The High Court of England and Wales in its November 2020 judgment in Municipio de Mariana v BHP Group1 (BHP) declined jurisdiction to hear the case initiated by victims of the Fundão Dam collapse in Brazil on the grounds of abuse of process. The decision raises serious questions about the Court’s willingness to vindicate the fair trial rights of victims of human rights abuses linked to multinational enterprises (MNEs). In this judgment, Turner J also made obiter comments on the possibility of staying the case on application of Article 34 of the Recast Brussels Regulation (Recast Regulation),2 the doctrine of forum non conveniens (FNC), and/or the Court’s case management discretion.

At the time when Irish veterans of the Great War were being demobilized, Ireland was in a period of profound social, political, and cultural change that was irreversibly transforming the island. Armistice and the veterans’ relief at having survived the conflict and being back with family could not eclipse the overwhelming political climate they met on their homecoming. This article draws on the 1929 Report by the Committee on Claims of British Ex-servicemen, commissioned by the Irish Free State to investigate whether Irish veterans were discriminated against by the Southern Irish and British authorities. The research also makes use of a range of underexploited primary sources: the Liaison and Evacuation Papers in the Military Archives in Dublin, the collection of minutes of the Irish Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Land Trust in the National Archives in London, and original material from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Archives of Ireland relating to economic programs for veterans. A comparative approach of to the respective demobilizations of veterans in Northern and Southern Ireland in the 1920s reveals that disparities in formal recognition of their sacrifice and in special provision for housing and employment significantly and painfully complicated their repatriation.

This article examines kidnappings for ransom by the ’Ndrangheta in Italy from the more measured perspective that the passage of time allows. To investigate the importance and characteristics of this phenomenon, we analyse a new database compiled from various sources. We put forward an explanation of the way that the kidnapping era ended that derives both from statistical analysis of the 654 instances surveyed and from a case study (the abduction of Cesare Casella). Within this analysis, we award significant weight to the changing political context and to two particular factors: the crime's politicisation under new electoral pressure, and the behaviour of law enforcement agencies. The two factors often regarded as the principal explanations for the end of kidnapping, legislation on the freezing of assets and the appeal of the drugs trade, are treated here as simply aspects of the overall picture. The disappearance of this criminal practice seems to have followed a hiatus in relationships and a reciprocal show of strength. Although the repertoire of state threats, notably military action and prison sentences, was substantial, the political value of victims’ lives and the weakness of the government were powerful weapons for the final cohort of kidnappers.

The segregation laws known as “Jim Crow” are often understood as legislative efforts to promote White supremacy by shielding White southerners from contact with other races. This was not the case, however. By analyzing early railway segregation laws–in particular, the 1890 Louisiana law that was challenged in Plessy v. Ferguson–this article shows that the first post-Reconstruction segregations laws used an expansive definition of the “white race” as everyone who was not Black. In short, White purity and separation were the pretext, not the purpose, of early Jim Crow laws. Instead, the structure of legal segregation was initially determined by White, Democratic legislators' efforts to isolate and subjugate Black Americans by reinstating the racial logic of slavery, which had divided the world into Black people and everyone else. To achieve this end, White supremacist lawmakers framed laws that strategically integrated “white” train cars, all the while claiming the laws did the opposite.

This article assesses the Liberal and Fascist administrations’ shifting attitudes towards colonial concubinage during the years of the repression of the anti-colonial resistance in Italian Libya (1911–32). Also known as mabruchismo, concubinage in Libya closely resembled its counterpart in Italian Eastern Africa, as it involved middle- to upper-class Italian officers coercing colonised women into engaging in often exploitative intimate relationships. During the first 20 years of colonisation of the territory, the colony's military administration employed an ambiguous stance regarding the practice, condemning it discursively to ingratiate itself with the local elites while unofficially allowing it to provide safe sex to its officers. When the resistance was defeated in the early 1930s, and the Fascist administration began its demographic colonisation plans, colonial concubinage was prohibited as out of place in a racially segregated settler colony. This article employs an analysis of official archival sources to trace the regulatory framework that shaped the lives of the Libyan women and Italian officers engaged in concubinage in a shifting colonial society. The colonial administrations’’ regulatory efforts toward colonial concubinage testify to the crucial role that Libyan women and racially ‘‘mixed’’ relationships played in shaping categories of race, class, and gender relative to the Italian colonial context.

