This article examines the extent to which overseas Chinese educators at Confucius Institutes (CIs) in Thailand act as representatives and practitioners of Chinese national identity. Though working for the state, CI teachers promote Chinese language and culture according to their own perceptions. In this paper, participatory observation and in-depth interviews were employed to assess how CI teachers in Thailand articulate their Chineseness and national identity. The findings show that (1) banal national sentiment was an important expression of the CI teachers' national identity, in terms of psychological attachment and ingrained behaviors; (2) pragmatic identity politics are used to distinguish various contributors to the CI; (3) the materialization of Chinese national identity recontextualizes the country via national symbols and cultural activities. The intricacy of the everyday activities of CI teachers illuminates the trans-nationalization and localization of Chinese national identity, which constitute the “doing” of the nation that the imaginary Chinese community in Thailand represents not just a government-endorsed national identity but also the CI teachers' creation of tradition.

This article aims to strengthen the link between history and theory by contributing to the scholarly conversation on “an integrated historical social science.” By examining the case of Qing China, it introduces a historically oriented and theoretically informed research agenda and toolkit for studying state making through the interactive lens of political sustainability and critical crisis. Using two historical upheavals as a prism, this article shows how destructive crises can have the unintended consequence of facilitating empire building and fostering political sustainability. Furthermore, it draws on theoretical insights from political science and sociology to construct a general framework for measuring the sustainability of political development and explaining the complex role of great crisis. This interdisciplinary model not only sheds new lights on the causative role of event, conjuncture, and structure but also enriches existing approaches to comparative historical analysis in general and state making in particular.

In his article, Thomas Rissfeldt argues the compatibility of palliative care with euthanasia and assisted suicide.1 By his account, many working within the field of palliative care feel that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are incompatible with palliative care. Wrongly, according to the author, since (1) the aims of palliative care and euthanasia/assisted suicide are not different, (2) euthanasia and assisted suicide are compatible with the fundamental role of the physician as healer, and (3) euthanasia and assisted suicide do not necessarily constitute patient abandonment.2

August 16th, 2022 marked the 10th anniversary of the Marikana Massacre in Rustenburg, South Africa. This was the worst incident of mass killing by police since the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 in the heyday of the Apartheid regime. In the first days of August 2012, workers at Lonmin plc, a platinum group metals mining company, went on a wildcat strike demanding a minimum salary of 12500 Rand, circa 800 USD, per month and protesting against the poor living conditions they and their families where subjected to in the Marikana vicinity, an area 100 km north of Johannesburg where the mine is located. As days passed, tension escalated leading to the killing of ten people, including three non-striking workers, two security guards, three striking workers, and two police officers. Various attempts to facilitate negotiations with striking workers were turned down by Lonmin management. Instead, Lonmin managers actively engaged in communications with senior political leaders, police officers, and state mining officials to frame the situation as one that required strong and decisive police intervention.1

David Dranove and Lawton Burn’s new collaboration Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America provides readers with a comprehensive tutorial on consolidation in United States healthcare markets over the past 40 years. Although the book is most explicitly aimed at those who look around and wonder how we arrived at a healthcare landscape dominated by giants, anyone with a serious interest in the prices of U.S. healthcare will want to have this rigorous and timely treatment on their bookshelf.

Because conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) can address the deep roots of violence, many scholars and policymakers have assumed them to be an effective and innocuous tool to take on the issue. I argue that while CCTs may have positive economic effects, they can also trigger social discord, criminal predation, and political conflict and, in doing so, increase violence. To test this claim, I take advantage of the exogenous shock caused by the randomized expansion of Mexico’s flagship CCT, PROGRESA/Oportunidades. I find that the experimental introduction of the program increased rather than decreased violence. Then, I analyze all the data compiled by LAPOP on the issue over the years. I find that, other things constant, Latin Americans are more exposed to violence and insecurity when they participate in CCTs than when they do not. These findings urge us to reconsider the effects of social programs on violence.

There has been tremendous momentum in adoption of business and human rights regulations, specifically national legislation that mandate human rights due diligence. While these laws have been heralded as the torchbearers of progress, this article approaches national legislation on business and human rights by placing them in context of a North–South divide through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens. It looks at the form of regulation of transnational corporations (national/international) – not the substance – and illustrates the neo-colonial flavour of these laws by diving into the narrative behind the adoption of the French devoir de vigilance law. It illustrates that the French law can also be read as an attempt to universalise European values while reinforcing power hierarchies. The claim of this article is that national legislation cannot be a substitute for a treaty but only a path towards one, because national legislation structurally lacks means to take the Global South participation seriously.

