Regional integration blocs are subject to the admission of new members, which must be approved by domestic institutions. This article analyzes how the incorporation of Venezuela and Bolivia into Mercosur passed in the Paraguayan Congress. While the first case lasted from 2007 to 2013, demonstrating parliamentary opposition, the second episode took place between 2015 and 2016, suggesting convergence between the executive and legislative branches on the issue. Using process tracing, the unveiled mechanism shows how government and opposition forces act to alter the duration of the bill in Congress and that political parties have a pendular behavior according to political cleavages. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest the existence of a parliamentary veto power in foreign affairs and the importance of having homogeneous coalitions to achieve faster approvals.

By now, it is well known that the murder of the Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, last fall sparked nationwide protests in Iran. Aside from Jina, many other young protestors were killed, imprisoned, or permanently disabled, as security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran began blinding demonstrators by firing rubber bullets at their eyes.1 These ghastly scenes were accompanied by other disturbing and violent acts that included the raiding of universities, sexual abuse of students, targeting of minority populations, and shockingly the execution of young men for their involvement in these fracases.2 The Woman, Life, Freedom (Persian: Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) uprising, which erupted in response to gender discrimination in the Islamic Republic, promptly embraced other social causes. What began as gender protests amplified people's strident cries against political repression in Iran. Despite raising awareness of a range of sociopolitical problems in Iran, the gender focus of this movement remains its singular achievement. This uprising,whose slogan (Kurdish: Jin, Jiyan, Azadi ) gained inspiration from the struggles of Kurdish women fighters, has put gender issues center stage and restored women's presence as primary agents of change in Iranian society.

Appraising the roots of the Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) movement requires a different framework of power: internal colonialism. Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova argues that internal colonialism results when the direct domination of foreigners over natives disappears, and the domination and exploitation of natives by natives emerges.1 This process, I contend, has occurred in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the forty-year rule of Iranian clerical elites has subjugated a dissenting populace, especially women. The repressive gender practices of the theocracy in Iran have over the course of the past year prompted a unique internal anticolonial protest.

The World Cultures collection at National Museums Northern Ireland is an essential source for the study of Irish collecting in the wider British Empire. The 2022 redisplay of the collection in the Ulster Museum's exhibition, Inclusive Global Histories, is part of a staged engagement with local and source communities. Given the critical importance of the global museum decolonisation work of which the exhibition is an example, a fresh consideration of this ethnographic collection's history is timely. This article reviews the collection within the context of the three museums that have housed it, and investigates how curators within the institution understood, represented and displayed the collection. It does so through a case study of a war canoe (tomako), that was taken from the Solomon Islands, by John Casement, a captain in the Royal Navy, and is the largest and among the most significant items within the collection. The canoe's centrality to the gallery — built around it in 1925 — that now contains Inclusive Global Histories reveals complex social networks between nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors, curators and photographers, and aids understanding of how global human cultures have been regarded in Northern Ireland's civic life.

To make sense of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF), some have asked straightforward questions: Why now? What are the reasons for it? Who is behind the uprising? The Islamic Republic of Iran, its supporters, and its allies have responded to the last question by labeling protestors as spies or provocateurs influenced and supported by foreign governments or activists. By raising the possibility of outside interference to bring about regime change through the participation of willing or even unsuspecting Iranians, the Islamic Republic defends its extreme responses to the WLF uprising and dismisses the international community's condemnations of human rights abuses.

This paper forwards the concept of homohistoricism as a historicism that narrativizes the nation's past as the site of illicit or authentic relations/affections that have the power to pervert or rescue the public sphere in the present-now. In the case of contemporary Turkey, I identify republican, Islamist, and queer homohistoricisms as divergent political projects with interconnected rationales. I analyze two sets of primary materials on queer contention from Istanbul's Gezi Park uprising: Protest records (fliers, brochures, zines, pictures, banners, posters) from Kislak Center's “Gezi Park Protests 2013” collection and the meeting minutes from 657 neighborhood forums produced and archived by the protestors. I argue that queer homohistoricism in Turkey as a contentious repertoire of invoking nostalgic visions of Ottoman cosmopolitanism and urban civility may succeed in authenticating a certain kind of queer politics, but would do so at the expense of perpetuating just as authentic mechanisms of oppression.

The death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, on September 16, 2022 following her arrest by Iran's now-suspended Gasht-i Irshad (guidance patrol or morality police) for apparent lax conformity to the Islamic dress code ignited protests across Iran. The protests, known as Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Azadi) quickly spread to Iranian diaspora communities across North America, Europe, and Australia. Initially, diasporic Iranians organized their protests to support and amplify their compatriots’ calls for justice. As the protests continued in Iran and the demands for change grew louder, some members of the Iranian diaspora shifted their focus from the Islamic Republic to the public shaming of Iranians living outside Iran for their purported support of the Iranian regime. Some of the tactics employed by those engaged in public humiliations of suspected regime supporters recalled Gasht-i Irshad's methods of trapping and accosting individuals for perceived infractions. These public confrontations were aimed at isolating, shaming, and silencing perceived allies of the Islamic Republic and, by extension, denouncing the regime for its abrogation of women's and human rights. I refer to this phenomenon among diasporic Iranians as gasht-i intiqām, roving avengers, which reflects a frustration with the absence of justice in Iran and targets purported proxies for the regime. There have been many instances and types of denunciations aimed at silencing and ostracizing individuals, academics, and institutions. As Daniel Block points out in his analysis, “The attacks overwhelmingly target women, most notably in North America and Europe. The victims include gender equality activists, journalists, foreign policy analysts and a historian, each of whom has been accused of colluding with the authoritarian Islamist regime in Tehran.” Block further points out that many of the attacks are anonymous or originate from fake social media accounts. The common denominator he finds among those who target individuals is opposition to “Western-Iranian diplomacy or reporting information that adds subtlety to the debate over how the United States and its allies should handle the Islamic Republic.”1 Often those deemed regime collaborators are Iranian American individuals, journalists, or institutions that supported the 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the nuclear deal.