Recent times have been hard for global governance, not least for formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs). Given changing conditions and their inability to adapt, many observers argue that FIGOs are drifting and losing ground to low-cost institutions (LCIs). We argue that this widespread perception is incomplete and that it dismisses too quickly the durability of FIGOs. We begin by pointing out that not all FIGOs are drifting and that some may even thrive amid transnational crises and power shifts. We then highlight the possibility that in a densely institutionalized global environment, states can substitute one FIGO for another. Thus, even as one FIGO is drifting, other FIGOs, rather than or alongside LCIs, can take the mantle. We identify and exemplify three key motivations for FIGO substitution: overcoming gridlock, enhancing ideological alignment, and policy laundering. During crises and power shifts, some members might paralyze a FIGO, leading to gridlock and prompting other members to cooperate in another FIGO. Power shifts and crises can also motivate dissatisfied FIGO members to pursue parallel activities in a FIGO that better fits their ideological outlook. Policy laundering occurs when members use one FIGO over another to signal political intent. We conclude by exploring the normative implications of FIGO substitution.

In the introduction to this roundtable, we argue that global governance currently faces hard times because it is affected by a set of significant developments revolving around the changing distribution of state power, the rise of nationalist populism, and the frequent occurrence of transnational crises, while seeking to facilitate collective action on complex cooperation problems. Against this backdrop, the essay identifies two major institutional dynamics of global governance in hard times: first, the drift of formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) that is caused by them being gridlocked in a period of significant changes in their social, (geo)political, economic, and technological environment. Second, the proliferation of various types of low-cost institutions. To help us think systematically about how these two interrelated institutional dynamics affect global governance, the essay develops the innovation thesis and the decline thesis. The “innovation thesis” suggests that by transitioning from a rather exclusive and hierarchical system revolving around FIGOs into a more inclusive and heterarchical system revolving around institutional diversity, global governance is currently being adapted to its new environment. The “decline thesis,” by contrast, argues that the two institutional dynamics undermine rules-based multilateralism and may lead to a shift back toward traditional (great) power politics that does not respect institutional constraints.

The history of sugar is that of a commodity that has played a central and contested role in the development of global agro-industrial capitalism. In my introduction to this “Suggestions and Debates” collection, the theoretical underpinnings of The World of Sugar will be explained. Reference is made to the agenda of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, which was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021, and of which I was a co-author. Inspired by the work of Friedmann and McMichael, a key element of this agenda is the notion of successive commodity regimes, separated by systemic frictions and phases of intense innovation to overcome them. Moreover, the argument is made that The World of Sugar can be read as an invitation to explore new directions in global labour history. My introduction concludes with an exhortation to overcome the limitations of single-commodity histories and to give more attention to the agency of workers in shaping the trajectories of global capitalism.

The article looks at instances of specialisation for specific linguistic contexts in ‘command’ and ‘inference’ uses of will and must. It tests the feasibility of different motivations for this specialisation, such as statistical and construal pre-emption. It also proposes a new motivation for specialisation, polysemous pre-emption, i.e. whether a strongly entrenched polyseme of a given expression might pre-empt the use of an expression with a less strongly entrenched polyseme. The investigation uses corpus analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis to test the three motivations (statistical, construal, and polysemous pre-emption). The results show that all instances of specialisation with will and must could be explained through construal pre-emption and/or polysemous pre-emption, thus making recourse to statistical pre-emption unnecessary.

This article explores the systems of policing that emerged in the early Cape Colony (1652–1830). Contrary to previous historical scholarship that understood the institution to be largely nonexistent or of marginal importance to the colony’s political economic development, this article argues that the Cape colony’s systems of policing, which doubled as ad hoc military organizations, were not so much weak as privatized. It shows how this persistent tendency was motivated by the Dutch East India Company’s desire to maximize profits—though it manifested differently in different parts of the colony. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the mercantile economy that the company installed at the Cape ensured that private policing would become a vehicle of indigenous dispossession. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the field of African carceral studies and understandings of processes of racialization in the early Cape.

This article offers a Baradian–Butlerian reading of Arendse & 42 Others v Meta, a landmark Kenyan case on outsourced content moderation. Moving beyond structural and subjection-centred framings, it theorises law as a site of ontological reconfiguration – where labour, harm and personhood are co-constituted through intra-action. Drawing on diffraction as an onto-epistemological method, the paper examines how the Kenyan courts reclassified digital labour, pierced jurisdictional separability and temporarily unsettled transnational corporate insulation. Yet, this legal aperture also generated recursive violence: moderators lost employment, residency and psychiatric care, even as their trauma became juridically legible. The paper challenges linear emancipatory or subjection-based accounts of such cases, arguing instead that law functions as a diffractive apparatus – producing patterns of recognition and exclusion without closure. It contributes to the governance of content-moderation scholarship by showing how Kenya’s legal system intra-acts with global capital to generate contradictory but generative juridical formations.

