This article presents a corpus analysis of changes over a period of two centuries in speech-reporting constructions in written White South African English (WSAfE), a native variety of English that has been in contact with Afrikaans throughout its history. The analysis is based on register-differentiated comparable diachronic corpora of WSAfE, its parent variety, British English (BrE), and the contact language, Afrikaans. Three related reported-speech constructions are analysed, focusing on changes in the relative frequencies of variants of each construction. These constructions show ongoing change, with similar trajectories of change for WSAfE and BrE in some cases, but divergent trajectories in others. In the latter case, WSAfE and Afrikaans converge on similar frequency distributions, which follow from an accelerated rate of change or a slowing down of the rate of change for particular features in WSAfE in comparison to BrE. Descriptive findings are supported by conditional inference tree modelling. The effect of frequency on reinforcing similar patterns of change in WSAfE and Afrikaans, as well as simplification through the levelling of register differences in WSAfE and Afrikaans are proposed as explanations. The study highlights the importance of converging norms in a multilingual publication industry as a site of contact.

The pronunciation of the bath vowel is a salient feature of English varieties of the southwest of England, yet neither the status of the trap–bath split in traditional dialects nor ongoing change today is well understood. After reviewing the existing literature, we investigate the quality and length of low unrounded vowels in Bristol English on the basis of sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-five speakers. The picture suggested by these data is complex: there is evidence for a traditional length-only trap–bath split, for a length and backness split diffusing from the east and for a merger diffusing from the north. Some of these changes involve lexical diffusion, especially with loanwords and other distinctive lexical groups. Overall, the rich and contradictory data speak to the contested sociolinguistic status of these variables and to the need to examine individual patterns of variation closely to gain a full understanding of them.

At the dawn of the Second World War, the successes of the Axis seemed to herald the realisation of a new anti-Bolshevik and anti-democratic European order dominated by Nazi-fascist powers. Italian Fascists and Spanish Falangists enthusiastically welcomed plans for the ‘new civilisation’ in which they were determined to participate as protagonists. This article sheds light on the roles projected for the respective countries in the New European Order in the postwar period, according to the black and the blue shirts. It also investigates the ideological and cultural foundations of the Fascist and Falangist projects related to the new continental configuration, identifying similarities and differences between them. Considering the scarcity of comparative writings about fascist movements in the Mediterranean area, the present research fills a historiographic gap.

The 2014 Arctic Human Development Report identified “Arctic settlements, cities, and communities” as one of the main gaps in knowledge of the region. This article looks at circumpolar urbanisation trends. It dissociates three historical waves of Arctic urbanisation: from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century (the “colonial” wave), from the 1920s to the 1980s in the specific case of the Soviet urbanisation of the Arctic (the “Soviet” wave), and from the 1960s−70s to the present as a circumpolar trend (the “globalized” wave). It then discusses the three drivers of the latest urbanisation wave (resources, militarisation, and public services) and the prospects for Arctic cities’ sustainability in the near future.

Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still lie in ruins and are at the center of debates surrounding their reconstruction. This article examines the collective memory and narratives of the NATO bombings through a spatial lens, looking at how architectural discourses of reconstruction relate to multiple understandings and narratives of the bombings themselves. It focuses on how architects in Belgrade discuss and envision the reconstruction of buildings such as the Generalštab in relationship to the collective memories of political violence and war. The article explores the continuum between calls for full restoration and memorialization, by discussing how architects relate to the bombing of 1999 on personal and professional levels, and how narratives of the bombing influence architectural visions for the reconstruction itself. All in all, the article argues that architectural reconstruction, collective memory, and national identity shape each other. On the one hand, reconstruction responds to collective memory as architects make sense of the collective memory of war; on the other hand, reconstructed urban space reshapes memory by creating a new cadre matériel for remembrance.

