There are two general pathways towards climate change litigation in China: tort-based litigation to hold carbon emitters accountable in civil law, and administrative litigation against the government to demand better climate regulation. While the first pathway is gaining momentum among Chinese scholars, this article argues that legal barriers to applying tort-based rules to climate change should be fairly acknowledged. The article argues that China's legal framework for environmental impact assessment (EIA) provides more openness and flexibility for the resolution of climate change disputes. Therefore, EIA-based climate lawsuits, which challenge environmental authorities for not adequately taking climate change factors into account in decision-making processes, encounter relatively fewer legal barriers, require less radical legal or institutional reform, and have greater potential to maintain existing legal orders. The regulatory effects produced by EIA-based litigation suggest that the scholarship on climate change litigation in China should take such litigation seriously because it could influence both governments and emitters in undertaking more proactive efforts. This China-based study, with a special focus on judicial practice in the largest developing country, will shine a light on China's contribution to transnational climate litigation.

Present-day English is unlike Old English in not using singular demonstrative pronouns with anaphoric reference to human beings. This article adds to the contributions of Cole (2017) and Los & van Kemenade (2018) in our understanding of the factors determining the choice between personal and demonstrative pronouns in Old English by documenting the hitherto unexamined use of these pronouns as heads of relative clauses. It also traces how the singular demonstrative pronouns referring to humans retreated as heads of relative clauses in Early Middle English. A corpus-based study shows that third-person personal pronouns were unusual as heads of relative clauses in Old English and normally referred to specific individuals, while demonstratives were the pronouns of choice for generic reference but could also refer to specific individuals. The increased use of personal pronouns for generic reference is well underway in Early Middle English. While the retreat of the singular demonstrative pronouns to refer to humans in Early Middle English seems to have some connection with the reduced marking of feature distinctions in that period, a simple explanation in terms of loss of gender is untenable.

This article examines the contribution of the FILEF (Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Migranti e Famiglie) to the European debate on the human, social and civil rights of migrant workers during the 1970s. Through the project of an ‘International Statute of Migrant Workers’ Rights’, presented to the European Parliament in 1971, FILEF submitted a proposal for the reform of the 1968 Community Regulation on the Free Movement of Migrant Workers in Europe in order to extend to workers from non-European countries the same rights and protections accorded to those from the EEC area. The analysis is focused on the discussion around the proposal in the committees of the European Parliament as well as on the debate that developed within the transnational network of the FILEF during the international conferences organised by the Federation from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s.

While almost all European democracies from the 1980s started to accord legal recognition to same-sex couples, Italy was, in 2016, the last West European country to adopt a regulation, after a tortuous path. Why was Italy such a latecomer? What kind of barriers were encountered by the legislative process? What were the factors behind the policy change? To answer these questions, this article first discusses current morality policymaking, paying specific attention to the literature dealing with same-sex partnerships. Second, it provides a reconstruction of the Italian policy trajectory, from the entrance of the issue into political debate until the enactment of the civil union law, by considering both partisan and societal actors for and against the legislative initiative. The article argues that the Italian progress towards the regulation of same-sex unions depended on the balance of power between change and blocking coalitions and their degree of congruence during the policymaking process. In 2016 the government formed a broad consensus and the parliament passed a law on civil unions. However, the new law represented only a small departure from the status quo due to the low congruence between actors within the change coalition.

While the intergovernmental climate regime increasingly recognizes the role of non-state actors in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement (PA), the normative linkages between the intergovernmental climate regime and the non-state dominated ‘transnational partnership governance’ remain vague and tentative. A formalized engagement of the intergovernmental climate regime with transnational partnerships can increase the effectiveness of partnerships in delivering on climate mitigation and adaptation, thereby complementing rather than replacing government action. The proposed active engagement with partnerships would include (i) collecting and analyzing information to develop and prioritize areas for transnational and partnership engagement; (ii) defining minimum criteria and procedural requirements to be listed on an enhanced Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action platform; (iii) actively supporting strategic initiatives; (iv) facilitating market or non-market finance as part of Article 6 PA; and (v) evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships in the context of the enhanced transparency framework (Article 13 PA) and the global stocktake (Article 14 PA). The UNFCCC Secretariat could facilitate engagement and problem solving by actively orchestrating transnational partnerships. Constructing effective implementation partnerships, recording their mitigation and adaptation goals, and holding them accountable may help to move climate talks from rhetoric to action.