This study is a conceptual replication of Teimouri et al.'s (2022) investigation into the validity of the second language (L2) grit scale (the L2-Grit scale). There are several concerns about the generalizability of the findings of Teimouri et al. (2022), especially regarding the discriminant validity of the scale and the relation of L2 grit with language achievements. A conceptual replication study was conducted because these concerns could be addressed by using a different methodology. The main findings include: (a) the factor structure of L2 grit was supported in the replication sample (106 English majors at a Japanese university), (b) the results support the discriminant validity of L2 grit, but in a different way from the initial study, and (c) L2 grit was a consistent predictor of L2-specific Grade Point Average and standardized test score. The results obtained lend further support for the validity of the L2-Grit scale.

Since the election of Aleksandar Vučić and the Progressives, Serbia has witnessed a slow decline in media freedom, which scholars such as Subotić (2017) argue has been worse than in the 1990s. Although the government had adopted a package of three laws in August 2014 to bring the media landscape up to European standards, the implementation of the laws has been limited and marginal, with the Progressives engaging in fake compliance. The adoption of the new media strategy 2020–2025 in 2020 has not led to genuine domestic reform and compliance to EU conditionality. In fact, the EU Commission and journalists’ associations in Serbia have criticized the decline in Serbia’s media freedom, citing continued attacks on journalists and indirect political and economic control through advertising and project co-financing, which continue to be features of the Serbian media landscape. In the absence of clear and credible EU conditionality, the decline of media freedom is in the eye of the beholder, where the gap between public engagements with Serbian politicians and the critical stance of progress reports regarding the degradation of the media have enabled Serbian elites to exploit this ambiguity to continue their strategy of fake compliance vis-à-vis rule of law.

William Wood argues that analytic theology can be included as a part of the academic study of religion. He describes two types of benefits to this inclusion: benefits accruing to the study of religion on the one hand, and benefits accruing to analytic theology on the other. I find the first type of benefit that he describes to be real, but think that within the overall compass of the interests of the academic study of religion in Christian traditions it is quite small in scope, even in a context in which doctrines are a topic of particular interest. The second type of benefit, that accruing to analytic theology, is more of a puzzle. On the one hand, I find that one species of benefit that Wood describes with some clarity is unpromising, as it seems to amount to an opportunity for yet more defensive apologetics. But on the other hand, some of what Wood says is compatible with the idea that analytic theology stands to be improved in ways that are not yet clear by engagement with the academic study of religion. I conclude with a critical glance at Wood's attempt to defend analytic theology as a method of inquiry from the charge of historical shallowness.

This essay focuses on analyzing the history of the evolution of the nationalist memory narrative in recent memory politics in Ukraine. It observes the political rehabilitation of the radical nationalist movement and its leaders and organizations, followed by public recognition and glorification, and the evolution of this memory narrative since the beginning of the 1990s from local memory to the centerpiece of the state politics of memory. This article examines the memorialization and commemoration of the nationalist movement at regional and national levels (sites of memory, memorial dates, renaming of topographical objects, movies, TV series, etc.), policies aimed at the promotion of the nationalist historical myth, political controversies, roles of major actors, public debates on these issues, societal responses, and international disputes.

The limited success of employment-based social protection measures under the diverging patterns of post-COVID-19 recovery rekindled interest in a social policy framework known as the Basic Income (BI) support. We test the potential of the BI program using five alternative scenarios ranging from households with income less than half of median income to all adults with estimates of their respective fiscal costs. We then employ an applied general equilibrium model to analyze the economy-wide effects and welfare implications for Turkey in the long run through 2030. We evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare effects of both a business-as-usual fiscal program and an alternative (green BI scenario) comprising of (i) carbon tax levied on the fossil fuel producing industry; (ii) corporate income taxation policy reform that aims at expanding the revenue base and consolidation of the fiscal space of the government; and (iii) restructuring of public consumption expenditures by introducing rationality and efficiency in the structure of fiscal expenditures. Our model solutions reveal that a green BI scenario not only achieves a higher GDP and welfare in the medium to long run but also helps Turkey to reduce its carbon emissions in line with the global policy challenges of a green recovery.

During the last decade, environmental issues have gained saliency in Turkish politics, especially after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. This article is on the relationship between politics and deforestation in Turkey. It combines possible major drivers—political, economic, and climatic—of deforestation in Turkey with high-resolution satellite data on deforestation to conduct a systemic empirical analysis. The results show that districts in which Justice and Development Party mayors are in power have higher deforestation. The effect is around an average combined area of forty-two football fields in a given district. The article also shows that increased mining activities and newly built hydropower plants positively correlate with deforestation.