One key aspect of threat in terrorists’ language is incitement to violence. Contributing to a fuller understanding of how terrorists use language to encourage people to join their cause, this article examines the role of evaluative language in incitement strategies used by a far-rightist to align with and alienate particular social groups. The Affiliation framework (Knight 2010a; Zappavigna 2011; Etaywe & Zappavigna 2021; Etaywe 2022a), as grounded in systemic functional linguistics, is used to understand how values and social bonds are leveraged in the process of incitement, as explored in a manifesto published online by Brenton Tarrant, preceding his 2019 terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand. The findings reveal two main affiliation strategies used for incitement: communion (forging solidarity and alignments) and alienation. These strategies function to construct opposing social groups in discourse, with the condemned groups positioned as a threat, hostility legitimated as morally reasonable, and violence as warranted. (Far-right extremism, incitement, hate crimes, affiliation, morality of terrorism, forensic linguistics, conspiracy theory discourse)

This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is not there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity)*

This article explores Russian occupation policy in Ukraine as an adaptive tactic of Russia’s grand strategy and a manifestation of its military culture. Based on a comparative analysis of the Russian occupation policy during the hybrid and conventional stages of the Russian-Ukrainian war, including the employment of a de facto state playbook, we find both continuity and shifts in Russia’s approach. Although the main shift lies in the change of Russia’s conflict management in neighboring countries from reactive to proactive, the main continuities are the subordination of occupation policy to Russia’s geostrategic interests and path dependence in its military culture, which together lead to the employment of brutal violence against civilians and the demodernization of occupied territories.

The annexation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China in the 1950s led to an exodus of nearly 80,000 Tibetans along with the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso. Since then, thousands of Tibetans have taken refuge in the neighboring countries. Many live as refugees in different parts of the world today. Although the Tibetan refugee community has emerged as a successful model for other displaced communities, the individual struggles of these refugees in foreign lands cannot be underestimated. Dhompa's book A Home in Tibet shines a light on this other side of their exilic existence by raising questions about identity, home, country, and memory. It outlines the hardships, confusion, and contestations that Tibetans face on a daily basis. After a short introduction to provide context, this article reports a conversation with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, which grippingly addresses these issues.

About ten years ago, reports of lab-grown “mini brains” or “brains in a dish” appeared in the media, falling somewhere between the curious and the alarming. The trigger of these reports was a new method to grow three-dimensional neural tissue from human stem cells that recapitulates, to some degree, the early development of brain tissue. Despite their relatively small size and other limitations, such model systems capture in part the structure and functions of regions of the human brain and can also be combined to form so-called assembloids.

This paper considers the historical contexts in which theories of legal pluralism grew and developed between the final third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Theories of the state as a pluralistic system, as opposed to the absolute supremacy of state-made law, were the focus of German legal historical scholarship in the late nineteenth century, represented by the towering figure of Otto von Gierke. Gierke's image of a pluralist German Middle Ages largely influenced legal scholarship in Europe, even affecting the Italian scholar Santi Romano, whose book on the “legal order” has been considered a milestone in the construction of pluralist legal theories. Once passed from a legal historian like Gierke to a theorist like Romano, the model of a pluralist legal order returned to legal historiography, inspiring the innovative historical interpretation of medieval law proposed by Francesco Calasso. Gierke was a conservative, right-wing socialist, and Romano was a fascist and counselor of the fascist Italian government. Calasso, on the contrary, was a liberal opponent of the fascist regime. The three versions of legal pluralism, then, decline the same basic vision in three different ways, being influenced by the political contexts in which the three authors operated.