This article centers on the life of Bilal Ould Mahmoud, an enslaved man who became a spiritual authority in the nineteenth-century Sahara. It examines how Bilal's piety allowed him to rise to prominence in a hierarchical context that subjugated him to an inferior position. Yet what makes him so fascinating to study is his ability to achieve the highest station as a Sufi saint without being attached to a Sufi order. Using Bilal's case, this article makes two important contributions to the historiographies of Sufism and slavery. First, it brings fresh perspectives to the studies of Sufism outside of ṭarīqa (Sufi orders). Second, it contributes to the studies of Saharan slavery by exploring enslaved Muslims’ experiences beyond the practice of illicit magic, and also as part of how they exercised their saintly authority as empowered agents. In the process, it analyzes the interplay among Islam, race, and slavery in the nineteenth-century Sahara.

While much of the literature on recipe contexts has focused on English and the availability of null definite patients, this paper shows that both null agents and null patients are possible in recipes in a range of typologically and genetically diverse languages. It is proposed that null agents in recipes arise due to a variety of syntactic strategies, but null patients are uniformly licensed via a null topic in the left periphery in all the languages considered. These results indicate that while the recipe register does not directly dictate specific syntactic structures such as imperatives or null objects, the register can provide the pragmatic context necessary for certain syntactic processes, such as null topicalization.

The Abkhaz State University (ASU) is internationally isolated, despite its cooperation with universities in Russia. Georgia combines its refusal to recognize Abkhaz statehood with a policy of nonrecognition of its university, which sets the direction for other countries. But the Abkhaz policies of nonrecognition are also to be taken into account. Abkhazia opposes any form of internationalization of the ASU generating closer ties with Georgia. The article examines how the Georgian and Abkhaz policies of nonrecognition hamper the internationalization of the ASU within the European educational space. It explores a conflict on recognition and nonrecognition of status and identity, where status does not refer exclusively to statehood. In the field of higher education, European integration involves a large number of state and nonstate actors in 49 countries and a wide variety of forms of recognition and nonrecognition, ranging from the certification of individual qualifications and the publication of lists of unrecognized universities, to the setting up of joint educational programs. This integration process is largely state driven but based on the principle of the institutional autonomy of universities. Using the ASU as a case study, the way that policies on nonrecognition affect status in the field of higher education is examined.

Could it be true that even though we as a group ought to do something, you as an individual ought not to do your part? And under what conditions, in particular, could this happen? In this article, I discuss how a certain kind of case, introduced by David Copp, illustrates the possibility that you ought not to do your part even when you would be playing a crucial causal role in the group action. This is because you may have special agent-relative reasons against participating that are not shared by the group as a whole. I defend the claim that these are indeed cases in which you ought not to do your part in what the group ought to do. I then argue that we can expect these cases to produce a troubling kind of rational conflict.

As a coerced labour force living under repressive conditions, contract workers in São Tomé e Príncipe's cocoa plantations belong to a wider phenomenon of global plantation experience during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Flight appears as an important element of that experience and this article is an attempt to interpret the strategies of runaways in São Tomé's turbulent Great Depression years after 1930. The work set out here benefitted from a large selection of unexplored sources of the island's labour inspectorate, which can be found in the archipelago itself. Its analysis has enabled interpretation of the motives of escaping workers, and with it discussion of three principal strategic contexts of flight: the experiences of runaways who formed communities; attempts by escaped workers to hide and become part of “native” (forro) communities in rural areas or in the city of São Tomé; and the agency of workers trying to run away to subsequently renegotiate their conditions with labour inspectors or with plantation administrators sympathetic to their situation. The last part of the article attempts to locate that experience in the global history of runaways, connecting it with the types of “ecosystems of running” discussed for Atlantic slavery and later indentured labour systems.

In August 1920, the political fate of the Kurdish nation, along with its territory, Kurdistan, were on the line, after the Allies asserted their interest in national rights to self-determination following World War I. Under the Treaty of Sèvres, Kurds were acknowledged as an ethno-political entity in the Wilsonian perspective, yet the ideal of self-determination failed to crystallize as a full legal right to independent nationhood. Thus, Kurdish statehood was annulled. In contrast, the drawing of states’ boundaries in Europe took place mostly along national lines. The result has been an untenable diversity across regions affected by the War in the varieties of self-determination, arguing that some peoples’ nationhood was credited with less legitimacy than others. The departure of imperial powers and subsequently the League of Nations from self-determination for achieving territorial independence came as a result of imperialist world policies to reorder political influence. With the adoption of self-determination as one of the purposes of the UN in 1945, and with the crystallization of self-determination as a legal right in 1966 and the subsequent campaign of decolonization, it could be argued the Kurds’ status was not repositioned and in some way is invisible to the law of self-determination, as applied.

The article examines the ideas and arrangements referred to as nonterritorial autonomy (NTA) in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states. Many scholars regard NTA as a theoretical breakthrough and as a way to drastically rearrange diversity policies. The author seeks to clarify whether NTA had been a groundbreaking innovation and an area of political contestations. Two short periods of NTA-related initiatives after 1917 and in the late 1980s–1990s may look like attempts (albeit ineffective) to replace the earlier forms of diversity governance. The author shows that the ideas of group societal separateness, differential treatment of individuals, group agency, and cohesiveness, as well as a group’s running of its internal affairs, were present in varying degrees in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet governments’ thoughts and practices. Academia and civil society were also appropriating and developing these views, and group self-rule on a nonterritorial basis was their logical extension. However, the practical implementation was, in most cases, on a top-down basis, and group agency and self-rule were affirmed mostly rhetorically. The continuity of discourses and practices demonstrates that NTA was an integral part of “normal” and broad ethnopolitical developments across the major historic divides in Northern Eurasia.

Canadian historiography has long regarded the choice and elaboration of Ottawa as a capital city in the mid-nineteenth century as a political compromise between Ontario (Canada West) and Quebec (Canada East). This article suggests that this view be reconsidered in the context of Canada's expansion westward and the dispossession of Indigenous lands. The key goal of this article is to provide a comprehensive analysis of transforming Ottawa into a capital city in 1857–60, including not only its choice as the seat of government but also the elaboration of Canada's Parliament Buildings, which were to become the key symbol of its future statehood, as well as the visit of the prince of Wales to Ottawa in 1860. The prince's visit allowed the city to be legitimized and inaugurated as the new seat of government.