Baku, Azerbaijan, is one of the most significant historical sites of industrial oil production in the world. Yet, the oil industry is largely ignored in the official heritage and tourism strategies. Drawing on ethnographic research in Baku, this article examines the place of the industrial past in the top-down and bottom-up heritage practices. It identifies three different heritage discourses pursued by different actors: the government, state-linked corporate actors and city tour guides. It argues that industrial heritage has significant touristic potential which, in the context of a strongly centralized state, can only be unlocked if the official heritage actors incorporate the industrial past into its heritage discourse.

Transnational corporations pose a dilemma for scholars of normative political economy. On the one hand, many think that such entities must be tamed by instruments of legal accountability and political control, lest they be allowed to act relatively untamed by legal and moral concerns. On the other hand, the very concern about regulating transnational corporations lends itself to suspicion of such efforts. Just as corporate power often reflects the interests of some class or national interest, efforts to extend normative standards can be seen as a vehicle for powerful nations and actors to extend their influence in the guise of moral or legal accountability. Reviewing three books that touch on different aspects of corporate accountability, this essay considers the way business ethics, human rights due diligence, and extraterritorial legal enforcement attempt to find the balance between these concerns. It concludes that meso-level institutions, which play an important role in all three books, may provide unique spaces for the mediation of normative accountability and power politics.

This State-of-the-Art review examines second language (L2) writing assessment research over the past 25 years through a framework of fairness, justice, and criticality. Recognizing the socio-political implications of assessment, the authors argue for a shift toward more equitable and socially conscious approaches. Drawing from a corpus of 869 peer-reviewed articles across leading journals, the review identifies five major themes: (1) features of writing performance, (2) rating and scoring, (3) integrated assessment, (4) teacher and learner perspectives, and (5) feedback. Each theme is reviewed for foundational findings, then critiqued through questions related to fairness and justice using a critical lens. The authors advocate for a multilingual turn in writing assessment, greater attention to teacher and student voices, and questioning dominant norms embedded in assessment practices. The review concludes with a call for future research to engage with fairness, justice, and criticality in both theory and practice, ensuring that writing assessments serve as tools for empowerment rather than exclusion.

Critical-Level Utilitarianism entails one of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, depending on the critical level. Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism is a version of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where it is indeterminate which well-being level is the critical level. Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where additions of lives in a range of well-being between the good and the bad lives make the resulting outcome incomparable to the original outcome. These views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, they avoid the Sadistic Conclusion, and they agree on all outcome comparisons not involving indeterminacy or incomparability. So it may seem unclear whether we have any reason to favour one of these theories over the other. But I argue that Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism still entails the disjunction of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, which is also repugnant. By contrast, Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism does not entail this conclusion.

This article reflects on the pitfalls of the combined search for big and better data and argues for more attention to everyday experiences and incidental evidence. It proposes that including spatial aspects, perspectives from cultural, colonial, and women’s history, as well as widening the source base helps to remedy these challenges, and encourages historians to abandon their hesitations and embrace the uncertainties in doing so. It draws on the results of a research project at the University of Amsterdam that utilizes incidental evidence to enhance our understanding of gendered spatial patterns in premodern cities.

States of emergency are usually approached separately in social, political, and economic policy spheres while they are generally tied to a concrete time frame: security, disasters, and economic crises are portrayed as discrete emergencies occupying specific periods. This paper shows that seemingly different and sometimes contradictory processes of states of emergency often intertwine with each other despite their variegated domains, scales, reasonings, and political endeavors. Moreover, their legacies and origins are found in the broader history of articulation of new forms of governance and accumulation of wealth. The paper presents two cases in Turkey that differ in terms of the violence they entailed while both exploited the same emergency declaration against disasters and the new Law No. 6306 on land grabbing. The first is a series of spectacular incidents in the southeastern Kurdish city of Diyarbakır and the second is an ethnographic study from Eskişehir, a mundane setting in western Anatolia. The study develops a historical–relational framework to examine how emergency governance operates through dual, interwoven logics of ruling and capital accumulation. This allows us to move beyond ready-made, reductionist understandings of contemporary emergency governance. Discerning institutionalization of states of emergency also shows their fragility and blurs the line between spectacular and non-spectacular.

From the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Mississippi River, more than mere distance separated the nineteenth-century port cities of Odessa and New Orleans. Although these ports emerged in distinct political and geographical settings, a comparative analysis reveals striking parallels between these two southern metropolises, each positioned at the territorial edge of continental empires. This article aims to examine the common challenges these cities encountered in their development, the factors that divided their cosmopolitan populations and how socio-environmental vulnerabilities contributed to their urban fragmentation.

Examining the early post-colonial Beirut International Airport (BEY), we make two arguments. First, BEY had the potential to become the Middle East’s largest airport only because from the mid-1800s Beirut, which had a large maritime port, had been the Arab East’s global cultural, commercial, communications and transport hub, which created a path dependency. Second, BEY deepened Beirut’s regional-global role throughout the 1960s, making it an aero-city piggybacking on a port-city. We explore four dimensions. First, in urban planning, the government was exceptionally interventionist where BEY was concerned; second, BEY’s construction triggered sociopolitical conflicts; third, BEY intersected with Palestinian and Lebanese unskilled labour flows; and, finally, air-travel, including tourism, affected Beirut’s cityscape deeply yet unevenly.