This article explores how the concept of minority national-cultural autonomy (NCA) has been defined and practiced in contemporary Estonia, combining data from interviews and previously unanalyzed archival sources to trace debates and policymaking processes back to 1988 and ascertain: why (and for whom) NCA was adopted; the functions ascribed to NCA institutions; and the effectiveness and legitimacy of the model in the eyes of different “noncore” ethnic communities. In so doing, the article uses NCA as a fresh lens for analyzing the more general politics of post-Soviet state and nation-building in the country, situating this case within the “Quadratic Nexus” framework. Estonia’s NCA law is generally viewed as irrelevant to ongoing issues of diversity governance in the country. However, Finnish and Swedish minority autonomies have been established and, in recent years, there have been three applications to establish a Russian NCA. None have been approved, and yet some authors see them as evidence that NCA could (and should) have a role to play in bringing about a more meaningful accommodation of ethnic diversity. Having reviewed the evidence, however, the article concludes that this claim is misplaced.

Chinese conservatism is often reduced to a cultural movement the main concern of which is the preservation of traditional culture. This article proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the origin of conservatism in the Republican era. Conservatism in this period was a reaction against New Culture activists’ denial of the political utility of this culturalist nationalism and constituted a response to World War I, leading some to question the merits of Western civilization. As a result, tradition no longer unitarily evoked the cultural elements corresponding to modern Western politics. Adopting a typological approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by differentiating various political implications of traditional culture, it divides the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarian conservatism.

This article addresses the colonial project of “civilizing” and educating indigenous people in the farthest corners of the Dutch empire – South Dutch New Guinea (1902–1942), exploring the entanglement between colonial education practice and the civilizing mission, unravelling the variety of actors in colonial education in South Dutch New Guinea. Focusing on practice, I highlight that colonial education invested heavily in disciplining the bodies, minds, and beliefs of indigenous peoples to align them with Western Catholic standards. This observation links projects to educating and disciplining indigenous youth to the consolidation of colonial power. Central to these intense colonial interventions in the lives of Papuans were institutions of colonial education, managed by the Catholic mission but run by non-European teachers recruited from elsewhere in the Dutch colony. Their importance as proponents of the “civilizing mission” is largely unappreciated in the historiography of missionary work on Papua.

Stalin’s collectivization campaigns and the associated famine killed millions in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, yet the two countries commemorate the events quite differently. In Ukraine, the Holodomor (death by hunger) occupies a prominent place in the public sphere and is remembered most frequently as a genocidal policy against the Ukrainian nation. In Kazakhstan, the famine takes up little space in the public arena, and officials remain reluctant to call it a genocide. This article explores these differences using two models explaining variation in the politics of memory: one emphasizing the instrumental calculations of political elites and the other emphasizing the historical and cultural constraints that frame contemporary debates. These two models complement each other rather than compete. The contest over the famine in Ukraine was in part a consequence of eastern and western Ukraine’s differing histories, but it intensified when governing politicians deployed the memory of the famine instrumentally in the 2000s. In Kazakhstan, political calculations led the regime to emphasize unity and stability over divisive debates about the past, but historical factors made depoliticizing the famine feasible.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which dedicates the continent to peace and international scientific cooperation in the face of rising east–west tensions, is informed in part by a shared scientific imaginary created by the UK and other nations which maintained scientific bases in Antarctica at the time. In this article, the poet offers works extracted from her longer sequence “Met Obs,” based on meteorological reports and journals from the UK station at Port Lockroy written in advance of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). The poems engage with the work and circumstances which helped foster such an imaginary, as well as with the nexus of Antarctic “values” endorsed by the Treaty, and the later Madrid Protocol. The commentary further contextualises these literary responses in terms of the attitudes of the men working there as well as the “wilderness and aesthetic values” recognised by the later Protocol on Environmental Protection. The world of the poems may belong to 1950s Antarctica, but their observations reach beyond that experience, making a case for the continued relevance of Treaty values, and for the importance of artistic, as well as scientific, responses to the environment in a world under threat from accelerating climate change and competition for resources.

The aim of this article is to inquire how recent and more consolidated historiographical trends consider the impact of nationalism in the late Ottoman Balkans. I focus on historical accounts of Albanian–Slav interaction in the late Ottoman Macedonian context, although the inquiry also includes texts that do not only engage with this epistemological field. I confront research efforts that have been published from the early 1960s to the present in order to understand the continuities and the discontinuities that characterize the work of historians. A preliminary investigation has allowed me to outline two main historiographical approaches: the national historiographies and the postnationalist approach. Such a distinction has become tangible especially after the end of the Cold War when a new generation of historians started to question the validity of the studies conducted by their colleagues in the past decades by pointing at the methodological and ideological issues that limited their work. In this article I evaluate to what extent the work of postnationalist historians is different from that of traditional historiographies and finally reflect on the possibility and benefits that might come from a dialogue between the two approaches.

