Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved as a disruptive technology, impacting a wide range of human rights-related issues ranging from discrimination to supply chain due diligence. Given the increasing human rights obligations of companies and the intensifying discourse on AI and human rights, we shed light on the responsibilities of corporate actors in terms of human rights standards in the context of developing and using AI. What implications do human rights obligations have for companies developing and using AI? In our article, we discuss firstly whether AI inherently conflicts with human rights and human autonomy. Next, we discuss how AI might be linked to the beneficence criterion of AI ethics and how AI might be applied in human rights-related areas. Finally, we elaborate on individual aspects of what it means to conform to human rights, addressing AI-specific problem areas.

This Special Issue collects articles on urban slavery in the Atlantic world during the time when the institution of slavery was being abolished globally (c.1770s–c.1880s). At the time of abolition, most slaves were held on plantations, but this did not mean that the urban context of slavery was unimportant. In the cities of the Atlantic world, slavery was pervasive, and the cities themselves played an important role in the functioning of the slave system. This Special Issue seeks to examine urban slavery in its connection to the wider slave-based economy, and to address how slavery in the cities changed when abolition appeared on the political agenda in the Atlantic world. The articles in this issue find that urban communities went through great changes in the age of abolition and these changes proved crucial to determining the legacies of slavery and its abolition. Recovering the history of urban slavery in this area should come to inform the current mainstreaming of the memory of slavery around the Atlantic world. Attention to its history can provide new layers of understanding to the persistence of inequity and historical silencing today.

This paper examines the perceptual and reasoning processes that underpin regularities in behaviour. A distinction is made between situations as they are, or as described by an omniscient external observer, and situations as agents see or frame them. Different frames can stem from differences in culture, experience and personality, as well as from other context-specific factors. Drawing upon David Lewis’s Convention (1969), I show that consistency between reasoning and experience does not preclude individuals from understanding the same state of affairs differently, and that agents’ beliefs about others’ beliefs may well be wrong. As a result, cases may occur in which conventions are sustained by false but mutually consistent and self-confirming beliefs.

This article explains a normative political theory of asymmetrical federalism as it relates to the accommodation of national minorities within multinational states, using Cyprus as a case study. Many normative prescriptions emerging from traditional liberal and federal political theories and models rest on monist assumptions; therefore, there is a need to highlight the cultural and national limits of those theories and models in order to attain a democratic system in Cyprus that respects and promotes its bicommunal structure. It is suggested that multinational federalism in Cyprus necessitates constitutional asymmetry, which is likely to provide a basis for political accommodation. The article also demonstrates the necessity of multinational federalism to accommodate common and distinct identities by promoting a fuller understanding of the concept of “federal togetherness” and “federal separateness.” Such an understanding would better enable asymmetrical federalism to properly and feasibly adjust and regulate federal institutions in Cyprus.

This paper considers contractarianism as a method of justification. The analysis accepts the key tenets of contractarianism: expected utility maximization, unanimity as the criteria of acceptance, and social-scientific uncertainty of modelled agents. In addition to these three features, however, the analysis introduces a fourth feature: a criteria of rational belief formation, viz. Bayesian belief updating. Using a formal model, this paper identifies a decisive objection to contractarian justification. Insofar as contractarian projects approximate the Agreement Model, therefore, they fail to justify their conclusions. Insofar as they fail to approximate the Agreement Model, they must explain which modelling assumption they reject.

Analyzing the newly emerged Trianon cult, this article argues that the current wave of memory politics became the engine of new forms of nationalism in Hungary constituted by extremist and moderate right-wing civic and political actors. Following social anthropologists Gingrich and Banks, the term neonationalism will be applied and linked with the concept “mythomoteur” of John Armstrong and Anthony D. Smith, emphasizing the role of preexisting ethno-symbolic resources or mythomoteurs in the resurgence of nationalism. Special attention will be given to elites who play a major role in constructing new discourses of the nation and seek to control collective memories, taking their diverse intentions, agendas, and strategies specifically into consideration. This “view from above” will be complemented with a “view from below” by investigating the meanings that audiences give to and the uses they make of these memories. Thus, the analysis has three dimensions: it starts with the analysis of symbols, topics, and arguments applied by public Trianon discourses; it continues with the analysis of everyday perceptions, memory, and identity concerns; and finally ends with an anthropological interpretation of memory politics regarding a new form of nationalism arising in the context of propelling and mainstreaming populist right-wing politics. The main argument of this article is that although the Hungarian Trianon cult, identified as national mythomoteur, invokes a historical trauma, it rather speaks to current feelings of loss and disenfranchisement, offering symbolic compensation through the transference of historical glory, pride, and self-esteem within a mythological framework. This article is part of a larger effort to understand the cultural logic and social support of new forms of nationalism in Hungary propelled by the populist far right.

