Liquid Nationalism and State Partitions in Europe is Stefano Bianchini’s magnum opus, reflecting a lifetime of working on the issues of ethno-nationalism in Europe, from Southeast Europe through Central Europe and the former Soviet space to all of western Europe. It is more than a book; it is an entire seminar, ranging not only geographically but also historically, from the Enlightenment to the second decade of the 21st century. Simply a list of the gems I learned would usurp all the space I have been given for this essay and much more. I choose to focus on one small part, what I take to be the primary motivation behind this book, namely his anguish over the lessons for western Europe “not learned from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia” (the title of Chapter 10), a case he knows so well. That chapter then begins with a quotation from another specialist on Yugoslavia, Jacques Rupnik, in Le Monde in 2014, “the greatest obstacle to the Europeanization of the Balkans is the Balkanization of Europe” (185). Nor are Bianchini and Rupnik alone in this concern. Already in 2012, Ivan Krastev convened two parallel seminars at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna on what he called, “The Logics of Disintegration” – of the Soviet case (Part I) and the Habsburg and Yugoslav cases (Part II) and their lessons for the European Union.

This essay examines the interplay between law, Christianity, and oppression in the thought of James Baldwin. This essay begins its inquiry from Baldwin’s own essay, Equal in Paris, and expands out to his broader writing. The essay makes four contributions. First, it shows that Equal in Paris presents a view of law and Christianity as simultaneously serving as instruments and sources of hypocrisy and injustice while representing critically important, if difficult to achieve, standards of justice and love. Second, the essay shows that for Baldwin avoidance and denial of collective moral failure underlies the hypocritical use of law and Christianity to perpetrate injustice rather than justice. Third, the essay reveals that Baldwin would see current legislative bans of critical race theory as a means of avoidance and denial of collective moral failure. Moreover, from a Baldwinian perspective, the maintenance of innocence through bans on critical race theory is a “crime” that typifies the problem at the root of racial oppression in America, which is the refusal to come to terms with the reality of white supremacy. Fourth, while agreeing with scholars who find significant overlap between Baldwin’s approach to law and critical race theory, the essay concludes that Baldwin’s work suggests that critical race theory’s neglect of love constitutes a critical shortcoming for critical race theory’s anti-subordinationist agenda.

Science diplomacy has been instrumental in facilitating cooperation in the Arctic region, yet through the projection of vast hydrocarbon potential in the region, it has also served to undermine the major transformation necessary in Arctic decision-making towards the goals of climate governance. This article surveys the translation of science from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports (i.e. the CARA study and Factsheet 2008-3049) on Arctic oil and gas and its transformation into common knowledge within Arctic discourse through repetition by the agents in between and its subsequent adoption into Arctic policy documents. In this process, we interrogate the production of the science underpinning US science diplomacy and the influence of this science on international Arctic discourse and policy use science diplomacy. This paper contributes to the literature of science diplomacy in the Arctic by examining the contributions of the USGS to Arctic policy discourses and its impact on Arctic governance at the nexus of science diplomacy on climate and energy.

In recent experimental work, arguments for or against Condition C reconstruction in A′-movement have been based on low/high availability of coreference in sentences with and without A′-movement. We argue that this reasoning is problematic: It involves arbitrary thresholds, and the results are potentially confounded by the different surface orders of the compared structures and non-syntactic factors. We present three experiments with designs that do not require defining thresholds of ‘low’ or ‘high’ coreference values. Instead, we focus on grammatical contrasts (wh-movement vs. relativization, subject vs. object wh-movement) and aim to identify and reduce confounds. The results show that reconstruction for A′-movement of DPs is not very robust in German, contra previous findings. Our results are compatible with the view that the surface order and non-syntactic factors (e.g. plausibility, referential accessibility of an R-expression) heavily influence coreference possibilities. Thus, the data argue against a theory that includes both reconstruction and a hard Condition C constraint. There is a residual contrast between sentences with subject/object movement, which is compatible with an account without reconstruction (and an additional non-syntactic factor) or an account with reconstruction (and a soft Condition C constraint).

Drawing on a long career of research into the history of nationalism and ethnic politics in Europe, Stefano Bianchini has written an erudite book on how the nationality factor affects European politics – state formation and state partition in particular. He presents a wide-ranging survey over la longue durée, and also argues a case: that state partitioning should be avoided whenever possible, as it creates many more problems than it solves.

In A Liberal Theory of Property (2021), Hanoch Dagan makes an important, thought-provoking contribution to property theory – one that unifies divergent, and at time apparently dichotomous, strands of thought in property theory and revives rich dormant ideas. Dagan persuasively centres property's justification and design on the value of autonomy and on the basic need for reciprocal recognition of the individual right to self-determination. He does so without excluding the relevance and significance of other property values, both public and private. The theory deepens existing debates within property scholarship about values such as freedom and personhood, and provides a wide-reaching analysis of how autonomy functions as property's telos. That telos is used to justify structural pluralism in property law and to delimit owners’ rights. In this way, for Dagan, property's justification determines the nature and ambit of private authority over resources.

Image and reputation are key factors in how nations are perceived by global audiences. Current and historical issues can pose as challenges to a nation’s reputation prompting the need to save face. The Armenian genocide is one of the most critical issues the Republic of Turkey has had to manage in terms of its global image and reputation. While the vast body of literature on the subject borrows from history and political science focusing on the mechanism of denial, this paper offers a communication framework to understand the rhetoric of Turkey’s image repair. Turkey’s crisis communication strategies vis-à-vis the centennial of the Armenian genocide are analyzed by employing Benoit’s image repair theory through a content analysis of official statements and declarations by the heads of state given in 2014 and 2015. In response to the emerging political crisis, the Turkish government primarily employed image repair strategies of evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness with the aim to appeal to international audiences.

The Congress of Deputies should supposedly represent the entire Spanish population and the Spanish Constitution provides mechanisms to ensure geographic representation in the lower house. However, the mobility of the members of parliament (MPs) across constituencies can generate territorial representation imbalances. Based on the territorial component of descriptive representation, this article analyses the unequal geographic representation of autonomous communities in the Congress. A descriptive statistical assessment was conducted based on MPs’ autonomous community of birth, the autonomous community for which they have a seat, the role played by political parties, and the way in which territorial representation occurs within the hyper elite. Special attention was paid to the representation of peripheral regions and to the drivers of overrepresentation (and underrepresentation) of some regions in the Congress. It was observed that—with few exceptions—territorial peripheries include more native MPs, export fewer MPs, and are generally underrepresented in the Congress and within the hyper elite. In contrast, the Basque Country (an exception), Madrid, and other central territories are overrepresented in the Congress. Finally, four models of descriptive territorial representation were identified, which correspond to Spain’s different territorial tensions.

This paper describes a perception experiment with L1 Polish and L1 English listeners on the affrication of initial English /tr/ and /dr/ (TR) consonant clusters. The goal was to test phonological predictions formulated within the Onset Prominence (OP) framework. OP offers two distinct structural configurations for representing rising sonority onset clusters. One predicts synchronous cluster articulation in English, giving rise to affrication, while the other predicts asynchronous cluster articulation in Polish. Two groups of listeners performed a two-alternative forced choice identification task on stimuli that included affricated clusters, unaffricated clusters, affricates, and CəC-initial words. For L1 English listeners, the unaffricated cluster-initial items induced the slowest responses. For L1 Polish listeners, the lack of affrication facilitated cluster identification, while the CəC-initial words induced the slowed responses. The results suggest cross-language interaction by which Polish listeners equate L1 unaffricated clusters with L2 CəC-initial words, in accordance with the OP proposal.