The indirect cause of death of the three members of the Andrée balloon expedition on White Island in early October 1897 was the ice drift during their attempted retreat after the forced landing at 82°56′N 29°52′E. They initially tried to reach Cape Flora to the southeast of their current position in the Arctic pack ice even though they could deduce from prior explorers’ experience that the expected long-term direction of the ice drift in the area would be to the southwest. However, when they finally turned towards the Seven Islands in the southwest, the ice unexpectedly began to drift in a southeasterly direction. In this paper, trigonometrical methods are used to derive more precise measures of the ice drift the expedition members actually experienced, based on their own position fixes and their own descriptions of their marches. The results confirm that they were exposed to a southwesterly ice drift, on average, during the weeks they were trying to head southeast, and to a southeasterly ice drift, on average, during the weeks they were trying to head southwest. Hence, the disastrous ending of the expedition was, at least to some extent, a result of bad luck.

This article examines an ideological and a narrative rift between two elitist formations and two forms of nationalism that a practice of memory-making embodies. In the subterranean polemic where Soviet generation intelligentsia and liberal intellectuals animate the past on Russian–Georgian relations in two distinct ways, past becomes a critical terrain where the struggle over Georgia’s geopolitical belonging and the resulting disputes on national identity take place. This analysis not only flashes out recent discursive rifts, linking them to the broader political processes, but traces the genealogies of the narrative practices that enable two idioms of nationalist discourse. It is both an analysis of post-socialist class formations and of the semantic fields within which their idioms are embedded.

This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.

There are at least four ways in which Antarctic colonialism was white: it was paradigmatically performed by white men; it consisted in the taking of vast, white expanses of land; it was carried out with a carte blanche (literally, “blank card”) attitude; and it was presented to the world as a white, innocent adventure. While the first, racial whiteness has been amply problematised, I suggest that the last three illuminate yet other moral wrongs of the Antarctic colonial project. Moreover, they might be constitutive of a larger class of “white” colonialisms beyond the White Continent.

This article engages critically with William Rowe's notion of an “alternative economic discourse” linking the market-consciousness shown in some aspects of Dong Wei's approach to famine relief in the Song dynasty to that which informed many subsistence-policy discussions and some aspects of bureaucratic practice during the high Qing. The longevity of the discursive tradition is shown to be understated if we start with Dong Wei, but it is also taken as an interpretative challenge. Comparison with the case of ancien régime France is used to suggest an alternative conceptualization that enables us to differentiate between (1) a mainstream tradition of conventionally accepted market-conscious prescriptions that were not perceived as challenging Confucian moralism, and (2) avant-garde departures. A review of the arguments used down the centuries to justify distributing famine relief in monetary form is used to pinpoint one such departure and to reflect on its significance in a multi-century perspective.

Austria's post-World War II transition from two consecutive, abusive regimes (the Austro-fascist and the Nazi regime) to a functioning democracy has not yet been thoroughly assessed through the lens of transitional justice. An evaluation of what could now be dubbed transitional-justice measures shows that Austria was reluctant in accepting its collective responsibility vis-à-vis the victims of World War II. Another defining factor of Austria's transition is that it never encouraged the surviving victims of the Nazi regime to return. An appraisal of Austria's transition in light of the two final ends of transitional justice, namely democracy and reconciliation, culminates in two conclusions: first, Austria attained the goal of democracy but failed with reconciliation; second, the current model of transitional justice is ill-equipped to assess the non-linear course of long-past transitions.

Like all of Maurice Ravel's compositions, the virtuosic violin piece Tzigane, styled rapsodie de concert by the composer, rapidly became a mainstay of the concert repertory following its premiere with piano by the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi in April 1924 in London (her premiere of the orchestral version occurred in Paris on 30 November 1924 with Gabriel Pierné conducting the Colonne Orchestra). Yet, despite its popularity, no critic has included it among Ravel's major works. Reflections on Tzigane in the secondary musicological literature are very few indeed, which is somewhat surprising in the context of a new explosion of interest in Ravel. In his recent biography, Roger Nichols avers that ‘probably no one has ever suggested that Tzigane is great music’. Robert Orledge noted in 2000 that it ‘has never been among Ravel's most successful works’, a remark surely meant as a critique of the composition rather than a statement about its popularity with performers, which has been considerable. Alexis Roland-Manuel, a close friend of the composer, did not even discuss the piece in his biography of 1938. The violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, another close friend and consultant about the virtuoso figuration in Tzigane, confessed almost apologetically in her book on Ravel that ‘this rhapsodic piece is perhaps the only one in Ravel's oeuvre where I cannot locate – hidden in the intricacies of its tours de force – Ravel's characteristic flavour: in it, music has surrendered too much place to instrumental acrobatics’. In other words, she appears to suggest that Tzigane is a mere showpiece where Ravel's personal style has been eclipsed by fireworks, with an implicit criticism of pandering to market. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti spoke of the ‘resistance I always felt towards this brilliant and (to my mind) synthetically produced pastiche of Ravel's’. At the time of the premiere, the young Henri Sauguet told Francis Poulenc that ‘the aesthetic informing these pages is so antiquated that I am astonished anyone can still believe in it’.