The article is devoted to violence that took place in the Polish-Lithuanian borderland after the Great War. Using the theoretical insights of Stathis Kalyvas (2006), the author explores violent actors, types, and the dynamics of violence in the conflict over the neutral zone between Poland and Lithuania between 1920 and 1923. The focus is on the experiences of civilians and the social impact of violence on the formation of their national identities. The author suggests that violent ways of nation making forced the local populace to adopt national identities to ensure their security, but the process of forced nationalization was limited and may have resulted in the emergence of indifference among certain groups of the population.

The vast body of inquiry into nationalism has traditionally seen Europe as a main center for the emergence of nationalism, but scholars of “national indifference” have countered with the idea that nationalism may not matter much at all as a motive for most people. The concept of national indifference calls into question the power of nationalism as a motive for action and the mass appeal of nationalism. Studies of national indifference have constructed an alternative non-national narrative, but face particular challenges accounting for major themes and episodes of discrimination and violence. At its core, national indifference paradoxically both rejects and accepts binary notions of identity and incorporates binary assumptions about motives. It is tempting to resolve the contest between parallel accounts of pervasive, powerful nationalism and national indifference by choosing a victor, but this contrast between models shows the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism. The debate between the now classic accounts of nationalism and the alternative of national indifference points to the importance of often overlooked variables: frames and sense of time.

This article, on the Early Neolithic pottery from the Cabeço da Amoreira shellmidden in the Muge region of central Portugal, presents a detailed review of the evidence to date and a systematic analysis of the decorative and mineralogical characteristics of the stratified and radiocarbon-dated ceramic assemblage. A homogenous pottery manufacturing tradition seems to be present right from the beginning, including both local and non-local ceramics. The authors formulate a working hypothesis on the geographic origin of the exogenous pottery, which contributes to the discussion of the dynamics of mobility and social networks in the Neolithization of south-western Europe.

This article traces debates and policies of the Russian imperial administrators toward the Korean population in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire. Koreans were initially treated as de facto members of the peasant estate, and in the 1890s many were granted the status of Russian subjects. Yet the rise of settler colonialism and a nationalizing empire from the 1880s, and especially after the Russian revolution of 1905, complicated the issue of Korean subjecthood and led to policies that excluded Koreans from the regulations normally applicable to peasants, such as the right to increased land allotments. At the same time, the neotraditionalist approach to the management of difference in the empire was still present in the 1910s, albeit never clearly articulated to compete with the nationalizing idiom.

Many egalitarians incorporate a concern for interpersonal welfare inequality as part of their favored axiology – that is, they take it to be a bad-making feature of outcomes. It is natural to think that, if inequality is in this sense a bad, it is an impersonal bad (one that makes an outcome worse, while not in itself being worse for any person). This natural thought has been challenged. Some writers claim that egalitarian judgments can be accommodated by adopting an expanded view of a person's good, according to which being worse off than others is one of the factors that, in itself, makes one's life go worse. The putatively impersonal bad of inequality is thereby “dispersed” among individuals. I argue that this dispersion strategy fails. In a slogan: if you care about inequality, do not disperse it.

Does knowledge of language transfer spontaneously across language modalities? For example, do English speakers, who have had no command of a sign language, spontaneously project grammatical constraints from English to linguistic signs? Here, we address this question by examining the constraints on doubling. We first demonstrate that doubling (e.g. panana; generally: ABB) is amenable to two conflicting parses (identity vs. reduplication), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign Language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of spoken language. Hebrew speakers can project the morphological parse when doubling indicates diminution, but English speakers only do so when doubling indicates plurality, in line with the distinct morphological properties of their spoken languages. These observations suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a common set of linguistic principles that are algebraic, amodal and abstract.

What is the role of nostalgia in our increasingly dynamic and interconnected world? This special issue, Mobilizing Nostalgia in Asia, assesses the mobilization of nostalgia in the changing international order, and within individuated socioeconomic and cultural spheres. Its four articles examine the political and social dynamics that evoke, utilize, amend, and manipulate nostalgia for collective present needs and demands. This Introduction connects the issue's four contributions to three interconnected themes: the power of nostalgia, the plurality of nostalgia, and nostalgia as a process of creation.