From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology companies have participated in the search for solutions to new challenges. One of these has been the need for public health authorities to engage in contact-tracing to help curb the spread of the disease. Manual contact-tracing for public health purposes is a well-established component of the management of epidemics and pandemics. Public health authorities identify infected individuals, question them about close contacts, and then reach out to those contacts with the appropriate public health advice. From the outset of the pandemic, many believed that technology could play a role in supplementing manual contact-tracing. How it could do so quickly became tied to issues of how it should do so, engendering a normative discussion affecting the partnership between business and government in the large-scale design and deployment of technology for public health surveillance.

Sentences like They tricked him into believing them and They charged him with abandoning them raise interesting issues for selection and control. We show that these two sentences exemplify two distinct classes, subsuming P-gerund constructions that are formed with seven distinct prepositions: implicative vs. nonimplicative constructions. The first class displays a cluster of restrictions, both syntactic and semantic, which are absent from the second class: It resists partial control or embedded lexical subjects, and it bans object drop and movement of the P-gerund phrase. The existence of these two classes, as well as their empirical profiles, follow from Landau’s (2015) theory of control and challenge alternative approaches.

This article examines the role of ethnicity and ethnic parties as stabilizing factors in Southeast European party systems. It compares two ethnically divided countries in Southeast Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethnic identities that form the political cleavage are firm, and Montenegro, where they are malleable. Theoretically, it addresses the debate between scholars who either find stability or instability in East European post-communist party systems. The article traces the role of ethnicity in the formation and development of electoral contests and compares the two cases by utilizing measures of block volatility, based on analysis of official electoral data. We argue that party systems in ethnically diverse countries are stable at the subsystems level, but unstable within them. In BiH, firm ethnic identity stabilizes the party system by limiting competition between blocks, leading to closure. Malleable ethnic identity in Montenegro opens competition to non-ethnic parties seeking to bridge ethnic divisions, leading to more instability. We find that party system dynamics in ethnically divided new democracies depend on identity rigidity and cleavage salience, in addition to levels of heterogeneity.

Covid-19 seems to have unlocked the reality of democracy's ongoing tension in many parts of the world, including India. The present government, led by Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, enjoys absolute majority in the lower House of Samshad (Indian Parliament); thus satisfies WHO requirement of strong political leadership for meeting the challenge of Covid-19 pandemic. Through analysis of various acts, rules, notifications, social media behaviour, media-representations and reports, two aspects of governance become relevant: the process of policy-communication on the pandemic, particularly while declaring and extending lockdowns, through widely publicised speeches of the Prime Minister, packed with emotive appeals and policy-propaganda. However, government's several omissions and commissions have defied the norms of democratic accountability. In response, opposition political parties and civil society activism have continuously contested these trends, for stretching the democratic space wider and achieving better governance outcomes.

This article aims to expose the political and cultural processes that contributed to the eradication of problematic memories of the Italian colonial period during the national reconstruction following the Second World War. It offers a systematic examination of newsreels and documentaries about the Italian former colonies that were produced between 1946 and 1960, a film corpus that has largely been neglected by previous scholarship. The article first dissects the ambiguous political scenario that characterised the production of this footage through the study of original archival findings. The footage configured a particular form of self-exculpatory memory, which obstructed a thorough critique of the colonial period while articulating a new discourse about the future presence of Italy in the former colonies. This seems to be a case of aphasia rather than amnesia, insofar as the films addressed not an absence, but an inability to comprehend and articulate a critical discourse about the past. This aphasic configuration of colonial memories will be tackled through a close reading of the voice-over and commentary. In so doing, this work suggests that the footage actively contributed to spread un-problematised narratives and memories about the colonial period, whose results still infiltrate Italian contemporary society, politics and culture.

