Provided we blame others accurately, is blaming them morally right even if we are guilty of similar wrongdoing ourselves? On the one hand, hypocrisy seems to render blame morally wrong, and unjustified; but on the other, even hypocritical blaming seems better than silence. I develop an account of the wrongness of hypocritical blaming which resolves this apparent dilemma. When holding others accountable for their moral failings, we ought to be willing to reason, together with them, about our own, similar failings. Hypocrisy undermines this process of mutual deliberation. Thus, even if better than silence, hypocritical blaming is second-best, and that is why it is wrong.

Forced choices between rescuing imperilled persons are subject to a presumption of equality. Unless we can point to a morally relevant difference between these persons' imperilments, each should get an equal chance of rescue. Sometimes, this presumption is overturned. For example, when one imperilled person has wrongfully caused the forced choice, most think that this person (rather than an innocent person) should bear the harm. The converse scenario, in which a forced choice resulted from the supererogatory action of one of the imperilled people, has received little attention in distributive ethics. I argue that, sometimes, we need not offer equal chances in these cases either. When the supererogatory act places the initially imperilled person under a reciprocal duty to bear risks for the supererogatory agent's sake in the forced choice, we may fulfil this duty for them if they are unable to do it themselves, by favouring the supererogatory agent.

A review published in this journal claims that my first academic monograph, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), fails to meet “basic academic standards” (George Zhijian Qiao, “Was There an Administrative Revolution? Review Essay on Maura Dykstra, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State,” Journal of Chinese History (2023), doi:10.1017/jch.2023.19). The reviewer makes this remarkable claim not by demonstrating any egregious or particularly damning fault, but rather with an argument of preponderance, claiming that the book contains “hundreds of errors” (2). The review also contains several dubious and disturbing arguments about what constitutes good history. The flaws of those larger methodological and historiographical assertions are serious and compelling enough that they must be treated at length, separately. In this, my initial response to the review, I will constrain myself to rebutting the reviewer's false claims that the book is full of errors and that I have committed academic malfeasance.

Approximately 70,000 people were displaced from Greece to Turkey and the Middle East during World War II. Following a presentation of the geography, statistics, and timeframe of the displacement, and Turkey’s interwar demographic policies, the article studies Turkey’s management of this refugee movement. Based on Greek, Turkish, and British archival material, the article argues that Turkish wartime refugee policy took shape in the intersection of two occasionally contradictory attributes. On the one hand, there were the state’s demographic desiderata and policies that differentiated incoming refugees on account of their ethnic and religious identities. On the other, Turkey’s reaction was necessarily conditioned by the military, political, and diplomatic conjuncture of the war. It was this conditionality that explains the inconsistences and shifts in refugee management and its rationale during the war, for instance, the differentiation in the treatment of Jewish and Christian refugees, but also in the management of Greek Muslims in 1941–1942 and in 1944–1945.

This study aims to develop an understanding of how different communicative strategies used by case officers in asylum interviews may position applicants in various ways. The analysis focuses on a relatively standardised sequence at the start of asylum interviews, where the communicative situation and its legal framework are explained to the applicant. Case officers use guidelines to support them with this process. Using a comparative discourse analysis of excerpts from two asylum interviews, I examine the discursive means by which the applicants are positioned in the case officers’ utterances, drawing mainly on the concepts of positioning and recontextualisation. The findings show how case officers’ instructive statements could be used as a resource not only to provide information to the applicants but also to position asylum seekers in a respectful way. (Asylum interview, intertextuality, positioning, recontextualisation, speaker role)*

The difference between the representation of German femininity in the 1920s and the 1930s is striking: while glamorous flappers with bob haircuts ruled the beginning of the interwar period, its end is characterized by serious and earnest—and often longhaired—young women. Rather than taking the obvious route of relating this change to the political changes in Germany, most importantly the rise of the Nazis, this article argues that the changing representation of interwar femininity in Germany was always embedded in a transnational, transatlantic process. The transformation of flappers into humble girls started well before the Nazis came to power and was fueled by a wide variety of voices, from communist to bourgeois actors.

The doctrine of creation is a teaching shared across many faith traditions that requires urgent interdisciplinary attention today. Joanna Leidenhag's book Minding Creation considers how the philosophy of panpsychism might be beneficial to the Christian articulation of creation. This article is an overview of the book, in order to contextualize the four responses and author's reply that follows.

In 2006, the authorities of the de facto state of Transnistria unilaterally held a sovereignty referendum. Almost all voters supported Transnistria gaining internationally recognized independence and subsequently integrating/associating with Russia. Despite such clear results, the poll was not recognized internationally and, consequently, not implemented. However, this was not a problem for the Transnistrian leadership, since the primary objective of the referendum was not to reallocate sovereignty, but to domestically empower Transnistria’s President Igor Smirnov. Based on the discourse of Transnistria’s next president, Yevgeniy Shevchuk, this article argues that the referendum was not placed in the dustbin of history. Analysis of the official Transnistrian news published during his presidency from 2011–2016 shows that Shevchuk re-exploited the 2006 sovereignty referendum. His aim was not to reallocate sovereignty either, but to reach the following goals: 1. procure legitimacy of the Transnistrian sovereignty cause internationally; 2. empower Transnistria vis-à-vis its parent state, Moldova; 3. boost relations with Transnistria’s patron, Russia; and 4. empower himself domestically. Arguably, the argument about the strategic use of past unilateral sovereignty referendums also works in cases of other de facto states, which can be analyzed using the analytical framework presented in this article.

This article deals with the war crimes committed during the First World War. Whereas in historiography the presence of franc-tireurs, the new industrial warfare or the specific military and radicalised command culture of individual armies often served as explanatory patterns for the escalation of violence, this contribution attempts to introduce a different perspective into the discussion. The focus is on the specific violence of mobile warfare, which was articulated in the context of military “forward panics” (Randall Collins) on the Eastern and Balkan fronts and was responsible for a considerable part of the war crimes committed there. The article therefore deals with the nature and character of these military forward panics. Starting with a description of the spatial characteristics of the front as a specific space of violence, the role of military orders and the significance of the front as a soldierly space of imagination, the article analyses above all the structural violence of forward panics. In this context, the article discusses three factors that played an essential role in this escalation process: first, the special soldierly frame of reference of combat in mobile warfare, which continuously lowered the inhibition thresholds for the escalation of violence; second, the escalation-forcing dynamics that the swift advance or the flight-like retreat of the troops brought with it for the process of violence; and finally, third, the significance of soldierly group pressure for the process of escalation of violence.