In this article, we analyze how the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA), which signalizes the overall (positive) progress and development of the potential candidate country of the post-Yugoslav space, is not straightforwardly translated as a benchmark for progress and development by the political elite. Drawing on securitization theory in order to understand the grammar of security, the wider discursive context, and the position of power and authority in RS during the analyzed period – and informed by the triangulation of content and discourse analysis – we show how the negotiations for the SAA were (mis)used in order to present both the “internal and external Other” as an existential threat for Republika Srpska. Our analysis shows that although the securitizing acts of the political elite from RS did not succeed in terms of the final outcome as the SAA was signed, certain security narratives, which are present in the contemporary sociopolitical landscape in BiH, have been constructed during this period and embedded into the wider discursive context and consolidated the position of power and authority of Milorad Dodik’s SNSD.

In the Bronze Age, warriors are probably the best-known social class. Evidence for warfare and other violent encounters links them to aggression and bloodshed that could be translated into social status. This made warriors a potential two-fold threat to the social cohesion of their communities: not only did they risk threatening the integrity of communities as agents of death but also they could challenge local authority and cause internal conflict. Here, the author presents evidence that suggests that internal conflict was a major concern for Nordic Bronze Age societies, in that warriors constituted an internal social challenge, and proposes that local communities may have mitigated this threat in rituals such as the sacrifice of weapons and the construction of social narratives through rock art.

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil.1 In this book, French explicitly aims to give a bottom-up account of Lula's life.

For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, they need only have represented enough about the meanings of the words used by another speaker to understand what is intended in context on a particular occasion. Reliance on partial meanings is common in both children and adults. More detailed, shared, representations of word meanings for a domain depend on acquiring additional knowledge about that domain and its contents.

This article brings together insights from efforts to develop a global history of science and recent historical and sociological studies on the relations between science and religion. Using the case of the late Ottoman Empire as an example, it argues that ‘science and religion’ can be seen as a debate that travelled globally in the nineteenth century, generating new conceptualizations of both science and religion in many parts of the world. In their efforts to counter arguments that represented Islam as the enemy of science and progress, young Ottoman intellectuals wrote many texts addressing a specific European author, or an imagined, broad European audience in the mid- to late nineteenth century. These texts described a ‘science-friendly’ Islam of which not only Europeans but also ‘ignorant Muslims’ were unaware. Using examples from the Ottoman press, the article demonstrates how this effort involved separating Islam from the lived reality of Muslims, transforming the religion essentially into a text that referred to scientific facts or that instructed adherents to appreciate science. In their contributions to the debate on science and religion, these young intellectuals thus also defined themselves as the legitimate interpreters of Islam in the ‘age of science’.