The securitization of Russian-speakers has been central to nation-building in Estonia and Latvia since they regained their independence in 1991. Securitization at the levels of discourse and policy varies over time as a result of historical legacies, Russia’s kin state activism, and the minority protection requirements of European institutions. This article introduces a typology that links discursive frames with policies to map securitizing trends in Estonia and Latvia after the Soviet collapse: securitizing exclusion — less accommodating policies are justified by presenting the minority as a threat to the state or core nation; securitizing inclusion — more accommodating policies are justified to “win over” the minority in order to decrease the threat; and desecuritizing inclusion — more accommodating policies are justified on grounds of fairness or appropriateness without reference to security. The utility of the typology is demonstrated by analyzing frames in the public broadcast media and recent policy developments in Estonia and Latvia immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis points to increasing convergence across countries in favor of securitizing exclusion. The analysis points to increasing convergence across countries in favor of securitizing exclusion. We conclude by evaluating these trends in light of minority mobilization and recent data on support for the active defense of the state among Russian-speakers and titulars.

In the 1920s, Eastern European Jewish immigrants settled in Antwerp and became economically active in the diamond industry. While historians have focused on the role of Jewish commerce and the development of the diamond industry in Antwerp, the role of Jewish labour has been paid only scant attention. The current article focuses on the specific economic position of Eastern European Jewish immigrant diamond workers in Antwerp. It sheds light on the social and working conditions under which Jewish immigrants laboured. The reaction of Belgian diamond workers and their union towards the arrival of Jewish immigrants in the industry is also discussed. Special interest is accorded to the attempts of Jewish political parties and the Diamantbewerkersbond van België (ADB, General Diamond Workers Union of Belgium) to unionize the new arrivals. In this way, the article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics between immigrant labour, union organization, and (imported) political ideologies in the attempts to integrate foreign workers within the industry.

In September 2023, the trial at Stockholm District Court against Orrön Energy (previously Lundin Energy) and two corporate directors for complicity in war crimes in Sudan between 1999 and 2003, started. The Lundin case is part of a trend of attempts to hold corporations criminally accountable for their alleged involvement in serious human rights abuses and provides a unique opportunity to assess the possibilities of such attempts in relation to the rights of the victims. This article analyzes how human rights obligations and the objectives of reparations for victims are satisfied by Swedish law and practice in the Lundin trial. It shows that while the law allows victims participating in trial to put forward civil claims, it denies this right to the large number of victims not participating, and the decision early in the Lundin proceedings to separate damage claims from the criminal trial has left the participating victims effectively denied reparations.

Why could politicians of religious minority backgrounds become national leaders in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas in some other countries, almost all the national leaders have been from the religious majority background for decades if not centuries? I argue that the most important factor explaining the incidence of national leaders of a religious minority background or lack thereof is whether the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that established the nation-state was of the same religious sectarian background or not. Nations established in a constitutive conflict against an adversary of the same religion are much more likely to have national leaders of a religious minority background. Furthermore, political leaders of religious minority backgrounds have three “secular” paths out of their marginality, which is also determined by the combination and nature of the primary external and internal conflict of the nation. I examine these paths through the cases of Britain (liberalism), France (socialism), and Hungary and Italy (nationalism). Finally, I examine a world-historical example of pattern change, the rise of Catholic-origin national leaders in previously Protestant-led Germany, which was due to a new constitutive conflict (World War II and the Holocaust) that altered the national-religious configuration.

Lara Buchak defends a Weight-Ranked Utilitarianism (WRU) that she says avoids the critique of Rawls’s that is sometimes thought fatal: utilitarianism unjustifiably blurs the distinction between persons. Buchak’s defence depends upon (i) a version of Harsanyi’s assumption that parties to a social contract should reason as if they have an equal chance of being anyone and (ii) a hypothesis she explores in a recent article. I argue that her assumption and hypothesis are untenable. WRU fails of the generality to which Buchak aspires because it fails for one of her most important cases: the distributive question posed by Rawls.

Historical research on efforts to reduce the stigma associated with venereal disease (VD) generally dates these campaigns back to the 1930s. Within the United States, one of the earliest attempts to detach VD from its traditional association with sexual immorality occurred during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, when the New York City dermatologist Lucius Bulkley coined the term syphilis insontium (‘syphilis of the innocent’) in the hopes of demonstrating that many of those who contracted this disease did so through non-sexual contact. Gaining widespread acceptance within the medical community, Bulkley’s ideas served as the intellectual foundation for a discursive assault on the prevailing belief that syphilis constituted the ‘wages of sin’—one designed to destigmatise the disease and to promote more scientific responses to it. However, the effects of this anti-stigma rhetoric were often counterproductive. Encouraging doctors to discern ‘innocence’ or ‘guilt’ through assessments of a patient’s character, syphilis insontium often amplified the disease’s association with immorality. With the passage of time, physicians became increasingly aware of these problems, and in the 1910s, a backlash against Bulkley’s ideas emerged within the American medical community. Yet even with the resultant demise of his destigmatisation campaign, discourses of ‘innocent syphilis’ continued to circulate, casting a long shadow over subsequent stigma reduction efforts.

