The democratic backsliding that has accelerated across the globe over the past decade has included a rollback of liberal arts and sciences (LAS) as a system of university education. This essay explores the origins and goals of the global LAS education reform movement. I argue that while the movement is under threat largely due to its principled value of educating democratic citizens, it still has powerful potential and global impact; in part because LAS education is primarily an indigenous phenomenon adapting to local circumstances. I also argue that U.S. universities could contribute more constructively to the movement if they conceived of their role as global civic actors that conduct themselves in the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity, not as multinational corporations that channel neoliberal tendencies to maximize revenue. U.S. critics of the global LAS movement should also pay heed to the United States’ own history. Specifically, they can learn from historically Black colleges and universities how, operating under the extreme authoritarianism of the Jim Crow era, they managed to produce leaders who shaped a more democratic country. Liberal arts education produces short term benefits for students and alumni, but in the democratic context it is a long-term wager.

How should we understand the relationship between global justice and global democracy? One popular view is captured by the aphorism “No global justice without global democracy.” According to Dryzek and Tanasoca's reading of this aphorism, a particular form of deliberative global democracy is seen as the way to specify and justify what global justice is and requires in various contexts. Taking its point of departure in a criticism of this proposal, this essay analyzes how to best understand the relationship between global justice and global democracy. The aim is not to offer a first-order substantial account of this relationship, but to theorize the normative boundary conditions for such an account; that is, the conditions that any plausible theory should respect. These conditions take the form of what is here called a “three-layered view,” which is specified through three claims. It is argued, first, that global democracy is best seen as a partial normative ideal; second, that global democracy must be grounded in fundamental principles of justice; and third, that global democracy is an ideal through which applied principles of distributive justice are formulated and justified in light of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires.

Several decades of scholarship on international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have established their important role in leading cosmopolitan political projects framed around moral ideals of global justice. But contemporary legitimacy crises in international liberalism call for a reexamination of NGOs’ global justice activism, considering how they should navigate the real-world moral contestations and shifting power dynamics that can impede their pursuit of justice. Recent work by deliberative-democratic theorists has argued that NGOs can help resolve disputes about global justice norms by facilitating legitimate communicative exchanges among the diverse political voices of subjected global communities on the correct interpretation and implementation of global justice norms. In response, this essay argues for an expanded account of the political roles of NGOs in global justice activism, which reflects greater sensitivity to the multifaceted political dynamics through which power in real-world global politics is constituted and contested. It is shown that in some NGOs’ real-world operational contexts, structural power imbalances and social division or volatility can undercut the operation of the ideal deliberative processes prescribed by democratic theory—calling for further attention to work focused on mitigating power imbalances, building solidarity, and organizing power in parallel or as a precursor to deliberative-democratic processes.

The article provides a philosophical explication of an African religious moral philosophy. Often philosophers repudiate the view that African Traditional Religions (ATR) can embody a religious moral philosophy. Theologians, on the other hand, tend to believe that ATR can, but they often do not provide a systematic account of such an ethical system. The article demonstrates that ATR can embody an under-explored moral philosophy. ATR refers to indigenous religious ideas, beliefs, and practices of the indigenous people below the Sahara. The article will invoke the metaphysical and moral concept of vitality as the basis to construct an African religious moral philosophy. (It is worth noting that this article merely constructs, but it does not defend, this ethical system.) Vitality is the spiritual energy that originates, maximally inheres and defines God, and God has since distributed it to all that exists, albeit in varying degrees. By ‘moral philosophy’, the article focuses on (1) meta-ethics (it proffers a vitality-based account of the moral terms right and wrong); (2) normative theory (it expounds on the perfectionist and deontological principles of right action); and (3) applied ethics (it invokes a vitality-based conception of moral status to explore environmental ethics and select bioethical themes).

The conflict in Ukraine indicates some of the features of a potential post-liberal order and raises several potential ethical issues that may arise for international interventions as the world changes. What types of interventions, if any, are justifiable in response to situations such as the one in Ukraine? Can interventions be permissible given the potential undermining of universalist claims that are often used to support them? How should states prioritize between situations if there is an even greater number of global challenges in a post-liberal order? Three new books—Solferino 21 by Hugo Slim, Decolonizing Human Rights by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, and Promoting Justice across Borders by Lucia Rafanelli—can help to navigate these questions. Drawing on their insights, this essay argues that reform interventions can be justified to defend the liberal international order, that intervention can be defended from a relativist basis, and that socioeconomic rights should be given greater priority.

