This study aims to analyze how two popular television series, Famagusta (produced in Greece) and Bir Zamanlar Kıbrıs (Once Upon a Time in Cyprus, produced in Turkey), reflect the political approaches of Greece and Turkey toward the Cyprus issue. Television series are often powerful media for national narrative building, and both Famagusta and Bir Zamanlar Kıbrıs series demonstrate the ways historical events are selectively portrayed to reinforce contemporary political perspectives regarding Cyprus. Beyond simply retelling historical events, both series are used to reflect the ongoing efforts of Greece and Turkey to assert rights over Cyprus, a geopolitically significant island with a complex colonial past. This study will analyze how these series engage in narrative framing to legitimize national claims over a distant territory, using television series as a medium for both national narratives and colonial continuity. The study will explore the underlying messages, rhetorical tools, and symbolic elements that each series uses to shape the public perception about the Cyprus issue, drawing on concepts from media studies and international relations.

This article examines the political ecology of water and ethnic conflict in Kirkuk, Iraq. Kirkuk is an internally disputed frontier territory, controlled by the federal government of Iraq but claimed by Kurdish nationalists. Kirkuk contains some of Iraq’s largest oil fields and most productive agricultural lands. In recent decades Kirkuk has also faced water shortages tied to global climate change. The article deploys survey data, supplemented by qualitative historical research, to evaluate framing of environmental security and the relationship between water insecurity, ethnic conflict, and governance. We find that commitments to competing programs for territorial control in Kirkuk correlate with different framing of ecological risk factors. Arabic-speaking respondents frame water scarcity as a matter for the federal government. Kurdish-speaking respondents prefer to enlist the Kurdistan Regional Government or local politicians to deal with water scarcity, undercutting federal jurisdiction. These findings cast doubt on environmental security and peacebuilding theories which suggest that ecological scarcity can spur inter-ethnic cooperation toward sustainability. Rather, commitment to different ethnoterritorial programs justify different perspectives on ecological change. At a policy level, these findings show that political conciliation must come before progress in environmental peacebuilding.

This article examines the position of the Slovak minority in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the Second World War, focusing on the tension between official discourses of interstate friendship and local experiences of insecurity. Drawing on extensive archival sources, including diplomatic correspondence and administrative and security reports, it shows how ethnic Slovaks were formally portrayed as members of a friendly nation while remaining exposed to administrative exclusion, stigmatization, and violence in peripheral regions. Inspired by selected insights from Brubaker, Wimmer, and Kalyvas — used as heuristic points of reference rather than deductive frameworks — the article conceptualizes this ambivalent position as that of a “frenemy” minority: symbolically included yet structurally marginalized. It argues that the deterioration of the Slovak community’s security from 1942 onward resulted from an uncoordinated syncretism of centrally implemented policies of ethnic exclusion and processes of state degradation, manifested in fragmented authority and the brutalization of local actors. By highlighting the gap between declared friendship and practical neglect, the article contributes to debates on minority governance under fascist rule and on the effects of weak state capacity and localized violence in wartime authoritarian contexts.

Contemporary just war theory is increasingly remote from the grounded realities of warfare. This is problematic because it diminishes the utility of just war theory as an action-guiding framework. This article asks how just war theorists can better incorporate the lived experience of war into their analysis. The argument it develops places war writing front and center. Drawing inspiration from Martha Nussbaum’s argument that moral philosophers should use the literary works of writers such as Henry James to fill out and work through their own positions, it proposes that just war theorists should engage war memoirs in a similar manner. This argument is substantiated via a close reading of Frank Richards’s World War I memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die. By incorporating experience into their ethical frame, this article concludes, just war theorists will be better able to account for the ambiguity and messiness of combat—ambiguity and messiness that simply fall out of the frame when the ethical questions that war generates are examined from a detached perspective.

The present article focuses on five recent Japanese-language research monographs on the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), authored respectively by Eda Kenji, Mishina Hidenori, Zhou Jun, Takahashi Nobuo, and Suzuki Takashi. The books cover a wide span, reaching from the history of the early years of the CCP through the Communist-Nationalist civil war era, the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic, the implementation of the Great Leap Forward policy, the Cultural Revolution, and until the contemporary Xi Jinping regime. Based on a joint review workshop held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto University in 2025, the article discusses the contributions of the five books and the perspectives of their respective reviewers.

As East-Central Europe shifted from empires to nation-states, financial insecurity became an everyday reality. Ordinary people found themselves suddenly cut off from their savings and vulnerable to the rapid devaluation of new national currencies. Focusing on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, this article discusses the Teschen Savings Bank in the divided city of Teschen (Cieszyn/Český Těšín). It traces the protracted yet futile efforts of Český Těšín’s leaders to recover Czechoslovak residents’ deposits stranded in Poland. Drawing on negotiation records from the local, regional, and national levels, the article demonstrates how financial entanglements inherited from the imperial era persisted into the postwar order. It further shows how the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Czechoslovak state seemed to have obstructed meaningful resolution. Ultimately, it argues that the government’s failure to address these deeply felt grievances eroded public trust and contributed to the unraveling of the interwar political order.

In this article I am concerned with interrogating the intersection between the Newtonian and Cartesian intellectual inheritances of AI and machine learning, and ideas about the ethics of war. As militaries turn to new and emerging technologies to maintain or achieve a technological edge over their perceived adversaries, they create new imaginaries of future war—alongside the technologists, academics, and defense scientists crafting new terms, ideologies, and frameworks for making sense of these technologies. In this article I will argue that the intellectual inheritances of machine learning strengthen certain pre-existing tendencies of thinking about ethics and war that function to push the experience of war, particularly for those subjected to it, to one side. The first of these is ethics as code, which in its most extreme form seeks to quantify ethics. The second is ethics as identity, in which we see the reduction of complex ethical debates to a simple belief that “we” are the ethical actors and the “other” is not. To combat the expansion of militarism that these narratives enable we must foreground the experience of war, both of those subject to it and of those creating the conditions for war.

This paper analyzes the structure of Noun Phrases with repeater classifiers (i.e., numeral classifiers that are only used with the single noun they are form-identical with). I show that a previous attempt to account for repeaters in terms of syntactic head movement encounters both empirical and theoretical problems. I suggest that repeaters emerge in the post-syntactic component, via a melody copying operation, which I characterize as a type of syntactic reduplication.

This article explores how cultural representations of outer space in Kazakhstan reflect and shape public debates on the history and legacy of the Soviet cosmos while offering new perspectives on national cosmic imaginaries. Kazakhstan inherited much of the Soviet outer space physical infrastructure, including its most potent artefact, spaceport Baikonur. The article demonstrates that the artistic representations of the cosmic themes provide an important ground for understanding 1) how the cosmic enthusiasm and utopianism of Soviet astroculture have been moulded into a more critical interpretation of outer space and its impact on Kazakhstani society and 2) how the cosmic mythologies of the past have been used for reinventing Kazakho-futurism as an element of the nation’s future. ‘Cosmic art’ offers a unique lens for exploring how cultural representations of outer space contribute to the redefinition of societal conditions and the complexity of becoming a sovereign nation in the twenty-first century.

The prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from the works of early just war theorists to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest to the contemporary moral injury discourse. In this article, I show how this history has contributed to the ongoing infliction of devastating harms on civilians, as evidenced in the case studies of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, and I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of noncombatant civilian perspectives in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I demonstrate, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.