This special issue builds on empirical research to provide new insights into the interrelations between collective memory and legacies of political violence in the Balkans. The contributions pay particular attention to two major issues: First, they explore the ways in which individuals and groups respond to and cope with violent pasts by investigating commemorative practices including public performances, narratives, and negotiations of counter-memories. Second, they make explicit how people select and reassemble collective memories through remembering violent pasts to create and disseminate novel forms of identity. Through interdisciplinary lenses, the studies reveal how the legacies of political violence and their lived experience become important means for people to create and mobilize collective memories that are influential enough to shape nationalistic and political realities on the ground. On a theoretical level, the articles demonstrate various ways in which collective memories enable critical discussions around a wider set of issues including national identity, nationalism, making of history, and local power games. By engaging with these concepts, the contributions question dominant framings of past events as they investigate how counter-memories and counter-powers emerge in the process of negotiating established versions of history, official narratives, and hierarchies of power.

The article aims to compare the conditions of migrants from Central Asia into Russia with that of migrants from the Maghreb into France. Despite many similarities in conditions (related to the experience of social exclusion), there are deep differences. The precarious legal status of the majority of Central Asian newcomers in Russia has prevented them from embarking on an effective struggle for public recognition; this is in sharp contrast with North African newcomers in France who have been engaged in such struggle since the 1980s. In addition, Islam plays different roles in the migrants’ perceptions by host societies and in identification of the migrants themselves. Whereas Islam has become a marker of overarching collective identity among the Maghreb migrants’ descendants, this is not the case with Central Asians in Russia, for whom Islam remains part of their individual identity, rather than the basis of social consolidation and political mobilization.

During the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the built physical landscape and places of cultural heritage were deliberately targeted and destroyed as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement recognized the potential for cultural heritage to contribute to postwar reconciliation and rebuilding; Annex 8 established a commission to preserve national monuments. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage in post-Dayton Bosnia and the ways in which it has been (ab)used to propagate a narrow, exclusivist identity. It focuses on the struggles to control the Commission to Preserve National Monuments as well as the fates of two monuments in particular—Vraca Memorial Park and the Partisans’ Memorial Cemetery—whose abandonment signifies the wider struggles over memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This article focuses on ideological constructions of contemporary nationalism shaped by the influence of Dmitrii Galkovskii. At the dawn of the Russian Internet, Galkovskii’s website, Samizdat, became the birthplace for intellectuals of contemporary Russian nationalism who emerged around Voprosy natsionalizma magazine and the online magazine Sputnik i Pogrom. Enemification strategies described in this article are understood as forms of self-representation of contemporary Russian nationalism. The goal of this article is to characterize one of the ideologies of contemporary Russian nationalism, which serves as a moral justification for some odious manifestations—xenophobia and racism. Three forces are characterized by contemporary Russian nationalists as the most dangerous challenges for the nation: the West, internal enemies, and migrants. Traditional and fundamental anti-Western rhetoric has turned into Anglophobia in the ideology of contemporary Russian nationalism. The most profound evidence might be found in Galkovskii’s conception of the history of international relations. This idea is also used when defining the internal enemy. Caucasians have taken the place of Russian nationalism’s previous main internal enemies, Jews, and are treated as representatives of the British colonial administration. The third enemy of modern Russian nationalism is migrants. They are seen as tools of the degradation policy toward Russians.

In spring 1999, amidst a wider ethnic cleansing campaign, Serb police forces abducted Ferdonije Qerkezi’s husband and four sons, who were never to be seen alive again. She subsequently transformed her private house into a memorial to the lost normalcy of her entire social world. We trace this memorialization process; her struggle for recognition; her transformation into an iconic mother of the nation and her activism, both for missing persons and against the internationally-driven Serb-Albanian normalization process in Kosovo. From a multi-disciplinary perspective, we critically reflect on the theoretical concept of “normative divergence” in intervention studies. We are guided by social anthropological (including immersive, historical-ethnographic, and semantic) analysis of the core tropes of social memory as both narratively and materially embodied by the House Museum. In systematically juxtaposing these to the normative transitional justice principles of truth, justice, non-recurrence, and reparations, and the overarching international intervention goal of reconciliation, we critically interrogate normative divergence per se. The ethnographic “thick description” of this case study—cognizant of context contingency, victims’ agency and experience, cultural change, and social transformation—points to divergent meanings of these principles as resulting directly from the political and institutional failure to provide key transitional justice goals.