Limited strikes are arguably different from war insofar as they are more circumscribed, less destructive, and cost less in blood and treasure to employ. However, what they can achieve is also considerably more circumscribed than what is set out by the goals of war. How do we morally evaluate limited strikes? As part of the roundtable, “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay argues that we need to turn to the ethics of limited of force, or jus ad vim, to do so. Two moral assumptions that are the keystone to jus ad vim can shed light on the moral imperatives and ethical dilemmas of undertaking limited strikes. First, such strikes should be seen as an alternative to war, and not part of the jus ad bellum last resort process. What I call the “Rubicon assessment” determines at what level force should be used: at the level of war, with all its costs and unpredictability, or at that of the more predictable and less costly limited force. Second, limited strikes should adhere to a “presumption against escalation”; that is, a moral commitment not to escalate to war. This essay highlights these moral principles in five different limited strike scenarios: “hot pursuit,” “red line,” “the last straw,” “the point of no return,” and “the right of retaliation.” The conclusion explores the notion of justice after limited strikes, or what I call jus post vim, to show that while what can be accomplished by limited strikes is inherently constrained, they can, if used morally and in tune with diplomacy, be of service in the quest for peace.

Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphold his “red line” militarily. As part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay analyzes diverse expressions of such opinion and finds that they highlight three dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes against Assad. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was many Syrians’ sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely an opportunity to hold the Syrian regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing Assad and his allies that they could kill with impunity. These views controvert both legalistic arguments precluding military intervention and assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering. In this case, consideration of the case for military intervention from the viewpoint of those on whose behalf the intervention would have taken place challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which limited strikes might be not only ethically justified but also imperative.

“Civilization” is back at the forefront of global policy debates. The leaders of rising powers such as China, India, Turkey, and Russia have stressed their civilizational identity in framing their domestic and foreign policy platforms. An emphasis on civilizational identity is also evident in U.S. president Donald Trump's domestic and foreign policy. Some analysts argue that the twenty-first century might belong to the civilization state, just as the past few centuries were dominated by the nation-state. But is the rise of civilization state inevitable? Will it further undermine the liberal international order and fuel a clash of civilizations, as predicted by the late Samuel Huntington? Or might ideas from East Asian and other non-Western civilizations contribute to greater pluralism in our thinking about world order and the study of international relations?

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.