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.

According to Böckenförde’s interpretation in his famous essay “The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization” (1967), in the formation of modern statehood religious freedom and, more generally, freedom of conscience played a central role. It was “for love of such freedom” that the modern state set inviolable limits on the exercise of its own coercive force vis-à-vis citizens relying on its protection. Nobody may be forced through the coercive tools of political power to hold true something that they do not believe. This dynamic of freedom is further taken up in Böckenförde’s analysis of church history and theological traditions, as this essay demonstrates. The conception of religious freedom as a right of the human person, contained in the Second Vatican Council declaration Dignitatis Humanae, is a real “Copernican turn.” It represents a true revolution in Catholic interpretation of democracy, public ethos, and natural law, which aims at reconciling modern freedom, democracy, and religion through a revised doctrine of the common good.

Using the unique and historic Islamic cemetery of Mamillah in Jerusalem as a primary example, this essay discusses the ethno-necrocratic order that led to the 2008 Israeli High Court of Justice's codification of the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones, on the basis of advancing Israel's values. Hundreds of Palestinian burial grounds, starting with village cemeteries, have been destroyed since 1948. Indeed, funerary sites have testified to the omnipresence and millenarian existence of a population that the state has sought to erase from memory. In a few decades, the deathscape was radically altered, in cities as in the countryside. Although real estate corruption plagues Israeli politics, land use planning and real estate capitalism are inseparable from the ethno-racial politics of exclusion, which affect both the dead and the living.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork data, this article argues there is tension between how Longyearbyen’s residents wish to perform as a community and hindrances the town inherited from its past and accepts as demarcation lines of Norway’s Svalbard politics. The population of Longyearbyen has undergone considerable change since the 1990s, turning from a predominantly Norwegian mining community into a highly diversified group of people from all over the world. This article places Longyearbyen into the wider context of settlements with similar traces (in Scandinavia, the Arctic, multilingual and immigrant communities worldwide, or in the context of extractivism) and discusses the existing barriers of communitification. Encounters with four participants illuminate the tensions and contradictions when it comes to cultivating social cohesion and shaping Longyearbyen’s “desired futures.” Unless the process of increasing the community’s agency is actively encouraged by people living there and those governing it from the outside, the future of the settlement risks being alienating for its inhabitants, weakening further the communitification potential.

AMS radiocarbon dating has been widely applied in Palaeolithic art research and its value has been proven over the past three decades. Yet it still suffers from issues that need to be discussed and analysed to improve future sampling strategies and strengthen the interpretation of the results. This study presents new AMS dates for the parietal art in Cueva de Las Chimeneas in northern Spain, describes the quality of the samples, and discusses their reliability. The joint assessment of the dates and its comparison with previously obtained dates as well as stratified and dated portable art makes it possible to put forward a hypothesis about the time of creation of the cave's parietal art and the degree of synchrony or diachrony in its production. Consequently, it is proposed that the cave art at Las Chimeneas was created in the lower Magdalenian, between 19,000 and 17,500 cal bp.

Perforated stone plaques, known as bracers, are found across late prehistoric Europe and many of them have been recovered in Bell Beaker funerary contexts, usually associated with adult individuals. Experimental, technological, and use-wear studies have determined that the bracers were both utilitarian and symbolic objects. Very few are found in children's graves, but examples are known in the Iberian Peninsula, two of which are presented here. The analyses conducted on the two bracers, including archaeological contextualization, raw material identification, and technological and use-wear studies, allow the authors to reconstruct their respective biographies. Although these pieces were associated with young children, they had long lives before their final deposition in the graves. Use-wear marks on one of the bracers suggest that it was used in archery, despite its small size.