Deploying a transnational approach, the article follows the explanatory framework of diffusion theories in aiming to provide a new perspective on the rise of national-populist actors across different sociopolitical and national-historical settings, in the context of ever-increasing interdependence and transfers of ideas. Thus, it focuses on reconceiving national-populist units not as evolving detached from one another, but rather influencing and providing discursive frames for each other, even in the context of non-institutionalized, indirect connections. For demonstrating the theoretical claims about diffusing ideas and transnational modes of borrowing in the European context, the article discusses the evolution of national-populist discourses in post-communist Georgia through an example of the emergence and exclusionary agenda of a social movement, “Georgian March.” Locating the case within diffusion models, the analysis scrutinizes discursive strategies and incorporation of “the West” in the movement’s discourse over the process of its collective identity construction. Thus, the article focuses on mediated experiences as providing models for certain behaviors; new roles and uses of social media as direct political platforms and channels for diffusions and borrowings; the factor of mutual references as tools for self-legitimization and mutual identification; and the relevance of borrowings and emulation among national-populist actors.

This article examines the impact of internal and external pressures on the parliamentary debate concerning the place of the working class within a newly emerging polity. Based on machine-assisted distant reading and close hermeneutics of parliamentary session transcripts, I ask how the first diet of the modern Polish state (1919–1922) responded to labour militancy and war. My analysis demonstrates that social unrest was successfully used by the left to foster inclusion of the popular classes in a political, social, and economic sense, contributing to the democratization of the state. In contrast, the external threat of war had an opposite effect. Although it justified the left advocating greater inclusion of workers and peasants because of their high death toll on the battlefields, it was actually the right that capitalized on national unity and readily used arguments about the Bolshevik threat or traitors among the landless masses to block or even reverse reforms aimed at democratization. The external threat of war, waged against a nominally leftist political force, helped the weak state to reduce the high impact of labour unrest on parliamentary proceedings.

The Roman presence in high mountainous areas has traditionally been considered marginal, but recent archaeological studies in several European regions have reshaped our understanding of the occupation and exploitation of these regions. Archaeological research conducted in the Cerdanya valley shows this to be the case in the eastern Pyrenees. The discovery and excavation of several indigenous settlements have allowed us to document an earlier and more intensive Roman presence there, attested by military activity and the exploitation of the area's resources. The site of Tossal de Baltarga (Lleida), where a group of Roman seal-rings was recovered, offers a window into this situation.

I provide a syntactic analysis of the take-time construction (It took an hour to complete the test). The investigation provides insight into well-known issues concerning the related tough-construction. Using a battery of standard syntactic diagnostics, I conclude that the take-time construction and the tough-construction require a predication analysis of the antecedent-gap chain, not a movement analysis. I also conclude that the nonfinite clause is in a modificational relationship with the main clause predicate, not a selectional relationship. Broadly, this study expands the class of tough-constructions, illustrating crucial variation among predicates, and pointing the way to a unified analysis. The investigation also reveals undiscussed aspects of English syntax, including the fact that English has a high applicative position.

According to the Competing Claims View (CCV) we decide between alternatives by looking at the competing claims held by affected individuals. The strength of these claims is a function of two features: how much they stand to benefit (or lose) by each alternative, and how badly off they would be in its absence. The view can be, and is, endorsed by both egalitarians and prioritarians. For the former the second condition will concern looking at how badly off the person is relative to others, whereas for the latter it will be how badly off she is in absolute terms. In this paper I want to argue that neither should be endorsed. The egalitarian version of CCV breaks down when attempting to assess the competing claims of possible persons who may never exist. Also, the view, on at least one plausible interpretation, leads to intransitive judgements. The prioritarian version of CCV, in turn, is vulnerable to its own unique objection, namely delivering an anti-prioritarian and rather implausible verdict in certain Single Person Cases.

Many proponents of the Harm Principle seem to implicitly assume that the principle is compatible with permitting the free exchange of goods and services, even if such exchanges generate so-called market harms. I argue that, as a result, proponents of the Harm Principle face a dilemma: either the Harm Principle’s domain cannot include a large number of non-market harm cases or market harms must be treated on par with non-market harms. I then go on to discuss three alternative arguments defending the status of market harms as exceptions to the Harm Principle and discuss why these arguments also fail.

The use of Spratt’s dog cakes is well documented in the diaries and reminiscences of many early Antarctic expedition members. Commercially produced dog food was promoted by the likes of Spratt’s as an advanced form of animal nutrition and would have been of interest to expedition planners who were already concerned with the nutritional requirements of expedition members. An approximately 100-year-old dog cake recovered from Antarctica was compared by chemical analysis and spectroscopic methods with a series of model dog cakes and a commercial dog biscuit to determine the composition and calorific content. The presence of bone fragments within the dog cake was confirmed, whereas starch in the bulk matrix of the sample was consistent with being a mixture of wheat and oat flour, while only minimal fat or oil was present. Calorific content, while insufficient compared to a modern feed for high-performance dogs, would nonetheless have been a valuable addition to the use of dried or frozen whole meat such as seal, fish, or pemmican and contributed additional energy compared to meat alone.

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based “civilizations” transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous “confessional state” served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.