The English modals have been used as case studies in many domains of linguistic enquiry. Their diachronic development and patterns of synchronic variation in historical and contemporary corpora have been used to develop theories of linguistic representation, to further understanding of correlations between structure and use, and to investigate relationships between form and meaning. However, much of this research explores only the modals themselves: relatively little attention has been given to the study of modal collocations. In this article, we explore variation and change in collocational patterns of two modals (may and might) when they appear directly adjacent to the adverb well. Our analysis is corpus based, using quantitative data to explore macro-level trends in recent American English, and qualitative analysis to explore micro-level variation, particularly with regard to the development of concessive uses of may and might, and post-modal meanings more generally. We foreground the idea that modals show subtly different diachronic trends in specific collocations compared to perceived trends when looked at as an isolated class of auxiliary verbs.

Archaeology has been closely entangled with dominant power structures since its formal emergence in the nineteenth century. Recent scholarly work has sought to challenge this relationship and destabilize the fundamental Eurocentrism of archaeological theory and praxis. The extent to which this effort is reflected beyond academia has, however, not been as widely explored. In this article, the author presents evidence concerning the production of archaeological knowledge within the academy, the dissemination of knowledge of the past in schools and the media, and the consumption of this knowledge by members of the British public, including adults and secondary school pupils aged 11–14. He concludes that there exists a fundamental disjuncture between contemporary scholarly work and popular perceptions of the past and suggests some ways the academy may challenge the continued prevalence of Eurocentric perspectives of the past in popular discourse.

This study examines Israeli judges’ incorporation of the Arabic language and Islamic religious sources in court rulings within Israel and the West Bank military courts. Analysing seventy-eight judicial decisions (1997–2024) and interviews with legal professionals, we identify six themes motivating this practice: persuasion, authority reinforcement, cultural bridging, mutual respect, substantiation and alternative reasoning. Both Arab and Jewish judges employ this approach across criminal, family and civil law cases. This linguistic and cultural integration enhances court decision legitimacy among Arabic-speaking litigants and fosters intercultural understanding within the legal system. The study contributes to discussions on legal pluralism, judicial behaviour and the role of language in multicultural judicial systems, illuminating how the Israeli legal system navigates its multicultural reality and the interplay between law, language and cultural identity.

The World of Sugar, Ulbe Bosma’s compelling historical narrative on how sugar became a global commodity, and the accompanying introductory article in the International Review of Social History raise many fascinating points for further reflection and debate. In this commentary, I wish to highlight several points that resonate strongly with my own work at the Transnational Institute (TNI), a global think tank based in Amsterdam that connects social movements with academics and policymakers. These points of reflection are informed by TNI’s mission and practice of “scholar-activism”: the fact that we seek not only to interpret the world, but also to change it for the better, in particular for those exploited and oppressed classes and social groups. As my work principally involves collaboration with transnational agrarian movements, I pay particular attention to areas of Bosma’s analysis that carry implications for rural working people and for agrarian and environmental justice. This includes the role of sugar in the global land rush, the rise of sugar cane as a “flex crop and commodity”, and the ways in which “rural sugars” can be supported in peasant- and smallholder-based economies and livelihood strategies.

Responding to Konstantin Morozov’s article, which criticizes the Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership, I point out that the reality of the right to unconsciously interact with objects, on which he heavily relies, is dubious.

Epistemic democrats indirectly evaluate democratic decisions by directly evaluating the inputs into the election. However, the fundamental problem of measurement in the philosophy of science shows that procedures are often as difficult to evaluate as outcomes. This paper brings this highly refined framework into political philosophy to show that epistemic democrats face an analogous ‘fundamental problem of evaluation’. This cross-fertilization of political philosophy with the philosophy of science shows that the quality of democratic mechanisms and their inputs regarding their ability to track the truths of justice is as difficult to evaluate as the quality of the resulting decisions themselves.

This article presents a critique of Sergei Sazonov’s entrepreneurial theory of ownership. The article first reconstructs Sazonov’s response to the private duty imposition objection. It then demonstrates that Sazonov’s theory cannot overcome this objection because it is based on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘use’. The entrepreneurial theory of ownership understands ‘use’ in a rather narrow and contradictory sense, which differs from the meaning in which this concept appears in objections to theories of original appropriation.

While literature on English modality has usually focused on traditional modal and semi-modal verbs, to our knowledge, no attention has ever been given to the emerging be having to (BHT) construction. Through corpus analysis conducted on GloWbE, ICE, BNC and CLMET, this article investigates the semantic differences between have to and BHT that make them distinct in the English constructicon. We demonstrate that BHT conveys meanings of contingency, reluctance and inchoativity, and propose that its recent emergence may stem from a specific functional gap within the English modal system. While have to appears to be gradually grammaticalizing with future-oriented functions, BHT seems to be renewing the original (and less grammaticalized) dynamic functions of have to. Finally, we explore the productivity of the construction across different English varieties and the reasons for its lower frequency in postcolonial varieties. The hypothesis of negative retentionism proposes that a feature that was absent in the lexifier language at the time of contact may indeed be found to be less frequently used in the contact variety at a later stage due to colonial lag.