For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

This article explores diversity, belonging and representation in the city of Ulan-Ude, Buryatia (Russian Federation). In particular, it looks at their discourses and practices as they take spatial forms in the fast-changing post-Soviet urban environment. Through case studies of two central locations in the city – a statue of Lenin and a Buddhist prayer wheel – the article reveals recent tendencies of “indigenization” (Szmyt 2014) in Ulan-Ude’s material and discoursive space, exploring them as instances that would suggest an image of a “contested city” (Low 1996). However, this article aims at complicating the latter concept, demonstrating that seeming contestations should be read in their particular context, taking into consideration local ideas and practices of accommodating diversity.

Humanity is at a crossroads in addressing biodiversity loss. Several assessments have reported on the weak compliance with the Aichi Biodiversity Targets by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To address this lack of compliance, the challenges in implementing and enforcing CBD obligations must be understood. Key implementation challenges of the CBD are identified through a content analysis of policy documents, multi-stakeholder interviews, and participant observation at the recent CBD Conference of the Parties. Building on this analysis, the article explores the extent to which the review mechanisms of international human rights law, with their various strategies for eliciting compliance, can help to improve CBD mechanisms. The findings of this article reveal insights that the CBD can draw from international human rights law to address these compliance challenges, such as facilitating the participation of civil society organizations to provide specific input, and engaging independent biodiversity experts to assess implementation. The article concludes that insights from human rights review mechanisms are useful for improving the emerging peer review mechanism of the CBD, which is important for strengthening accountability within the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Deciphering the bibliographical details of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, 1839-1843 has long been problematic owing to production of the Zoology in 24 parts over a 31-year time span (1844−1875), two publication periods (1844−1848, 1874−1875) each with a different publisher, non-consecutive issuance of text pages and plates, non-uniform plate numbering, ambiguities in publication dates and publisher imprints, conflicting bibliographical information in previous reports, and perhaps most of all the extreme rarity of parts still in their original state. The present report, based on what appears to be the most thorough examination of parts and reissues in original state to date, closes numerous knowledge gaps.

This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses the role of the press in constructing the meaning and implications of the 1963 count. In contrast with the literature's emphasis on identification, categorization, and enumeration, our focus is on how the census results informed a broader range of visual and textual narratives. It is argued that analysing the multiple ways in which demographic sources shape debates about trust, identity, and the state in the public sphere results in a richer understanding of the politics of counting people and narrows the gap between demographic and cultural history.

This article provides the first history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a legal entity. It makes two contributions. First, this history recasts the story of the so-called first disestablishment, revealing that it was longer and more contentious than is often assumed. Disestablishment produced a body of corporate law encoded with strong theological assumptions. Because corporate law was the primary mechanism for regulating churches, this created problems for groups like Roman Catholics and Latter-day Saints who did not share the law's theological commitments. Far from being settled in the early 1830s, the first disestablishment continued to spawn bitter legal battles into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, this article reveals legal personality as one of the key points of conflict between the Latter-day Saints and American society. This is a useful corrective to accounts that emphasize polygamy and theocracy as the points of legal contention. An understanding of the history of the church as a legal entity supplements these stories by revealing how the hard-fought legal battles of the late nineteenth century can be seen as an extension of the process of legal disestablishment that began during the American Revolution.

The battles of the Pacific War formally ended between mid-August and early September, 1945. However, the declarations of peace and surrender ceremonies that occurred during this time did not end informal battles across the Asian continent. Renegade Japanese military personnel refused to lay down their arms and repatriate quietly to their country. Some combed the waters between Japan and Korea in search of returnees attempting to repatriate with financial and material means in excess of that which the United States military governments allowed. Others sought to disrupt the occupation process by patrolling the streets of Korean cities and engaging in illegal and often violent activities. Koreans also caused problems by joining the Japanese in their postwar adventures or by harassing Japanese preparing to return to Japan and the Korean sympathizers who attempted to help them. Reportage of such actions appeared in the G-2 Periodic Report, which kept a daily record of such actions. These documents today open windows into the chaotic situation that the postwar era brought to Japanese and Koreans. Primarily through these reports, this paper sees the postwar belligerence that continued beyond official declarations of cease fire and peace in 1945 as kindling that sparked the broader conflicts of the late 1940s, and evolved to all-out war from the summer of 1950.

Improving knowledge about African historical demography is essential to addressing current population trends and achieving deeper understanding of social, economic, and political change in the past and present. I use census and parish register data from Tanganyika to address the origins of twentieth-century population growth, to describe how major changes in fertility and child mortality began in the 1940s, and to emphasise the significance of the large rise in fertility between the 1940s and 1970s. Through this work and my wider survey of parish registers in Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia, I consider the relationships between power, evidence, and meaning in these data sources. Alongside the macro gaps in Africa's population history are significant microsilences — lacunae in the sources and data which reflect the hegemonic structures within which they were produced. I suggest a moral demography approach to their analysis, borrowing from the reflexive and dialectic method found in studies of moral economy.