It seems futile to look for order in the tangle of norms that abound in the global extractive sector, even more so to look for the teleological principle that would give it meaning. In this tangle, normative regimes interact with each other—in a largely contingent manner—as elements of an ecosystem. We argue that inasmuch as order emerges in the global extractive normative ecosystem, it is a function of the success of norm entrepreneurs such as Export and Development Canada (EDC), Canada’s export credit agency, a financial institution adhering to the Equator Principles. Norms entrepreneurs like EDC perform various normative bricolages claiming to deliver different goods such as free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). We analyse how EDC tinkers with different normative instruments, including the International Finance Corporation’s Standard 7 regarding Indigenous Peoples, to deliver ‘FPIC compliance’ in jurisdictions that are deemed ‘deficient’. We argue that the political ontologies promoted by EDC’s notion of FPIC are better understood within the logic of leverage that underlies EDC’s Environmental and Social Risk Management Policy. These ontologies directly contradict notions of FPIC as expressions of Indigenous self-determination. In our view, offering such normative solutions as a palliative for ‘weak’ jurisdictions—a kind of ‘do-it-yourself (DIY) FPIC regime’ implemented by extractive companies—is thus deeply problematic. We conclude that the appraisal of such normative solutions as put forward by these norm entrepreneurs should look beyond the vocabulary these bricolages mobilise to also consider the political grammar that they induce in territories subject to extraction.

War is a lucrative business for the military industry, particularly in contexts of mass and structural violence, extensive violations of international law and genocide. For economically advanced states, the profits generated by military businesses are often seen as beneficial under the dynamics of the military-industrial complex. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has caused untold suffering that has ‘scarred the consciousness of humanity’, aptly illustrates this dynamic.

In such a context, states and corporations arguably have a duty under international law not to contribute to or benefit from the war economy of the state committing such violations. In practice, however, adhering to these obligations conflicts with the lucrative economic and geopolitical opportunities that this war economy provides. This essay reflects on the argumentative techniques used by states and corporations to justify continued military support for Israel, despite its clear contradiction with their international legal obligations.

In the Lafarge decision of 7 September 2021, the French Cour de cassation resolved a long-standing unclarity about the interpretation of French criminal law on complicity in the context of multinational corporations’ involvement in international crimes. The court found that complicity in crimes against humanity can be characterized as soon as a business actor is aware that its actions can facilitate the criminal activities of the main perpetrator, without sharing their specific intent to commit the crime. With this ruling, France’s highest criminal court asserted that the transfer of money from multinational cement company Lafarge to the Islamic State (ISIS) to maintain its industrial activity in northern Syria could trigger its liability for complicity in crimes against humanity. This article summarizes this case from a French and international criminal law perspective, focusing on the charge of complicity in crimes against humanity, and assessing the potential implications of this jurisprudence to the arms industry.

In 2018, human rights organizations filed a criminal complaint in Italy against the directors of the Italian armaments export licensing authority (UAMA) and the CEO of the arms manufacturer RWM Italia, following the discovery of bomb remnants on the site of an airstrike in Yemen that killed six civilians. The criminal complaint was dismissed in March 2023, despite the judge ruling that UAMA’s directors had violated the Arms Trade Treaty. In July 2023, the victims filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights against Italy, alleging a violation of the right to life. Drawing on an analysis of the criminal investigation files, this piece assesses the failures of the Italian state and RWM Italia to comply with their international human rights obligations regarding arms transfers. It considers the potential for improving accountability within the arms trade via domestic and European courts.

The Solutrean in the Cantabrian region is one of the periods in the Upper Palaeolithic with the highest number of faunal studies conducted in recent decades, which offer valuable insights into how human groups exploited their environment for survival. Here, the authors analyse twenty-four archaeological levels from twelve sites dated between c. 22 and 19.5 ky cal bp, focusing on the exploitation of large mammals through palaeoecological and palaeoeconomic approaches. Their examination of prey acquisition and transport, age profiles, seasonality, nutrition, and energy costs shows that hunting decisions were influenced not only by the economic profitability of prey but also by the environment, topography, climate, animal behaviour, and species abundance. This multifactorial perspective provides an updated view of subsistence strategies at the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum.

This article challenges long-held assumptions that Raknehaugen, the largest prehistoric mound in Scandinavia, served as a high-status burial monument. While traditionally seen as reflecting elite power in the Late Iron Age, this interpretation is poorly supported by archaeological evidence, which has consistently failed to reveal any evidence of a burial. Instead, the author argues that the mound’s construction should be understood as a communal, ritual response to a catastrophic landslide that took place in the wake of the ad 536 ‘Dust Veil’ climatic crisis. Drawing on a relational landscape approach, recent LiDAR analysis, and dendrochronological data, the study situates Raknehaugen within a dynamic landscape and suggests that it functioned as a structure intended to restore the cosmological and social order. Reframing the mound as an active agent in a sacred landscape opens new avenues for interpreting Iron Age monumentality beyond elite-centric narratives, emphasizing landscape, materiality, and collective ritual practices.

Traditional Christian theism maintains that God’s creative act is intentional and rational, which suggests God must have ideas or creative blueprints in mind when creating. We also have good reason to think that God’s creative act displays creativity or artistry. Tom Ward has recently argued that God gets his creative blueprints from knowing himself, a position he calls ‘Containment Exemplarism’. However, Paul Gould has recently argued that Containment Exemplarism undermines God’s status as paradigmatically artistic or creative. I argue that Gould’s argument is unsuccessful. As I will argue, the conception of creativity Gould employs as the basis for his argument, if understood permissively, can be reconciled to Containment Exemplarism. If understood in a manner to avoid this reconciliation, the conception of creativity Gould utilises is unduly restrictive and leads to unintuitive consequences. Containment Exemplarists would thus be entitled to reject it.

