms. We then offer evidence to support the constituency analysis from constituency tests and behavior of post-numeral and pre-numeral modifiers. Finally, we demonstrate that the extra mechanism of grafting, proposed by Meinunger (2015), is unnecessary for English complex numerals.

This invited response commentary engages with Benoit Mayer's case comment, published in this issue of Transnational Environmental Law, on the recent landmark decision by the District Court of The Hague (The Netherlands) of May 2021 in Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell. The Court ordered the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell to reduce at least 45% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2019 levels. In this response commentary I build on and contrast Mayer's examination of how the Court arrived at this target. In doing so, I discuss the normativity of tort law compared with international law against the background of the ideas of Martti Koskenniemi. I conclude that the District Court legitimately qualified Shell's business plans as tortious. The specific reduction target is the result of civil procedural rules on evidence and the debate between the parties. In the light of this analysis, I respectfully reject Benoit Mayer's suggestion that sectoral practices should play a more significant role in determining corporate climate mitigation obligations. In my view, such an approach would be dangerously apologetic and lead to dystopian outcomes.

Children and young people constitute more than one quarter of all plaintiffs in rights-based strategic climate litigation cases filed globally up to 2021. This article examines the implications of this development for children's environmental rights inside and outside the courtroom, relying on the analysis of case documents, media coverage, and the broader literature on strategic climate litigation and children's rights. The article finds that children are well placed to make powerful arguments for intergenerational justice. Conversely, children's rights arguments that address their current-day grievances are under-utilized. More consistent inclusion of these types of claim could strengthen children's environmental rights, clarifying and enforcing legal obligations towards children in the context of the climate crisis as it unfolds. The involvement of children in strategic climate litigation, moreover, can advance the critical role of this demographic as stakeholder in climate solutions. However, the participation of children also raises ethical and practical dilemmas, which are currently poorly understood and only haphazardly addressed.

In her response to my case comment in this issue of Transnational Environmental Law, Laura Burgers purports to disagree with my analysis on two points. Firstly, she suggests that we disagree on the method that a court should use to interpret the duty of care of corporations on climate change mitigation. Secondly, she disagrees with each of the four inconsistencies that I identify in the decision by the District Court of The Hague (the Netherlands) in Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell. In this rejoinder, I respectfully disagree with her characterization of our disagreement.

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not context-relativity.

This paper examines the political and cultural context of the popular 2010 revival of the light comedy theatre production Sanullim in North Korea. The play, originally written and performed in 1961, portrays the spirit of revolutionary optimism as the characters resolve an unhostile conflict and unite to expand socialist production to contribute to overcoming the (real-life) political and economic crisis of the Chollima era. The 2010 revival of this propaganda responded to similar political and economic crisis, and was designed to instil confidence that the present crisis would be overcome as successfully as in the first Chollima era, provided that people could conjure the same revolutionary optimism. This paper examines why this particular play was revived over others from the Kim Il-sung era, and its particular potential to serve as effective propaganda during the transition from military-first to party-first policy in the Kim Jong-un era, in reference to parallels between 1961 and 2010. The play immerses the audience in the dramatic situations through verisimilitude to the lives of the audience, though the emotional excess of the characters is often exaggerated. Such laughter ignited by dramatic irony contributed to creating a heightened ideological thought of the audience who would spontaneously (re-)internalise the communist human character. The revival of the play was the most appropriate choice according to the object of justification of the succession of power from Kim Jung-il to Kim Jung-un.

As one of the world’s only constitutions to recognize Theravada Buddhism as the state religion yet not include a religious exemption to the universal franchise for its monastic community, Cambodia’s Constitution stands out as an anomaly. This article traces the ways in which the realities of this remarkably inorganic approach to religion—enshrined in Cambodia’s Constitution in 1993, pursuant to a heavily internationalized peace process—have subsequently been shaped by debates occurring within Cambodia’s Buddhist institutions, rather than judicial ones. Drawing on data derived from archival research and a series of ethnographic interviews conducted during 2017 and 2018, I home in on decades-old debates about the voting rights of Cambodian monks to show how individual monks justify their participation in electoral politics through a mixture of both secular and religious arguments. The on-the-ground reality of the extension of the franchise to the Buddhist clergy in Cambodia, in other words, is ultimately shaped by an ongoing contestation within the sangha, with proponents and opponents of a religious exception grounding their arguments simultaneously in constitutional and theological vocabularies. The article sheds light on a singular constitutional arrangement—a unique relationship between religious and state institutions that has so far received relatively little scholarly attention—and highlights an instance of constitutional practice that occurs beyond the reach of both judicial and other state institutions.

