The recognition of rivers and related ecosystems as legal persons or subjects is an emerging mechanism in transnational practice available to governments in seeking more effective and collaborative natural resource management, sometimes at the insistence of indigenous peoples. This approach is developing particularly quickly in Colombia, where legal rights for rivers and ecosystems are grasping onto, and evolving out of, constitutional human rights protections. This enables the development of a new type of constitutionalism of nature. Yet legal rights for rivers may obscure the rights of indigenous peoples and their role in resource ownership and governance. We argue that the Colombian river cases serve as a caution to courts and legislatures elsewhere to be mindful, in devising ecosystem rights, of the complex and interrelated rights, interests and tenures of indigenous peoples and local communities.

In this article, we present the results of an analysis of variation, whose main objectives are to ascertain the ethnocultural identities speakers declare and to measure the impact of internal, external and identity factors on the use of the connectors of consequence (ça) fait que vs donc vs alors vs so. Our research emphasizes that while there is no consensus as to the terminology chosen to express these identities, it is important to consider ethnocultural identities as a complementary factor conditioning linguistic variation. It also demonstrates that for communities whose linguistic practices and norms straddle those of minority- and majority-French language communities, the minority/majority dichotomy needs to be nuanced, according to the social and ethnocultural identity dynamics that may characterize specific communities.

Utilitarianism is often criticized because of its reliance on the interpersonal aggregation of harms and benefits. However, since the rejection of all forms of interpersonal aggregation strikes most people as implausible, some critics of utilitarianism have proposed theories of Limited Aggregation. These occupy the middle ground between fully aggregative and non-aggregative views. Recently, Limited Aggregation has been criticized for having counterintuitive implications that seem even worse than the counterintuitive implications of fully aggregative and non-aggregative views it tried to escape. I here propose a new view of Limited Aggregation that does better than existing accounts in this regard. It is more modest than existing accounts of Limited Aggregation, but it retains the view's core idea. This, I claim, is the thought that sometimes very strong individual claims stand in the way of realizing the best outcome.

By focusing on the Armenian homeland associations (hayrenakts‘akank‘) established in Istanbul in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article examines the migrants’ activism and their achievements—facilitated by affective bonds based on shared origins. It outlines the Istanbul-based homeland associations’ development chronologically and discusses their cultural and economic goals in their home regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article then focuses on their durability and ability to adapt to the needs of the communities in the series of great political and demographic changes in the late Ottoman Empire from mid-1890s to their reconstruction after the end of World War I. The homeland associations established in the post-genocide period reflect the persistence of local belonging as a basis of solidarity and they fulfilled important functions as information networks and intermediaries between the survivors and the community administration. The article argues that Armenian homeland associations constituted a space in which agency of the migrants and their interaction with broader social and political developments could be observed in the late Ottoman Empire. They were one of the most durable and institutionalized forms of migrant solidarity which render migrants’ agency visible in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire.

This article examines patterns of variation and change in the phonology of the regional French of Alsace, within an overarching framework of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) in the French of France. Data are drawn from an original corpus gathered in Strasbourg and a small village in a rural area of the Bas-Rhin. We analyse two well-known regional features in spontaneous speech: (h), the variable realisation of initial [h], and (ʒ), the non-assimilatory devoicing of /ʒ/. We focus on the effect on the variation observed of the major extra-linguistic variables of age, gender and social class as well as urban or rural community. While the results for class and location follow expected patterns, whereby working-class and rural speakers show higher rates of traditional non-standard variants, the principal observation is the decline and, in the case of (ʒ), apparent loss of such features. We thus provide new evidence in support of supralocalization, not only in the urban context but also in the rural location. The results for gender are however less clear-cut: there is an interaction with age, class and location, and disruption of the usual pattern of female-led adoption of supralocal norms.

Variation and change in the future temporal reference (FTR) sector in French has been the subject of numerous studies, from a variety of perspectives. Most studies consider the patterns of variation and evidence for change by looking at the verbal system as a whole. However, there are indications that some verbs differ significantly in their preference for one or other variant. Avoir and être are two such verbs. This study first examines the overall distribution of the inflected and periphrastic future with these two verbs in the ESLO corpus of spoken French, and considers the evidence for change. A multivariate analysis of the linguistic factors affecting variant selection in FTR with these two verbs reveals no exceptional effects; we thus explore other possible explanations for the exceptional distribution of FTR variants with these two verbs.

This article focuses on two Muslim groups, Azeris and Muslim Ajarians, who are differently perceived and treated in post-Soviet Georgia. Georgian ethno-religious nationalism bases Georgianness on an ethnic affiliation to Kartvelian roots and religious adherence to Georgian Orthodoxy, and determines one’s level of inclusion in the nation accordingly; those who do not fulfill these criteria, such as Azeris, are excluded from the nation. Muslim Ajarians, despite being Georgians, also face exclusion from Georgian identity. Based on the concept of ethnodoxy, which is defined as linking of “a group’s ethnic identity to its dominant religion,” this article argues that Muslim Ajarians, who are Georgian Muslims, an unaccepted category in Georgia, receive differential treatment by their Christian fellows, whereas recognition of the religion and ethnicity of Azeris is a factor that comparatively diminishes the pressure on the community. This research demonstrates that the visibility of Muslim Ajarians’ religious practices in the public space and the construction of places of worship is less tolerated than in the case of Azeris, who have no means of becoming “proper Georgians.” The findings of fieldwork in Georgia manifested that, although minorities have various problems in Georgia, Muslim Ajarians are subjected to more differential treatment than Azeris.