Two primary impulses have historically motivated the Iraqi Shi'i juristic establishment in its relations with the Iraqi state. The first, deeply embedded in centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, is to achieve maximum autonomy for the Shi'i community from the state. The second has developed more recently in response to the modern state's efforts to extend its hegemonic control over areas that premodern empires were content either to leave to the jurists to administer or at least to share the administration of with jurists. This is to have the state recognize and implement Shi'i rules within parts of the state infrastructure that are of core interest to the juristic establishment. There is an obvious tension between these two desires, nowhere more evident than in the subject of this article—namely, the law pertaining to the creation, management, and liquidation of the Islamic charitable land trust known as the waqf. On the one hand, Article 43 of Iraq's constitution declares the followers of religions and sects to be “free” in administering the waqfs and their affairs, suggesting a strong desire for autonomy and separation from state control. Yet the implementing legislation for this provision extends the existence of a thick state bureaucracy and hands its administration over to juristic authorities. The ultimate irony of this arrangement is that it subjects juristic forces to far more potential interference as a legal matter than they have ever been subjected to, even during the totalitarian rule of the Ba'ath. In the end, a religious establishment historically deeply suspicious of political rulers and political engagement—indeed, one that defines itself by virtue of its separation from the state—now finds itself deeply and dangerously entangled in state political and administrative affairs. This article explores how this came to be and some of the significant consequences that arise from it.

Responding to recent calls made within the UK Parliament for a government-backed definition of Islamophobia, this article considers the unanticipated consequences of such proposals. I argue that, considered in the context of related efforts to regulate hate speech, the formulation and implementation of a government-sponsored definition will generate unforeseen harms for the Muslim community. To the extent that such a definition will fail to address the government's role in propagating Islamophobia through ill-considered legislation that conflates Islamist discourse with hate speech, the concept of a government-backed definition of Islamophobia appears hypocritical and untenable. Alongside opposing government attempts to define Islamophobia (and Islam), I argue that advocacy efforts should instead focus on disambiguating government counterterrorism initiatives from the government management of controversies within Islam. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the governmental adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)'s definition of antisemitism by promoting a new definition of Islamophobia, we ought to learn from the errors that were made. We should resist the gratuitous securitization of Muslim communities, rather than use such definitions to normalize compliance with the surveillance state.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is conventionally understood as voluntary and market- based corporate behaviour without direct government involvement. The development of CSR in China challenges this understanding in the light of the growing role of government in promoting it. Over the past decade China has demonstrated a state-centric approach towards promoting CSR. Existing studies focus only on Chinese domestic CSR practices. However, with the rise of Chinese companies in Africa under China's ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, it is important to examine how the state-centric approach applies to the overseas CSR practice of Chinese companies. This article aims to fill the literature gap through in-depth interviews and analysis of the Standard Gauge Railway project in Kenya. It shows that close institutional, relational, and bureaucratic ties between the state and the business community give the Chinese government the power to influence the behaviour of Chinese state-owned enterprises overseas. The Chinese government can influence the CSR practices of Chinese companies overseas through mandating, facilitating, endorsing and partnering in order to minimize the negative externalities of companies’ overseas activities. However, the state-centric CSR approach limits the space for civil society engagement and the effectiveness of the approach abroad is constrained by a variety of institutional contexts and corporate ownership models.

The Shanghai News was the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) first English-language newspaper. The News played an important, but forgotten, role in the development of the PRC's “external propaganda” apparatus, used to fight the ideological Cold War. The News was unusual in that it adopted a commercial business model and juxtaposed vehement anti-imperialist propaganda with advertising for multinational companies from “imperialist-capitalist countries.” This article argues that the News was a product of “New Democracy,” the central political paradigm of the PRC between 1949 and 1953. New Democracy, a policy of cross-class cooperation in the name of national reconstruction, is often dismissed as cynical tactic deployed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to diminish resistance during the takeover of China. The author argues for taking the real world impacts of New Democracy on life and work in early 1950s Shanghai seriously and cautions against teleological narratives.

Most non-consequentialists “let the numbers count” when one can save either a lesser or greater number from equal or similar harm. But they are wary of doing so when one can save either a small number from grave harm or instead a very large number from minor harm. Limited aggregation is an approach that reconciles these two commitments. It is motivated by a powerful idea: our decision whom to save should respect each person who has a claim to our help, including those whom we fail to save. However, it has recently been argued that it is open to decisive objections. I develop a new limitedly aggregative view: Hybrid Balance Relevant Claims. This view is well grounded in the reasons we have to be skeptical of aggregation and resolves all recent challenges by paying careful attention to the rationale for limited aggregation.

This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data. As such, the study not only adds specificity to recent attempts to enrich the field of pre-modern public health, but also demonstrates that the Bolognese administration had a sophisticated and evolving understanding of communal health risks, and exposes several discrepancies between policy and practice.

This article situates the 1830 cholera epidemic in the provincial Russian city of Kazan within the context of broader local discourse on endemic disease and public health over the first half of the nineteenth century. In the decades before cholera, the city gained important local institutions, and began to perceive itself as a potential site of public health intervention. During the outbreak, Kazan's local institutions supported a comparatively robust response to the disaster. And, afterward, the resulting trauma helped spur those institutions to implement long-discussed public health improvements. Thus, the article emphasizes the interplay between cholera as an emotional catalyst, and the broader institutional and conceptual frameworks necessary to enact lasting change.

The connection between nationalism and sport seems at once both obvious and manifest, with the most lavish praise of the nation often arising at sporting events. While a sizeable body of academic literature exists on the connection between the two concepts, it remains overlapping and unstructured. This state of the field review essay accounts for the major works in this field and categorizes it according to the function it fulfills in the subfield. Specifically, it focuses on sport as a mechanism for the diffusion and creation of nationalism, sport under conditions of globalization at Sporting Mega Events (SMEs), and the connection between sport and the distinction between civic and ethnic definitions of nationality.