During a survey on the island of Öland in south-eastern Sweden, whose aim was to study the local waste-disposal practices, the authors recorded abandoned machinery and cars dating from the 1940s to today in locations close to residential areas and farms, and complemented the investigation by interviewing informants. This led them to conclude that dumping redundant objects in the surroundings of villages forms an entangled network with other behaviour, i.e. collecting things which had outlived their usefulness and embedding them in the landscape. The behaviour observed in Öland is compared with two other cases of collecting abandoned objects in Öland and southern Sweden. Using the location and chronology of the finds, the authors interpret the behaviour by borrowing the concept of heterotopia, as defined by Foucault.

Had Eric been allowed to live the long life that he deserved, he might have looked back and recognized the retrospective logic of his scholarly work. By then, I am sure, he would have produced more pathbreaking and important books and essays. Indeed, following the publication of his magnum opus, A World Divided, Eric was already at work on a study of Ralph Bunche, featured in A World Divided and one of the most prominent African Americans in the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II who went on to have an influential role as an advocate of human rights in the newly established United Nations.

Consequentialist theories that directly assess multiple focal points face an important objection: that one right option may conflict with another. Robert Adams raises an instance of this objection regarding the possibility that the right act conflicts with the right motives. Whereas only partial responses have previously been given, assuming particular views of the relation between motives and acts, an exhaustive treatment is in order. Either motives psychologically determine acts, or they do not – and I defend direct consequentialism on each assumption. Crucially, if motives determine acts, this may be compatible with the ability to act otherwise, but there remains a defense for consequentialism even on these assumptions. What clears consequentialism of conflict is not necessarily that the apparently right act is unavailable, but rather that its outcome is suboptimal once we account for necessary motives. Even if the agent remains free to perform the act, the act costs too much.

Following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, many investors responded by unloading their Russian sovereign debt holdings. However, data from Bloomberg show that at the time of the 24 February Russian invasion of Ukraine, ESG funds – investment funds pursuing environmental, social and governance goals – still held at least $8.3 billion in Russian assets;1 and while more than a thousand companies have curtailed their Russian operations and over 500 are holding off on new investments in the wake of Russia’s invasion,2 investors have been accused of being ‘missing in action’.3

To date, the research on Chinese figures residing or settling abroad and their residential settlements has mainly focused on trade merchants. Merchants frequently traveled abroad due to the characteristics of their occupation and were therefore more likely to reside in foreign countries for varying periods of time in the process. Song-era records that document figures staying overseas, however, largely center around intellectuals and bureaucrats who were trained in the Chinese systems of knowledge or administration, as opposed to merchants. Examining the records concerned, it is difficult to conclude that merchants accounted for the majority of overseas Chinese citizens at that time. This paper strived to focus on the emergence of people who looked for opportunities overseas as the background for the formation of Chinese communities in the Song period, as opposed to trade voyages by merchants. This situation is clearly revealed through the Song's ban on overseas travel for those with different traits from merchants. This indicates that the emergence of people who sought to journey abroad for new opportunities had begun even before 1078. As Chinese citizens sailed abroad to look for new opportunities, Chinese communities began to form in foreign countries around the twelfth century.

Challenging the Eurocentric belief that abolitionism was a top-down process issued by colonial powers, this article explores the emergence of personal and group strategies for the emancipation of Black enslaved people in Libya. During the late Ottoman period, Italian antislavery activities operated in Libya and established a mission in Benghazi to host manumitted children referred to as ‘Moretti’ (‘little Moors’). The goal was to make these Moretti a group of local people close to the Catholic Church and the Italian government. The failures of the missionaries to accomplish these aims reveal the strategies and trajectories of Moretti as they negotiated their role in society, especially after Italian occupation in 1911. Historical sources reveal an informal web of solidarity using antislavery societies and creating forms of urban and social autonomy. This article details actions of solidarity among Black enslaved persons that took place in late Ottoman and Italian colonial Libya, which challenges Eurocentric antislavery narratives.

This article studies infrastructure development in the colony of German East Africa from the early 1890s to 1907. By focussing on questions of continuity and change in the transition phase from the precolonial era to German colonial rule, the article demonstrates that colonial road planning coexisted and often collided with established infrastructure systems. After 1891, colonial authorities sought to transform existing caravan paths into all-weather highways. The analysis applies an actor-centred approach to explain why almost all of these efforts failed. A focus on those actors being expected to construct or maintain (residents) and to use (transport workers) colonial roads reveals the non-compliance of colonial subjects, the persistence of African spatial practices, and the resulting contestation of colonial rule in everyday life. In this way, the article illuminates how Africans responded to European interventions which restructured space and how these responses complicated and frustrated colonial road works. Hence, the article challenges classical narratives of infrastructure as a ‘tool of empire’ and instead highlights the resilience of vernacular structures and their producers under colonial rule.

The following is an edited transcript of a webinar that took place on 11 June 2022 between Diane Larsen-Freeman and seven colleagues (in alphabetical order: Anne Burns, Hossein Farhady, Mathias Schulze, Scott Thornbury, Benjamin White, Henry Widdowson, and Yasin Yazdi-Amirkhiz), who generously took the time to formulate and submit questions in advance of the webinar and to participate in the event. The focus of the webinar was on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Coincidentally, the webinar took place on the 25th anniversary of Larsen-Freeman's first publication on the same theme (Larsen-Freeman, 1997).