In 2004, Cape Town Opera mounted a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the former apartheid prison on Robben Island. Sponsored by Den Norske Opera, and endorsed by the South African government, the production was presented as a celebration of the country's tenth year of democracy. This article investigates the vision of democracy performed by Fidelio on Robben Island and asks how it interacts with the founding principles of the new South African political order. Situating the production within the context of contemporaneous debates about cultural identity and representation in a democratic South Africa, I argue that Fidelio on Robben Island performed a legitimizing function designed to endorse the validity of the state and of opera as a democratic cultural form.

The concept of a ‘safe harbour’ has been mentioned in several contexts during ongoing discussions around regulatory developments towards mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (mHREDD) which continue at international, European and national levels. This article analyses the concept of a ‘safe harbour’ and how it relates to human rights due diligence (HRDD) as described in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). It discusses examples of other types of safe harbours which were recognized in legislation and case law; considers that a safe harbour could result in a ‘tick-box’ approach; highlights the implications for access to remedy; and distinguishes a safe harbour exemption from a defence of having undertaken HRDD in accordance with an expected standard of conduct.

Agricultural practices are key for understanding socio-economic change, community organization, and relationships with landscape and the environment. Under the Roman Empire, cereals were vital for supplying urban and military populations, yet cereal husbandry practices within villa landscapes remain underexplored. In this article, the author applies new methods to analyse a large assemblage of charred plant remains from an area of chalk downland in central-southern England in order to evaluate changes in cereal production strategies over the Middle Iron Age to late Roman periods. Archaeobotany, carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, and functional weed ecology are combined to reconstruct crop husbandry practices, in order to establish the cereal production system of Roman villas and the preceding Iron Age settlements, and to consider the environmental and socio-economic impact of cereal production systems.

This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical performances and French-language textbooks (or ‘grammars’). My central concern is to consider how audiences in London – who had little exposure to the rich satirical and cultural connotations that these tunes had acquired over years of performance in Paris – might have been able to grasp their significance within staged works performed by visiting Parisian troupes between the years 1718 and 1735. I suggest that in tracing the transmission of tunes from France to England, scholars should consider a wider range of print sources, since vaudevilles had a social life extending beyond the plays in which they were performed. To this end, I focus on analysing vaudevilles found in French ‘grammars’. The pedagogical nature of these sources explicitly puts on display how French culture was translated for an English readership. By comparing the tunes found in grammars with plays that used the same tunes, I reveal both how Londoners could have become acquainted with the Parisian understanding of French tunes and how the grammar books could have shifted the meanings of these tunes for English readers and audiences. Ultimately, the circulation of French tunes abroad through grammars directs our attention to the material and cultural practices undergirding the mobility of eighteenth-century musical culture.

In recent decades, the rule of law has not been commonly associated with Afghanistan. Instead, its politics have been more likely to be framed in terms of lawlessness and ungovernability. But this trope does not do justice to Afghanistan's longer history of statehood or experiences of constitution-making. Over the course of the twentieth century, Afghan leaders drafted seven constitutions (in 1923, 1931, 1964, 1976, 1980, 1987, and 1990). These constitutions represented leaders’ attempts to assert their legitimacy and enforce their vision of an Afghan nation-state. This article sheds fresh light on Afghan elites’ top-down framing of Afghan national identity through ethnolinguism, exploring the legalization of Pashto as both an official and national language in Afghanistan's constitutions. Reformers intended Pashto to transgress community, kinship, and regional boundaries and act as a source of unity (though one in which ethnolinguistic minorities had little say). Tracing Afghanistan's constitutional history from 1923–90, this article reveals language as a constitutional arena for debating Afghan modernity and identity. As such, this article integrates Afghanistan into legal histories of South Asia while emphasizing how Afghan constitutionalists engaged in the process of law-making as a means of expressing Afghanistan's own independence and ideas of modernity.