In this paper, we carried out two experimental studies to investigate whether verbal tenses, in their perspectival usages, give access to the speaker’s perspective. Study 1 is an annotation study in which annotators evaluated corpus excerpts as expressing situations or narrating events in a subjective or objective way. We manipulated access to the verbal tense: half of the annotators saw the tense of the verbs, and half saw only infinitive forms of the verbs. Study 2 is a self-paced reading experiment in which we examined how native speakers of French process utterances with the Passé Simple when it is preceded by aujourd’hui (semantic incompatibility solved pragmatically by perspective-taking), hier (semantic and pragmatic compatibility) and en ce moment (semantic incompatibility which cannot be solved pragmatically). The results of Study 1 suggest that the subjective interpretation of an utterance is not triggered by its verbal tense. Study 2 questions the idea that perspective-taking is a component of speaker’s subjectivity. In general, our experimental findings do not support the hypothesis that verbal tenses give access to speaker’s subjectivity, a theoretical hypothesis which has never before been directly experimentally tested.

Deception, Bridgeman and Penguin are the three most recently active volcanic islands in the South Shetland Islands. Since the discovery of the archipelago in 1819, Deception Island has erupted on frequent occasions, most recently in August 1970. A number of nineteenth-century observers reported fumarolic or volcanic activity from Bridgeman Island. No eyewitness accounts of activity from Penguin Island have been found. A chronological list detailing the historic reports from Bridgeman Island was compiled to compare and establish their veracity. This process revealed a consistency of observation from independent observers. An effort has been made to consider if any of these reports of activity may have belonged instead to Penguin Island volcano, 60 km (32 NM) away. A review of the timing of discovery and availability of the first charts of the South Shetlands was also examined to narrow the period when mariners might have mistaken one island for another. Only the three earliest observations of activity from an unnamed volcano, during the short period when no maps were available, may be questioned. A useful chart of the region was published in 1822, and all subsequent observations of activity were from Bridgeman, not Penguin Island.

In Italy, living close to or even within a place of business is not in and of itself unusual. Forms of housing in Italy are similar to many other European countries in that people primarily live in mixed-use spaces. It is common to have an apartment above cafés, bars, and bakeries. In this article, I examine how this form of mixed-use residence shapes market practices, decision-making, and labour relations among owners and workers. I argue that the spaces in which employees participate in the market economy also mirror their commitments to family. By examining workspaces across two food certifications in Milan, Italy – a Made in Italy certification (Food Italy) and a halal certification (Halal Italia) – I argue that Italian kinship networks structure how workers in each business operate. This intervention contributes to a larger literature on the cultural dimensions of capitalism.

In April 1848, a proclamation of friendship to the Germans sent by the Provisional Government of Milan to the Fünfzigerausschuss (Committee of Fifty) in Frankfurt was rejected by the latter, creating widespread outrage in Italy. Concurrently, a parallel controversy over the possession of South Tyrol arose between the two revolutions. This article provides an exploratory analysis of these two episodes, examining the role they played in shaping relations between the two revolutions, and in influencing the image Italians had of the revolution in Germany. Shedding light on an episode until now overlooked by historiography, this article seeks to contribute to the salient debate on the peculiar relationship between internationalist ideals and nationalist claims during the 1848 revolution. It argues that the disillusioning impact on revolutionary audiences of specific ‘episodes of friction’, such as those examined in this article,was greater than the ‘natural convergence of goals’ of the various national revolutions in 1848.

This paper traces France’s role in the Antarctic from 1840, when explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville discovered the slice of the white continent he named Terre Adélie, to the present day. Since World War II, Terre Adélie has been the site of a host of performances of sovereignty: the French have built bases, drawn maps, conducted scientific investigations and erected plaques. But France’s commitment to Terre Adélie has been tested and has fallen into crisis several times. The history of France in Antarctica is a tale of ambition, ambivalence, trade-offs and political strategy. This paper aims to elucidate this story, focusing on the concept of sovereignty and the nexus of scientific and political interests. I argue that France’s relationship with the Antarctic has been characterised by continual tension, by peaks and troughs and by brinkmanship on the part of actors with their own stakes. While there is broad agreement that Terre Adélie serves a fundamental national interest, I show that France’s ambitions on the white continent are far from decided. With its focus on France, which has largely been left out of the growing body of literature on the Antarctic, this paper contributes to building a robust historical understanding of Antarctic claims.

Homelands are an integral component of nationalism. This recognition notwithstanding, the lines nationalism draws on the globe have received much less systematic attention than the lines drawn between in-groups and out-groups. This article argues that homelands, precisely because they are so central to nationalism, should be more consistently integrated into scholarship on international conflict, among other outcomes. We begin by detailing what homelands are, why they matter, and some suggested mechanisms for how they impact outcomes of interest. The next section considers the choices scholars make about identifying homelands, including the particular measurement strategy and the level of analysis used. Here, we highlight recent advances that enable the measurement and analysis of homelands in ways consistent with both constructivist insights about the possibility of variation in the homeland’s extent (both over time and within populations) and with positivist analysis. We conclude by sketching out future directions for research on homelands and nationalism.

In this article, the authors discuss the standard of living in medieval villages in central Europe on the basis of accessibility to dress, which is usually represented by the only archaeological material remaining—dress accessories, including buckles, strap ends, and rings. They attempt to establish a method of determining the value of the finds based on the different technological qualities of their material, decoration, and types of artefacts, and then discuss the dress accessories from selected village sites with complementary data from rural cemeteries dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Their overview shows that there was a large degree of similarity between the finds from rural areas and typical urban assemblages.