This study explores the interaction between pragmatic and phonetic variation, investigating the usage of just in British English. Based on an acoustic and auditory phonetic analysis of 1,260 tokens of just spoken by 100 male speakers of Standard Southern British English, I argue that speakers utilise phonetic resources to indicate pragmatic meaning alongside predictable contextual effects. The realisation of each of the canonical segments of just (/d͡ʒ/, /ʌ/, /s/, /t/) were investigated using duration, centre of gravity and vowel formant estimates. Discourse-pragmatic uses of just were more likely to exhibit phonetic reduction than adverbial uses in terms of word duration, vowel elision and quality, but not for /s/ and /t/ duration. The realisation of /t/ was dependent on following context, but the effect of function on vowel realisation and duration remained robust despite interactions with surrounding contexts and token stress. This suggests that speakers signal different functions of just via segmental realisation. Analysing just in phonetic detail within its pragmatic and contextual environment describes how the word is shaped in its representation.

This study investigates the English concealed passive construction (CPC), as in the car needs washing, using authentic corpus data. While previous research has explored certain aspects of the CPC, little attention has been given to strongly associated matrix verbs (or verb types) and interactions between matrix verbs (or verb types) and other elements of the construction. To address these issues, we apply three types of collostructional analysis, and our findings indicate that no single, straightforward pattern emerges with respect to real-life grammatical properties of the CPC. We then show that the well-known distinction between raising and control constructions, formalized in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), offers a more systematic account for the authentic properties of two subtypes of the CPC. We further argue that this raising vs. control contrast is not arbitrary but arises from the two senses of the verb need, which exhibits a particularly strong statistical association with the CPC.

This plenary critically examines the role of English medium instruction (EMI) preparatory programmes in supporting student success across global higher education. Drawing on a systematic, critical review of empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025, it explores how such programmes influence learning outcomes, motivation, pedagogy, and equity. Through the narrative lens of a Turkish student, Eylül, the discussion highlights how linguistic proficiency alone seldom ensures disciplinary engagement or academic confidence. Evidence from recent EMI research demonstrates that programmes integrating language and content, authenticity, and translanguaging practices most effectively prepare students to ‘think through English’. The paper concludes by identifying gaps in longitudinal and cross-contextual evidence and calls for pedagogical and policy designs that move beyond language support toward sustainable, inclusive, and identity-affirming EMI education.

Narratives possess a particular ability both to encapsulate and engender political/ideological aims. The extreme-right is aware of the pedagogic potential of fiction; however, their fiction is only rarely examined from a discourse-analytic perspective. This article analyses a short story written and distributed by a US neo-Nazi organisation. First, my analysis examines: narrative action processes, that is, the (transitive and intransitive) actions of characters, which drive narrative change; and modal tokens relevant to the evaluative function of the narrative. Second, I argue that narrative action processes and modal tokens represent the ‘warp and woof’ of narrative, since they (i) demonstrate how stories connect events, over time, and (ii) appraise the social/political meaning of these events. My analysis has significance for the discourse-analytic understanding of narrative more generally, as well as the specific ways that fantasies of agency and violence function in this story, to incite political action. (Narrative, narrative action processes, modal tokens, extreme-right, neo-Nazi fantasy)

This paper revisits debates about the right to communicate from the late 1960s to early 2000s, examining how different actors engaged with this concept in reaction to imminent technological changes and their implications for society. It explores how these actors advocated for or contested this concept at different international forums such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to advance different agendas for the international order. In telling the story of the right to communicate, this paper adopts a historical-materialist approach, examining discursive struggles as reflective of and conditioned by material and social relations and their contradictions, and reflects on the question of the promise and perils of human rights for social change, considering not only the malleability of rights language but the material conditions of which human rights concepts are reflective and constitutive.

As digital or video gaming has grown in popularity around the globe in the last few decades, attention to its potential as a means to learn L2s (second, foreign, or additional languages) has grown, as evidenced by an increase in academic journal-based treatment of research in DGBELLT (digital game-based and enhanced second/foreign language learning and teaching), alongside monographs and edited volumes. To identify common findings and research trends, we conducted a review of recent research and scholarship in the young field published between January 2021 and December 2024 inclusive in major academic journals and edited volumes. We ultimately selected 76 pieces for the review, categorizing them into five types or foci: reviews and meta-analyses, studies of game-enhanced L2 learning and L2 gaming, game-enhanced pedagogy, L2 learning game design and development, and teacher education. After synthesizing the pieces in each category, we offer concise take-aways and discussion, implicating gaps, needs, and future directions.

This article provides a formal phonological analysis of s-retraction, the process by which /s/ is realized as [ʃ] in /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, e.g. street [ʃʧɹiːt]. While previous research has focused on the sociophonetic and acoustic aspects of this phenomenon, this study situates s-retraction within Element Theory (ET), demonstrating that it is driven by the affrication of the following coronal stop. The analysis shows that both the rhotic /ɹ/ and the glide /j/ function as palatal triggers, as they both contain the palatal element |I|, which spreads leftward, affecting the coronal stop and, subsequently, the preceding /s/.

The study also explains why s-retraction is restricted to /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, while being absent in /spɹ/ and /skɹ/. This absence is attributed to elemental antagonism, as labials and velars contain |U|, which prevents affrication. The article further accounts for dialectal variation in yod coalescence and yod dropping, showing that the presence of these processes determines whether affrication – and, consequently, s-retraction – occurs.

Crucially, the evidence from external sandhi suggests that s-retraction is an active phonological process, rather than a purely phonetic effect. The findings align with broader cross-linguistic palatalization patterns, supporting the view that s-retraction is governed by systematic phonological principles.