Human rights due diligence (HRDD) has become the buzzword of much of the advocacy and work today around business and human rights.1 It is almost commonplace that companies have the responsibility to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address these adverse human rights impacts as part of their ongoing HRDD processes, in line with the UNGPs.2 The assessment of human rights impacts (HRIA) is a critical step in this process.3

As an implication of the ethnically and nationally diverse nature of Mediterranean polities, identification-driven boundary-making strategies bear considerable relevance for their political processes, both in the contemporary context and in the historical past. By utilizing a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), this study provides an interpretative exploration of Greek-Cypriot elite discursive framing strategies regarding Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot ethno-national identity during the Cypriot Civil War (1963–1967). The available historical interpretations of this period lead us to expect an exclusionary strategy of boundary contraction to be more prevalent than the inclusionary one of boundary expansion in the discourse of Greek-Cypriot elites. Through an examination of a sample of primary textual sources, the analysis disconfirms such an expectation, as elite figures primarily constructed broader, inclusive frames of ethno-national identity during the civil war. The relative absence of boundary contraction and the prevalence of boundary expansion indicate the applicability of Wimmer’s (2008) universalist approach to ethnic boundary-making, in contrast to the expectations that are built by the Cyprus-specific historical evidence. This study thus lays the groundwork for future research to delineate the discursive framing strategies of elite figures in Cyprus and beyond the ethno-nationally divided island.

By analysing the Church of England's 1985 report Faith in the City (FITC), this article demonstrates that the church played a decisive role in shaping the discourse on British ‘inner cities’. Following a brief historical contextualization, the article examines the FITC report itself, how it came about and what arguments the Church of England introduced into the national debate on inner cities, as well as the media and political discussion that followed its publication and the reactions in the religious field. The article argues that the publication was a turning point in the inner cities discourse of the 1980s. It examines how the church succeeded in (re)directing national attention to the topic thereby countering the territorial stigmatization and replacing it with a more positive view focused on the potential of the residents living in the inner cities.

The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

The living standards of the working classes during industrialization continue to be the subject of debate in European historiography. However, other factors closely related to the institutional setting, such as the role played by social economy and the institutions for collective action, are seldom considered. This study focuses on these factors, and attempts to quantify the social impact of consumer cooperatives. We argue that these institutions substantially improved the lot of the working classes from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, helping them to increase their incomes, and access food and services, such as education and social services, which the state did not provide in sufficient measure. To demonstrate this point, we analyse thirty-five consumer cooperatives in Barcelona, an industrial centre in which these organizations were more popular than anywhere else in Spain. Our main conclusion is that consumer cooperatives increased the well-being of their members, helping them to meet their substantial calorific needs, although their diets were unbalanced and low-cost; members improved their income between five and ten per cent, by simply shopping at the institution, and gained access to basic welfare services.

This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War. Yet East Africa is less prominent in these histories than we might expect, despite the vibrancy of current work on this period in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding not only of the ‘globalisation of decolonisation’ but also of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis.

Epistemic democracy aims to show, often by appeal to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that democracy has a high chance of reaching correct decisions. It has been argued that epistemic democracy is compatible with various metaethical accounts, such as moral realism, conventionalism and majoritarianism. This paper casts doubt on that thesis and reveals the following metaethical dilemma: if we adopt moral realism, it is doubtful that voters are, on average, more than 0.5 likely to track moral facts and identify the correct alternative. By contrast, if we adopt conventionalism or majoritarianism, we cannot expect that voters are both competent and sincere. Either way, the conditions for the application of Condorcet’s theorem are not met.

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents.

This paper presents a dilemma for the additive model of reasons. Either the model accommodates disjunctive cases in which one ought to perform some act $$\phi $$ just in case at least one of two factors obtains, or it accommodates conjunctive cases in which one ought to $$\phi $$ just in case both of two factors obtains. The dilemma also arises in a revised additive model that accommodates imprecisely weighted reasons. There exist disjunctive and conjunctive cases. Hence the additive model is extensionally inadequate. The upshot of the dilemma is that one of the most influential accounts of how reasons accrue to determine what we ought to do is flawed.

This is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation. It situates this focus amidst current methodological trends that stress structural oppression and argues that law-enforcers’ agency could illuminate discussions among historians and other scholars about the relationship between formal and informal law alongside the rise of the modern criminological state. The historical importance of enforcers is accentuated in the story told in each section—the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; the inequalities of policing alongside lynching in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the complex interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing nationwide; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights.

Although anti-Catholicism and anti-Jacobinism primed many Britons to fear what one observer called “the hordes of vagabond French” who reached their shores in the fall of 1792, others launched widespread relief efforts. Among the more remarkable was the Wilmot Committee. This subscription charity convened in September 1792, channeling donations from the public to destitute French priests at a time when the British government remained hesitant to directly aid refugees from revolutionary France. This article situates the committee's particular structures in both their eighteenth-century philanthropic contexts and Britain's history of aid to foreign refugees. It then traces interconnections between charitable giving and wartime exigencies, arguing that the Wilmot Committee, which managed relief efforts first to clergy and then also to laity throughout the subsequent war years in an evolving partnership with government, played a crucial role in shaping and shifting attitudes toward foreigners during an era of ideological revolution. Ultimately, the committee worked alongside legislation like the Aliens and Emigrant Corps Acts to underline that foreigners of different religious persuasions—provided their loyalties were confirmed, their principles appropriate, and their backgrounds appealing—might be mobilized to strengthen national interests. By the 1790s, shared opposition to revolutionary republican ideology came to supersede shared Protestantism in predicting foreigners’ utility to Britain.

Petitioning was a common form of protest, request, or expression across the British Empire, and historians of colonial rule and resistance have often drawn on petitions as sources to investigate particular controversies. This article assesses the significance, variety, and context of petitioning to the Imperial Parliament from both the British Isles and the colonies. To do so, we present new data drawn from more than one million petitions sent to the House of Commons in the period from 1780 to 1918, alongside qualitative research into a wider range of petitions to other metropolitan sources of authority. This range permits us to assess how colonial subjects across the empire demanded attention from Westminster and what the practice of petitioning reveals about the British self-image of parliamentary scrutiny and equality before the law.