Studies of futurity typically privilege licit economies and assume that the lines between licit and illicit institutions are largely clear to the actors involved. But what happens to those actors, and their grip on the future, when such lines blur? This article explores the epistemic crossroads of futurity and legality by focusing on ambiguity. From 1986 to 2009, the Stanford Financial Group reaped billions of dollars selling fraudulent investment products to thousands of Venezuelans. During this span, Venezuelans suffered successive governments’ shambolic currency schemes, bureaucratic dysfunction, judicial corruption, political upheaval, and worsening street crime. As crises became routinized, middle-class Venezuelans faced “normative ambiguity,” a loss of familiar legal and moral certainties, undercutting their sense of futurity. Drawing on 54 interviews with defrauded investors and others linked to the case, this article shows how such ambiguity left investors vulnerable to a fraud that promised to restore that threatened futurity.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the states to regulate terminations of pregnancy more autonomously than during 1973–2022. Those who think that women should be legally entitled to abortions at their own request are suggesting that annulling the reversal could be an option. This would mean continued reliance on the interpretation of privacy that Roe v. Wade stood on. The interpretation does not have the moral support that its supporters think. This can be shown by recalling the shortcomings of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist example and its application to abortion laws. Philosophically better reasons for not restricting access to abortion can be found in a simple principle of fairness and in sensible theories on the value of human life. Whether or not philosophy has any use in the debate is another matter. Legal decisions to regulate terminations are probably based on pronatalist state interests, shared by the apparently disagreeing parties and immune to rational argumentation.

This article presents 6637 radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites in southernmost Sweden, from 9000 cal bc to the present. Based on summed probability distributions (SPDs) of the calibrated radiocarbon dates, the authors consider long-term trends in settlement and human population. Most dates are from the fertile and densely populated plains of south-western Scania, but coastal lowlands and forested uplands are also represented, allowing for a discussion of the relationship between central and peripheral areas. The authors distinguish between different types of archaeological contexts and features and between different types of dated material, so as to better understand the processes behind population and settlement change. They highlight three periods and phenomena revealed by the SPDs: a strong population increase at the onset of the Neolithic (4000–3700 cal bc), followed by a sharp decline; a steady and long-lasting expansion from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Iron Age (1500 cal bc–cal ad 200); and a decrease in the Nordic Late Iron Age (seventh century ad), particularly in recently colonized upland areas. The SPDs presented provide a new framework for archaeology in southern Sweden and offer an empirical basis for discussion of long-term trends in settlement and population development.

Why pursue economic growth? For poor countries this is an easy question to answer, but it is more difficult for rich ones. Some of the world's greatest philosophers and economists – such as John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and John Rawls – thought that, once a certain material standard of well-being has been achieved, economic growth should stop. I argue the opposite in this article. We always have reason to pursue economic growth. My argument is indirect. I shall not argue that economic growth itself is always better. Rather, I shall argue that stopping growth requires morally objectionable actions. Economic growth tends to occur naturally if certain underlying conditions are in place. We have moral reasons to insist on these conditions independent their effect on growth, however. Halting growth requires that we alter these conditions, but we ought not do this.

Unlike whipping, which was quickly abolished following independence, India has continued to hold tightly to the noose’s rope and remains a retentionist country to our present day. Notably, though the number of executions would fall dramatically in the first decades of India’s postcolonial history, the list of crimes made punishable by death has grown ever longer in recent years. Rather than positing the continued presence of the death penalty as an anachronism ill-suited for a modern democracy, this article takes seriously the legal and discursive developments that allowed the most infamous of penal institutions to travel safely across India’s twentieth century. From something that begun as a distilled expression of racialised colonial state power, like many other state institutions during this period, the death penalty would undergo a series of changes to remain relevant amidst new organizing political principles of representative democracy and popular will. Moving from the first formal efforts at abolition in the 1920s, through constitutional assembly debates in the 1940s, and Supreme Court judgements between 1967-83, the article positions capital punishment as a product of both deep colonial inheritances, and a particular process of postcolonial translation. Becoming fully couched in the language of popular sentiment by the culmination of this legal transformation, this violence would become well-positioned to grow within a national political culture increasingly organised around majoritarian expressions of national belonging.

Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backlash despite the convergence? Wouldn’t that convergence of masculinity produce similar political imaginations? In this article we argue that in shaping the family and urban space, Çukur’s masculinities remain precarious vis-à-vis the hegemonic masculinity in “New Turkey.” Rather than being the society’s building blocks, Çukur’s families are suffocating spaces. At the same time, as opposed to cultivating neoliberal responsibility, Çukur’s familialism emerges as a space of solidarity in a precarious neighborhood to which state forces can hardly enter. Therefore, the neighborhood (mahalle) is not a space of consumption and surveillance but a haven against urban precarities. Despite their hierarchies and authoritarianism, Çukur’s men reject unquestioned political loyalty, conspicuous consumption, and entrepreneurship while endorsing the various impasses in family and urban life. Showing that absolute political obedience and economic dependence is not the only way out of neoliberal authoritarianism, Çukur confirms popular culture’s power in representing liminal spaces outside the state’s oppressive power and the markets’ commodifying logics.