The history of indigenous peoples from across the globe is marked by constant aggression, persecution and conflict. In these times, they are being obliged to confront the consequences of economic interests in their ancestral lands and natural resources, which often take the form of extractive projects conducted by corporate actors with the permission of governments. These abusive practices have led to a number of social, legal and political disputes, many of which have resulted in violence. All of this reveals that indigenous rights cases cannot be omitted in the study of the interrelation between business, human rights and security, since these three elements are present in many of them. In particular, the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights needs to be closely examined, as it is considered to be the regional system of human rights protection that has played the most prominent role in delimitating indigenous property rights.

International Polar Week is an educational activity that has been carried out since the International Polar Year 2007–2008 (known then as International Polar Days). This event, which brings together educators and polar scientists to promote polar science, is generally organised by the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists and Polar Educators International. Here we provide an overview of how International Polar Week started, and describe its implementation in Portugal, a “non-polar” country. We quantify the activities carried out during International Polar Weeks in Portugal between 2012 and 2017, which involved >96,000 students, >200 schools, >1900 educators and 100 polar scientists, with talks and Skype calls by polar scientists being the most frequent activities. Portugal’s International Polar Weeks have involved students, educators and polar scientists from 18 other countries, in particular from the United Kingdom and Brazil. We conclude by providing recommendations to other countries wanting to implement International Polar Weeks.

Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

The Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) is an important legacy of the International Polar Year (IPY). APECS continues to foster engagement in education, outreach and communication (EOC) activities relating to the polar regions and provide training for early career researchers (ECRs). We highlight opportunities for training, leadership and skills development, such as the annual Polar Weeks and Antarctica Day celebrations. Participation and engagement in EOC activities actively contributes to career development by enabling ECRs to develop valuable soft skills such as networking, communication and interdisciplinary knowledge. A pilot survey on EOC engagement highlighted that those who organise events also gain leadership skills such as team management. We discuss several factors contributing to the success of APECS in training the next generation of polar leaders. These include the geographical rather than discipline-specific focus of the organisation, utilisation of online resources, including social media, and the strong links with partner organisations. These examples demonstrate how the EOC legacy of IPY has continued due to APECS’ targeted efforts to create EOC opportunities and provide skills and leadership training for ECRs.

Italian anti-fascists started to emigrate from the moment that Mussolini seized power. These émigrés, or fuorusciti, tried to organise themselves to put an end to Mussolini’s regime, but found themselves confronting a number of unexpected difficulties in their host countries. Among them, Giustiza e Libertà (GL) was one of the most active organisations. One of the problems they had to face was the issue of how best to deal with their hosts without compromising their integrity as Italians, and as patriots. The case of Paolo Vittorelli (Raffaele Battino), who is the subject of this article, presents a clear case study of this issue and shows how close collaboration between Italian anti-fascists and western democracies (in this case, the United Kingdom) was hindered by ideological problems. The study of such episodes helps us to shed light not only on the mentality of the GL émigrés, but also on the way the Italian Resistance would later approach the issue of working together with the Allies during the Italian campaign of 1943–1945.

The key purpose of this article is to critically assess the extent to which auditing and certification to quality assurance and risk management standards containing human rights-related requirements are an adequate and effective means of ensuring that private security companies internalize their responsibility to respect human rights. Based on participant observation, interviews and publicly accessible data, it concludes that in the absence of the adoption of specific assurance measures in the certification and oversight processes, the constructivist ‘tipping point’ resulting in the internalization of the corporate responsibility to respect may not be attained when there is inadequate norm compliance or, worse yet, norm regression.

Civic improvement in Georgian Britain required significant amounts of capital. Tontines were an important means of financing projects. This article provides new evidence based largely on local newspapers that demonstrates their local and national importance for mutual assurance and building. Shifts in profitability depended on the price of Consols and this explains why building tontines increased in importance. Tontines were used to fund new leisure spaces, workhouses, prisons, bridges, streets and other improvements. Their popularity waned in the later nineteenth century but until then they were an important means of funding civic improvements.