Selling to strangers was a significant occupational hazard for retailers in late Georgian Britain, one that was hard to avoid. The dangers were especially great in larger towns and cities, where shopkeepers were dependent on a steady stream of passing trade composed of a large number of customers that they did not know. Though traders risked financial loss and even possible prosecution by accepting counterfeit banknotes, refusal to accept them meant losing vital custom. In areas of growing urban populations, tradesmen and women thus faced an increasingly tricky dilemma in their day-to-day business as they dealt with more strangers whose trustworthiness and personal credit were extremely hard to gauge, at a time when banknote forgery was on the rise. The decisions that retailers made about both banknotes and the individuals who presented them for payment illustrate some of the ways that town dwellers sought to navigate the rising anonymity of urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article suggests that traders relied on a series of techniques that in previous experience usually worked: examining banknotes and those strangers who presented them with care, relying on the expertise of neighbors and members of their household, and dealing by preference with individuals who appeared to be linked to their local community. These behaviors demonstrate that “modernity” might have affected the lives and outlooks of ordinary Londoners in unexpected and contradictory ways, some strongly linked to older forms of society.

One third of Estonian residents identify Russian as their mother tongue, and despite having lived in Estonia for decades, many of them are not fluent in the Estonian language and choose to remain stateless rather than obtain Estonian citizenship by passing the state language exam. Ethnic segregation in Estonia continues to be a matter of bitter political debate, not least in the context of tensions with neighboring Russia and pressure from the EU to solve the problem. While a lot of state resources are being spent on what the Estonian-speaking public often perceives as vain attempts at integration of Russophones, several civil society initiatives have recently emerged to provide platforms for informal language socialization. In this article, I focus on the case study of the Keelegrupp (Language Group) which provides a venue for interaction between Estonian and Russian speakers, to analyze what makes this informal organization more successful at responding to the challenges of language-based segregation than professional, state-funded initiatives. Ethnographic documentation and analysis of this initiative is essential given that its experience and structure are highly applicable for and transferrable to many other states with similar situations of ethnic segregation, not the least the neighboring Baltic countries.

This article examines extradition in nineteenth-century Ottoman diplomacy by exploring an illustrative legal conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the United States. The Kelly affair, which revolved around the murder of an Ottoman subject by an American sailor in Smyrna (Izmir) in 1877, sparked a diplomatic dispute that lasted for several decades. The controversy stemmed from conflicting interpretations of the treaty of commerce signed in 1830. The inability to reach a consensus pushed the parties to resort to the 1874 Extradition Treaty, which was the only official Ottoman extradition agreement. The Kelly affair poignantly illustrates how extradition, an issue of international law that touched on territorial jurisdiction and subjecthood, was a complicated and ill-defined matter when addressed in practice. By investigating the confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the USA, both putative secondary powers on the international stage at the time, this article challenges the existing historical narratives on interimperial relations that highlight Europe as the locus of power and agency. Even though ad hoc political actions overshadowed the binding force of the treaty text, it demonstrates how both governments adopted a political strategy that moved beyond the intrinsic arguments and logic of the capitulations to embrace a novel legal discourse.

The Lezgin irredentist movement is one of the less-studied national movements in the post-Soviet space, despite affecting the strategically important Russian-Azerbaijani borderlands and the bordering process between the two post-Soviet states. This article aims to fill this gap and to examine the impact of the Lezgin national movement on the development of territorial nationalism in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on the analysis of media publications in three Azerbaijani newspapers between 1992 and 1996, I argue that the movement contributed to consolidating the territorial vision of the Azerbaijani nation as incorporating groups historically settled in this territory. While media coverage stressed friendship between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins, the responsibility for secessionist claims was placed on external forces, particularly Russia and Armenia. In the long term, this framing led to the securitization of ethnic minority activism as a major threat to Azerbaijani statehood.

In 1865, the British Colony of Hong Kong extradited a Chinese shop-owner on a charge of piracy and incited a barrage of criticism when the offender was punished by the infamous “death by a thousand cuts” in Canton upon his rendition. Rumors surfaced identifying him as a rebel chief in the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). By excavating court records, diplomatic exchanges, and legal discourses surrounding this case, the article engages in a critical examination of extradition law and implementation in mid-19th century between Hong Kong and China. It examines how the case played into the politics of four administrative localities - Hong Kong, Canton, Beijing, and London - and uncovers the networks of agencies at play. It contributes to the history of extradition by contextualizing the “political offence exception” in international law and explains how this exception, ill-defined and vaguely conceived as it was, found its way into the implementation of Article 21 of the Treaty of Tianjin on the rendition of fugitives from Hong Kong to China, with a significant impact on the Qing's governance and jurisdiction of cross-border fugitives.