This article analyzes phenomenon of “migrant schools” and “migrant classes” in schools that began to emerge in the 2010s in Siberian cities of Tomsk and Irkutsk. The study is based on 120 interviews with migrants and 36 express-interviews with parents of children from both local families and those that have migrated from Central Asia, as well as case studies of four schools in these two cities identified as “migrant” by local residents. Despite the ethnic diversity of these Siberian cities where most families themselves descend from migrants from other regions, the local population singles out new migrants from the countries of Central Asia as “others” in the urban space. While school administrations, teachers, and parents reproduce the narratives of tolerance and ethnic diversity, school segregation persists in these cities, manifested, among other things, in the emergence of “migrant” schools and “migrant classes” in schools. This study presents this segregation as an outcome of strategies pursued by school administrators and parents of both local and migrant children. In particular, creation of “migrant” classes in some schools is the school administrators’ response to the lack of adaptation programs for migrant children. I conclude that rather than assisting the socialization of migrant children, such schools reproduce their isolation from other pupils, limiting their ability to succeed in the future.

This article focuses on the privately created commemorative practice of getting the official portraits of three former socialist leaders as a tattoo: Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito, and Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin). The mnemonic actors who have indulged in this practice after the 1990s contribute to a culture informed by vernacular memorials that conform to neither the official politics of remembrance and its aesthetics nor its content. Correspondingly, this article focuses on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic intricacies of remembering through the inked body. Unlike memorial tattoos that mark the recognition of a group that has suffered the same trauma, the commemorative tattoos analyzed in this article reflect a centrifugal set of identity concerns, ranging from Yugonostalgia to individualized spaces of self-healing and identity affirmation. The argument put forth is that tattoos can act as vernacular commemorations collected into a body archive of nostalgia for the ontological security of the past and “great leadership.” Thus, the overarching question is not how and why people materialize memories through their bodies but rather to what ends the inked body accommodates commemorative representations of former political leaders who are usually depicted in public memory as “unworthy” of commemoration.

This article examines the Soviet system of territorial autonomy by studying its impact on the Jewish population of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. While the new Soviet state created national republics, districts, and village councils for its non-Russian nationalities, Ukraine’s Jewish population was faced with a dilemma: Ukrainian Jews lived predominantly in cities, but urban space could not be claimed for Jewish territorial autonomy because the Soviet government hoped that peasant immigration would produce a Ukrainian working class. Without an autonomous status, many Jews felt threatened by the increasing influx of Ukrainians and the spread of Ukrainian-language institutions. Offered as a consolation prize, the Soviet Yiddishization initiative failed to cater to the needs of many Jews who preferred the Russian language as a means for social mobility. Attempts to resettle urban Jews in compact agricultural colonies suitable for territorial autonomy never reached the necessary scale. In conclusion, this article argues that the incompatibility of Soviet territorial autonomy with Ukrainian Jewish needs anticipated the Soviet state’s inability to accommodate the increasingly urban, heterogeneous, transnational, multilingual, and mobile society that emerged in the postwar Soviet Union.

This article shows how the Soviet government perceived higher birth rates in Central Asia as a threat to national identity and the stability of the USSR. The issue of demographic change was complex, and concerns about differential fertility between republics were not informed solely by prejudice. Rather, prejudice and racism mingled with practical concerns about labor surpluses and shortages. The Central Asian Republics had low labor mobility because people were unwilling to leave their cultural community, had a low level of Russian, and tended to not to be trained in the kind of heavy industries that required workers elsewhere in the Soviet Union. I argue that rather than aiming to change these factors, the government misdiagnosed economic problems as demographic ones. They placed primary emphasis on changing patterns of reproduction to remedy the situation by changing the population itself, portraying Slavs and Central Asians as distinct groups who had a predetermined role and place in life. In doing so, Moscow elites failed to address the structural and operational issues of Soviet socialism and inflamed tensions with local leaders who saw demographic campaigns as an attack on their culture.

Terraces and tenements provide the facades upon which are inscribed texts and decorative images. Embedded in the walls, these ‘plaques’ convey meanings and memories that saturate the built environment with references to the past. Evidence based on property surveys, maps and archival documents form the empirical basis from which it is concluded that images and inscriptions presented a wider geo-political and historical awareness in the everyday setting of local residents.

This essay analyzes one of James Baldwin’s least commented-upon essays, “Equal in Paris,” through the lens of current debates about transatlantic differences regarding race, equality, and citizenship. In his essay, Baldwin narrates how he was imprisoned in Paris for several days a year after his arrival in France. Baldwin constructs his essay not as a political manifesto about race, citizenship, and equality. Rather, through a powerful and cinematographic description, he leads the reader to share the narrator’s distressing experience of disjunction and terror he had while in prison. This literary choice can be understood in the context of Baldwin’s rejection of theologies of damnation and redemption that, according to him, motivate protest writings.