Nevil Maskelyne, the Cambridge-trained mathematician and later Astronomer Royal, was appointed by the Royal Society to observe the 1761 transit of Venus from the Atlantic island of St Helena, assisted by the mathematical practitioner Robert Waddington. Both had experience of measurement and computation within astronomy and they decided to put their outward and return voyages to a further use by trying out the method of finding longitude at sea by lunar distances. The manuscript and printed records they generated in this activity are complemented by the traditional logs and journals kept by the ships’ officers. Together these records show how the mathematicians came to engage with the navigational practices that were already part of shipboard routine and how their experience affected the development of the methods that Maskelyne and Waddington would separately promote on their return. The expedition to St Helena, in particular the part played by Maskelyne, has long been regarded as pivotal to the introduction of the lunar method to British seamen and to the establishment of the Nautical Almanac. This study enriches our understanding of the episode by pointing to the significant role played by the established navigational competence among officers of the East India Company.

As editor in chief of Utilitas, it is my great pleasure to announce the appointment of two new associate editors. Dr. Emmanuelle de Champs is Professor of British History and Civilisation at the University of Cergy-Pontoise. She is the author of Enlightenment and Utility: Bentham in France, Bentham in French (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and La déontologie politique ou La pensée constitutionnelle de Jeremy Bentham (Droz, 2008). Dr. Holly Smith is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Her Making Morality Work has just been published by Oxford University Press. So we have now strengthen our editorial roster in both the history of ideas and contemporary moral philosophy.

This paper offers a comprehensive discussion of the cardinal numeral system of Italian Sign Language. At the lexical level, we present the different formational strategies used to generate cardinal numerals and we provide evidence that in the younger generations of signers, the sign one has lost the function of indefinite determiner and is now used as a cardinal only. At the syntactic level, we show that the attested variation in the ordering between the cardinal and the noun is in part due to definiteness and contrastive focus. We account for this variation within the cartographic approach to syntax. Finally, we offer a principled explanation for the reason why cardinals inside Measure Phrases are not subject to word order variation, but always precede the measure noun.

A lasting legacy of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007–2008 was the promotion of the Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN), initially an IPY outreach and education activity by the International Permafrost Association (IPA). With the momentum of IPY, PYRN developed into a thriving network that still connects young permafrost scientists, engineers, and researchers from other disciplines. This research note summarises (1) PYRN’s development since 2005 and the IPY’s role, (2) the first 2015 PYRN census and survey results, and (3) PYRN’s future plans to improve international and interdisciplinary exchange between young researchers. The review concludes that PYRN is an established network within the polar research community that has continually developed since 2005. PYRN’s successful activities were largely fostered by IPY. With >200 of the 1200 registered members active and engaged, PYRN is capitalising on the availability of social media tools and rising to meet environmental challenges while maintaining its role as a successful network honouring the legacy of IPY.

Monthly mean passive microwave-derived sea-ice motion maps for 36 winters (October–April) are used to examine pan-Arctic sea-ice drift speeds and patterns. The mean Arctic Ocean sea-ice motion consists of three well-known primary circulation regimes: the Beaufort Gyre (BG), transpolar drift (TPD), and a motion system from the Kara Sea (KS). The 36-year mean winter sea-ice drift pattern is used to identify the average boundaries between the circulation regimes mentioned above. Regression analyses of the ice drift speed anomalies show statistically significant positive drift speed trends in BG, TPD and KS. Non-significant trends are associated with negative trends of generally weak drift speeds north of the Canadian Arctic and over the Chukchi/East Siberian Shelf. The first three modes of Empirical Orthogonal Functions were found to explain 30.2%, 13.5% and 8.7% of the spatial variance in the mean winter ice drift patterns and highlight the large variability in the ice drift patterns.