The Kosovo Albanian political movement in the 1990s contained three fluctuating factions with distinct strategies: boycotting Serbian institutions, participating in elections, and resorting to an armed insurgency. This article shows how expectations of external assistance, primarily from the Clinton administration, influenced which strategy was to dominate the movement at certain periods. It also shows how the movement successfully conflated the issues of human rights and the ethnonationalist secessionist agenda, even though the secessionist agenda predated the claims of human rights violations following the rise of Slobodan Milošević to power in Serbia. In the end, the article discusses how the Clinton administration’s failure in the Rambouillet peace talks, the diplomatic result of the NATO attack on Serbia, and the fall of Slobodan Milošević set the foundations for freezing the conflict and turning Kosovo into a parastate.

As part of the collective work “Inconvenient Realities: Parastates, between Statehood and Frozen Conflict,” this article discusses today’s status of Azawad, a relatively remote parastate occupying the territories of northern Mali, currently entrapped in a low intensity conflict involving non-state actors, local security forces, and external interveners. By retracing the history and the development of Azawad, the article identifies the different and partly contrasting socio-economic and ethnic elements at the basis of Azawadian parastatehood, and it charts the dialectical process of co-construction, which have shaped and inextricably linked together the Azawad and the Malian state. Moreover, it underlines the complex and evolving relations existing between “nationalist” Tuareg rebels and jihadist groups, with the aim to problematize the classical distinction between secessionist and terrorist parastates. By showing the connections between parastatehood, hybrid governance, patronage politics, and statelessness characterizing the situation in the Azawad, the article claims that the current condition of stalled conflict represents a temporary and unstable arrangement, which is paving the way for further parastatehood projects to arise.

This article examines a category of parastatates that has been largely neglected; the terrorist parastate. The main aim of the article is to fill this gap by scrutinizing the case of the Islamic State (IS), an organization that could be considered as the epitome of a terrorist parastate. Before the collapse of its territorial strategy in 2019, the group had targeted a significant number of states through terrorist attacks, while simultaneously controlling large swathes of territory and developing state-like institutions. During its buoyant period, IS called itself a state (Dawla), it viewed itself as a state (accomplishing a religious obligation), and perhaps more significantly, it was often perceived as a state by its enemies. The article will discuss the future prospects for the Islamic State after the collapse of its territorial/statehood strategy. After conceptualizing the nature of the terrorist parastate, the article will venture into comparative uncharted territory through an examination of the terrorist parastate vis-Á-vis its ordinary secessionist counterparts. One of the chief dissimilarities is the fact that IS, and terrorist parastates in general, tend to be less durable projects than secessionist parastates because they lack international sponsorship and they are more susceptible to foreign military interventions.

This article explores nation-building processes in the Transnistrian imagined community. While some scholars describe Transnistria’s nation-building strategy as a civic, multicultural project, the analysis of recent demographic and educational data corroborated with the close examination of local media content and official discourses—all point to the emergence of a distinct political culture marked by the increasing use of the Russian language in the public sphere, and the politicization of the Moldovan identity. Discourses about ethnic and national identity in the region have evolved as the Transnistrian elites reimagine the political community as part of the Russkii Mir. These circumstances suggest that, in the long run, the breakaway region might function as the southeastern frontline of Russian irredentism with the elites of the Pridnestrovska͡ia Moldavska͡ia Respublika continuing to call on the Russian Federation to annex the parastate instead of seeking a peaceful reintegration into Moldova.

This article assesses the characteristics of the parastate; a territorial entity that operates outside the formal structures of international law and sovereign recognition. The primary obstacle for parastates transforming declarative statehood into constitutive sovereignty is the nature of their creation, which is seen as a violation of another state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Parastates are thus prevented from becoming equal members of the international community with access to and decision-making in international organizations and governing bodies. Left outside these groups, parastates remain disputed territories dependent on patron state sponsorship and blocked from improving their status by international actors that deny sovereign recognition. Despite these limitations, parastates have a noted record of endurance that can last decades as long as the international status quo prevents the host state from regaining control of the contested territory. This article concludes that while options for ending frozen conflicts of parastates are not impossible, they are extremely costly and highly risky. Without decisive diplomatic and military leverage favoring the host state, parastates will continue to endure for the foreseeable future.

Within the growing literature on de facto states and disputed territories, the parastate stands as the most contentious challenge to international sovereignty and one of the greatest threats to regional security. Parastates are territorial entities that have unilaterally declared independence and control territory claimed by another state. Though parastates have been a part of international studies since the 1960s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have produced a number of breakaway entities that have challenged existing understandings of state theory and security studies. Without full legal international recognition, the de facto statehood of parastates cannot transform into de jure sovereignty. This special section introduces our collaborative project on the nature, scope, orientation, and character of parastates; a small, select, and particularly problematic subunit of the de facto state family. Though many of these examples should be familiar to researchers of disputed territories, we feel some that have been previously categorized as de facto, contested, or even unrecognized states are better understood as parastates due to the indefinite frozen conflict they find themselves in for years, if not decades.