This article analyzes the activism of Eastside Community Heritage in London's Docklands, circa 1997 to 2003, following its establishment by community activists concerned by the British National Party's electoral success in the postindustrial area. Eastside attributed local racism to deindustrialization and unaccountable, exclusionary redevelopment. Aiming to recenter solidarity against economic injustice—thereby countering racism—and to challenge redevelopers’ neglect, the group published booklets celebrating the area's working-class past. But the project's archived oral histories show that residents remembered an area forged by different ideals. Their nostalgia was for participation in empire through the docks as much as for an idealized working-class community. Residents rarely distinguished between the interconnected losses of imperial purpose and social cohesion. I frame these tensions as a heritage encounters, making three key arguments. First, memories of youth in the imperial metropole informed residents’ perceptions of the late twentieth-century nation, despite recent scholarly efforts to separate them temporally and conceptually. Second, contrary to their predominance within histories of postwar class identity, deindustrialization and urban change were popularly understood within a larger, postimperial narrative of local and national decline. Finally, a close reading of this project offers a vivid case study into the fragility of British multiculturalism in the 1990s and 2000s.

During the 2020 excavation campaign of the French Archaeological Mission to the Egyptian Eastern Desert (MAFDO), the team in charge of the excavation of the Roman fort of Deir el-Atrash uncovered a polychrome painting on one of the original entrance tower gates from the late 1st–early 2nd c. CE. The iconographic program includes, in the top register, a horseman genius and a caravan of dromedaries with its driver. In the lower register, a pattern of vine stalks and leaves occupies the space. This discovery is exceptional, as very few Roman paintings have been preserved in a military context. In addition to depicting a scene of everyday desert life, the supply of the fort, the scene also illustrates the power of the Empire and its presence at its borders.

The experience of the urban in nineteenth-century Hyderabad was interwoven with the experience of modern technologies like film. Cinema participated in constituting a modern public; practices of film viewing were practices of enacting the modern. Through a study of conflicts in the space of cinema, this article examines the politics of constituting and controlling the urban in the princely city of Hyderabad and the cantonment town of Secunderabad. It suggests that the princely modern adapted new technologies but was rooted in patrimonial traditions. The article also argues that the cantonment had a dependency relationship with the princely city, and urban space as constituted through cinema was the site of power negotiations between the princely ruler and the British.

In an era of global sanitary, economic and ecological crisis, beliefs in the predictive power of artificial intelligence (AI) progressively penetrate the legal and political spheres, in search of new ways to anticipate and govern the future. In this context, it is critical to understand the idiosyncratic nature of the interplay between governance and algorithmic logics of prediction. This contribution discusses how the association between governance and AI makes the future knowable in the present and shapes a programmatic way of formalising, justifying and deploying action in the here and now. We focus on three principles of institutional mobilisation in the face of uncertainty and indeterminacy: precaution, pre-emption and preparedness, each of which is affected by the use of AI relying on so-called ‘real-time predictions’. Drawing from risk theory and Science and Technology Studies, we argue that the current convergence between AI and governance is shaping a new sociotechnical imaginary, promoting a distinctive conception of life and of the future in the age of the Anthropocene.

Reacting sharply against the whiggish thesis that religious tolerance was a heritage of the Enlightenment, revisionist scholars have pointed to the many pragmatic concessions people made to tolerate those of other faiths prior to the eighteenth century. While they have underscored the contingent relationship of tolerance with neighbourliness in many important case studies, the historiography portrays early modern London as an essentially intolerant society for the city’s Catholics and a church on the margins. Through an examination of London’s embassy chapels reflected in vicious anti-Catholic polemic, this article argues that tolerance was not lacking in Jacobean London. It additionally shows how ambassadors’ chapels sustained a vibrant and visible form of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the capital. Finally, it assesses how contemporaries connected both of these issues to tensions surrounding the ‘king’s two bodies’ and the execution of the royal prerogative. While this places London’s Catholics at the heart and centre of Jacobean religio-political tensions, the article concludes that it is ultimately the circular relationship between tolerance and intolerance that is key to understanding why a contested form of corporate Catholicism survived in the very heart of England’s Protestant kingdom.