The future for people becoming displaced due to climate processes is still unknown. The effects of climate change are more apparent every day, and those most acutely impacted are still unable to access an appropriate legal remedy for their woes. Two new books evaluate the limits to international legal protections and the application of justice. Climate Change, Disasters, and the Refugee Convention, by Matthew Scott, investigates the assumptions underpinning the dichotomy between refugees and those facing adversity due to climate-induced disasters. Climate Change and People on the Move: International Law and Justice, by Fanny Thornton, goes further by examining how justice is used—and curtailed—by international instruments of protection. Thornton's legal analysis is thorough and thoughtful, but also demonstrative of the limitations of justice when confined by historical precedent and political indifference. With so little still being done to hold industries to account, is it any surprise that the legal system is not yet ready to protect those harmed by carbon pollution? Demanding justice for climate displacees is an indictment of modern Western economics and development; it implicates entire national lifestyles and the institutions and people that support them.

The principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) conceives of a broad set of measures that can be employed in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council remains an important part of the implementation architecture, given what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty referred to as its authoritative position in international society as the “linchpin of order and stability.” As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this review of the Council's role in fulfilling its responsibility to protect advances two somewhat contrasting arguments about the original ICISS report. First, it suggests that the commissioners may have underestimated the Council's potential contribution, by concentrating on the authorization of coercive means to address crises of human protection. Over the past two decades, the Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. However, I also argue that the willingness of the ICISS to identify potential alternatives to the Security Council when its members are paralyzed appears in retrospect to have been both bold and forward looking, in light of the Council's failures to act in a timely and decisive manner to protect amid crises and the contemporary realities of geopolitical rivalry. The article concludes by suggesting that future efforts to protect populations from atrocity crimes should focus not only on the herculean task of trying to change the behavior of P5 members of the Council but also on encouraging a new institutional balance between the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies.

This paper shows that social inequalities are cumulative and occur at each stage of the dispute pyramid, from the identification of a conflict through to satisfaction with its outcome. Based on a large and original survey on ordinary people's representations of and practices within the legal system in France (N = 2,660), our study finds that an individual's contact, or lack of contact, with a legal intermediary, who may be a legal professional or a non-legal professional, has a very significant impact on the decision to take a case to court. Contact with a legal intermediary also influences the individual's satisfaction with the outcome, but not in the same way for all plaintiffs: income is a more determining factor in satisfaction with the outcome in cases where the judge makes a decision than in cases where a solution is found outside the courtroom.

The notion of meaningful human control (MHC) has gathered overwhelming consensus and interest in the autonomous weapons systems (AWS) debate. By shifting the focus of this debate to MHC, one sidesteps recalcitrant definitional issues about the autonomy of weapons systems and profitably moves the normative discussion forward. Some delegations participating in discussions at the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems meetings endorsed the notion of MHC with the proviso that one size of human control does not fit all weapons systems and uses thereof. Building on this broad suggestion, we propose a “differentiated”—but also “principled” and “prudential”—framework for MHC over weapons systems. The need for a differentiated approach—namely, an approach acknowledging that the extent of normatively required human control depends on the kind of weapons systems used and contexts of their use—is supported by highlighting major drawbacks of proposed uniform solutions. Within the wide space of differentiated MHC profiles, distinctive ethical and legal reasons are offered for principled solutions that invariably assign to humans the following control roles: (1) “fail-safe actor,” contributing to preventing the weapon's action from resulting in indiscriminate attacks in breach of international humanitarian law; (2) “accountability attractor,” securing legal conditions for international criminal law (ICL) responsibility ascriptions; and (3) “moral agency enactor,” ensuring that decisions affecting the life, physical integrity, and property of people involved in armed conflicts be exclusively taken by moral agents, thereby alleviating the human dignity concerns associated with the autonomous performance of targeting decisions. And the prudential character of our framework is expressed by means of a rule, imposing by default the more stringent levels of human control on weapons targeting. The default rule is motivated by epistemic uncertainties about the behaviors of AWS. Designated exceptions to this rule are admitted only in the framework of an international agreement among states, which expresses the shared conviction that lower levels of human control suffice to preserve the fail-safe actor, accountability attractor, and moral agency enactor requirements on those explicitly listed exceptions. Finally, we maintain that this framework affords an appropriate normative basis for both national arms review policies and binding international regulations on human control of weapons systems.

What's wrong with joining corona parties? In this article, I defend the idea that reasons to avoid such parties (or collective harms, more generally) come in degrees. I approach this issue from a participation-based perspective. Specifically, I argue that the more people are already joining the party, and the more likely it is that the virus will spread among everyone, the stronger the participation-based reason not to join. In defense of these degrees, I argue that they covary with the expression of certain attitudes.

As part of the roundtable, “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this essay asks the reader to consider the role that trust, distrust, and ambivalence play in enabling and constraining the use of force under pillar three of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). Drawing on interdisciplinary studies on trust, it analyzes the 2011 military intervention in Libya for evidence on how trust, distrust, and ambivalence help explain the positions taken by member states on the United Nations Security Council. In so doing, it challenges the mainstream view that the fallout over Libya represents a shift from trust to distrust. We find this binary portrayal problematic for three reasons. First, it fails to take into account the space in between trust and distrust, which we categorize as ambivalence and use to make sense of the position of Russia and China. Second, it is important to recognize the role of bounded trust, as those that voted in favor of going into Libya did so on certain grounds. Third, it overemphasizes the political fallout, as six of the ten elected member states continued to support the intervention. Learning lessons from this case, we conclude that it is highly unlikely that the Security Council will authorize the use of force to fulfill the RtoP anytime soon, which may have detrimental implications for the RtoP as a whole.