In Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging Joseph David offers an erudite and duly nuanced analysis of Judaism as the faith of a people bound by kinship and a faith grounded in religious law, of consanguineous and spiritual belonging. In the premodern period and prior to the onset of secularization, the relation of kinship and spiritual belonging was determined by religious law in dialogue with evolving social realities. With the eclipse of religious authority, as David astutely notes, the traditional codes of Jewish belonging were desacralized, allowing for competing ethical and social values, and visions of the good. To remedy the consequent fracturing of Jewish affiliation, David calls for a revalorization of Jewish kinship, focused on familial affection and mutual regard, which he celebrates as an ethos of care. To cast the ethos of care in purely phenomenological terms, however, courts a blurring of the ethical and axiological boundaries between ideological communities—Left and Right—that offer bonds of mutual care, solidarity, and distinctive visions of the good. Moreover, as regards Judaism, one might find contemporary institutional expressions of Jewish kinship, religious or otherwise, to be incompatible with one’s understanding of the tradition’s teachings and values and choose not to belong.

This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

Science diplomacy can be defined as “the use of scientific collaborations between countries to address joint problems and to build constructive international partnerships for delivering effective scientific advice for policy making”. During the last 10 years, the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR) has been active in finding ways to solve global Grand Challenges, particularly climate change and poor air quality in polluted megacities, and at the same time, better bridge research to international climate policy and science diplomacy processes. INAR has introduced Pan-Eurasian Experiment programme running since the year 2012 (www.atm.helsinki.fi/peex) to better address the scientific challenge to understand Atmosphere – Earth Surface – Biosphere interactions and feedbacks in the Northern Eurasian context. INAR has also launched a measurement concept called the Global Network of Stations Measuring Earth Surface and Atmosphere Interactions (GlobalSMEAR) and has hosted the European Centre of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences since 2015. Most recently, INAR has coordinated the Arena for the gap analysis of the existing Arctic Science Co-Operations (AASCO), 2020–2021, to promote research with a holistic and integrated approach in understanding feedbacks and interactions globally and locally at the Arctic and outside the Arctic environments.

We deploy a novel and radical approach to vulnerability theory to investigate Scotland's response to asylum seekers’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic and test Scotland's self-affirmation as a hospitable country. Our ethical vulnerability analysis enhances Fineman's vulnerability analysis by denationalising the vulnerable subject and locating her within our ‘uneven globalised world’. We further enrich this fuller version of vulnerability analysis with insights from Levinas's and Derrida's radical vulnerability theory and ethics of hospitality. We demonstrate how our ethical vulnerability analysis enables us to subvert the hostile premise of migration laws and policies, and thus fundamentally redefine relationships between guests and hosts so that the host is compelled to respond to the Other's vulnerability. We argue that this hospitable impulse yields a generous and absolute commitment to progressive social welfare provision for asylum seekers, which brings Scotland closer to fulfilling its aspirations to be a hospitable host by welcoming the Other.

In the early 1960s, when a majority of African countries were gaining independence, the training of personnel capable of implementing nation-building projects became imperative for new African governments, even though higher education opportunities on the continent remained scarce. In a context of competition with the former colonial powers and the USSR, the United States decided to set up scholarship programs for the training of postcolonial African elites. Through the analysis of one of these programs, the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU), this article will show that in addition to the Cold War motivations of the US government, pan-African connections and university initiatives were essential in laying the groundwork for the project of educating Africans in the United States. It also highlights the too often overlooked role played by African leaders and academics in the concrete realization, reappropriation, and questioning of overseas training projects.

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs.

The so-called aggressively non-D-linked construction (ANDC) involving wh-the-hell phrases like what the hell is of empirical and theoretical interest due to its complex morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties. This paper focuses on the construction in general as well as in ellipsis phenomena. We first explore its grammatical properties on the basis of attested corpus data and show that the construction can occur more widely in elliptical constructions than suggested by previous literature. We then suggest that the licensing conditions of the ANDC in ellipsis are not solely syntax-based but due to tight interactions among a variety of grammatical components such as morphosyntax, semantics, and discourse/pragmatics. We also argue that the authentic uses of the construction favor a Direct Interpretation (DI) approach that can account for its uses in a variety of environments.

This article explores the role of place-based identity politics in constructions of the Russian nation by nongovernmental actors in the cities of Kazan and Ekaterinburg. Departing from more established approaches to the study of nation building concerned with elite strategies and actions, it contributes to an emerging line of inquiry focused on the agency of mesolevel actors. Drawing on interviews and analysis of public communications, the article demonstrates that actors such as museums, activist groups, and religious institutions creatively employ mainstream discursive practices present also in state narratives to anchor the nation in local symbols. At the same time, they position themselves in locally specific identity cleavages concerning city, regional, and ethnonational minority identities. The findings show that the imbrication of local identity politics in their narratives can problematize nation building by exposing contradictions in federal discourses or troubling the association of nation and state. Emphasizing the importance of locally situated processes of constructing the nation in conjunction with other scales of belonging, the article argues that nation building in Russia is complicated by mesolevel practices of identity making that can simultaneously support and subvert it.

I argue that propositional faith presupposes trustworthiness, in this sense: faith that p is fitting only if the one in whom you have faith to bring it about that p is trustworthy to bring it about that p. In defence of this, I argue that propositional faith is a species of interpersonal faith and that interpersonal faith presupposes trustworthiness. I also discuss some of the consequences of my thesis for theistic propositional faith.

The article explores the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in Russia in 2011–2018. Using the theoretical framework of desecularization from above, which claims that church structures play a key role in the religious renaissance policy, we argue that the rise of the political influence of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) may be explained by its capacity for dissemination of traditional values that ultimately results in votes for United Russia and President Vladimir Putin in national elections. This study reveals the emergence of a new area on Russia’s political map—the belt – into Belt, which combines higher levels of Orthodox religiosity and pro-Kremlin voting in national elections. Using multiple empirical strategies we construct an index of religiosity on the regional level and identify the Orthodox Belt regions, test the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in the national elections in 2011–2018, and test the differences in value orientations and electoral support between the Orthodox Belt regions and other ones. Finally, two model regions of the Orthodox Belt—Tambov and Lipetsk—are explored. We conclude that non-Orthodox Belt regions in Russia with higher Orthodox religiosity, conservatism, and loyalty are an emerging trend in Russian political geography.

Republican Shanghai was a renowned art capital. This article is based on a large-scale digital mapping project of the residential locations of 1,349 Shanghai artists. We analysed the transformative spatial distribution patterns of artists in relation to the city's social and urban conditions, and developed an artists’ habitation approach to elucidating the issues of Republican-period Shanghai urban and art history from the perspective of Chinese cosmopolitanism. We mapped areas of high artist concentration and identified a higher percentage of artists residing in the concessions (compared with the Shanghai general population) and the incremental convergence of art clusters in the concessions. We argue that the concessions provided a favourable environment for cultural diversity and the ungovernable, elite spirit of the literati tradition. The mainstream Shanghai art practices, known as haipai, were modern, as they were rooted in the urban modernity of the concessions and embodied Chinese cosmopolitanism.