This article seeks to explain how Mau Mau combatants selected and killed their civilian targets. The central argument is that Mau Mau members shared a moral logic that informed whom they killed, how, and why they did it. This moral logic was partly based on traditional Kikuyu ethics of violence, which were widely held and traceable to the late nineteenth century. Yet it was also a logic born out of novel, albeit contested, ethical convictions that developed in the context of an asymmetrical anticolonial war in 1950s-Kenya. Using captured guerrilla documents and oral history interviews with Mau Mau veterans, the article analyzes the perceived offenses that civilians committed against Mau Mau, the motives of Mau Mau assailants, and the internal conflicts that arose regarding the killings of some civilians. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the moral logic of Mau Mau killings was firmly rooted in a dialectical tension between longstanding Kikuyu ethics of violence and the harsh realities of waging an asymmetrical anticolonial war. It also shows that Mau Mau debates over who to kill formed part of a larger process of sacralization, whereby members of the movement reimagined what they deemed sacred, moral, and just measures for conducting the war.

This interview with Peter Singer AI serves a dual purpose. It is an exploration of certain—utilitarian and related—views on sentience and its ethical implications. It is also an exercise in the emerging interaction between natural and artificial intelligence, presented not as just ethics of AI but perhaps more importantly, as ethics with AI. The one asking the questions—Matti Häyry—is a person, in the contemporary sense of the word, sentient and self-aware, whereas Peter Singer AI is an artificial intelligence persona, created by Sankalpa Ghose, a person, through dialogue with Peter Singer, a person, to programmatically model and incorporate the latter’s writings, presentations, recipes, and character qualities as a renowned philosopher. The interview indicates some subtle differences between natural perspectives and artificial representation, suggesting directions for further development. PSai, as the project is also known, is available to anyone to chat with, anywhere in the world, on almost any topic, in almost any language, at www.petersinger.ai

The gated community is a unique site of social reproduction which has proliferated across India. Elite families are reproduced at the individual, household level but also at the communal level in service-rich private enclaves. These households rely heavily on specialised reproductive labourers who are deprived of worker status because they work in the private domain. Homeowners’ associations or resident welfare associations (RWAs) meanwhile regulate reproductive labour through surveillance and wage fixing and by regulating entry and exit. Despite their public function, RWAs claim no responsibility for worker welfare due to privity of contract and the exclusion of ‘domestic service’ from labour laws. We examine India’s new labour codes, establishment laws and constitutional law to pin responsibility on RWAs as public bodies for ensuring the fundamental rights and welfare of these workers.

This article examines the writings of late 19th and early 20th-century Marxist theorists and political leaders from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and their influence on the chief Bolshevik theorist of Soviet nationality policies, Joseph Stalin. It argues that although many early Marxist theorists held divergent views on managing nationalism, they uniformly rejected biological or romantic spiritual conceptions of the nation and instead posited that nationalism and contemporary nations are relatively new, socially constructed phenomena arising from processes linked to economic and political modernization. These perspectives align with what contemporary academia labels as “modernist” theories of nationality and this analysis therefore challenges prevailing views on the genesis of these theories, tracing them back to early Marxist thinkers rather than late 20th-century Western European theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. This modernist understanding of nations as products of material forces and processes enabled socialists to envision steering nation formation. For the Bolsheviks and some of the later international revolutionaries they inspired, this meant that just as they believed they could accelerate the transition to a socialist future through active class management, so too they believed they could control and expedite the construction of national identities through carefully designed policies.

In his early serialist composition style, Einojuhani Rautavaara expressed indebtedness to the flexible usage of the twelve-tone system that was adapted by Alban Berg. The trace of Berg's influence becomes dramaturgically reminiscent when investigating the philosophical impact that Berg's opera Wozzeck had on Rautavaara's opera Vincent. This study aims to analyse the symbolic content of the Vincent libretto, with a secondary depiction of parallel attributes found in the libretto of Wozzeck. This examination demonstrates how the operas share a philosophical foundation that is based on an expression of metaphysical temporality inherent within the plots of both operas, which juxtapose the duality of the two temporal planes of empirical reality and metaphysical illusion. The outcome of such a comparison illustrates how Rautavaara's opera can be interpreted in a new framework of understanding that is based on the Finnish composer's mirroring of Berg's operatic and dramatic style as seen in Wozzeck.

This article examines the discursive contestation of Alash movement narratives in post-1991 Kazakhstan by studying overlapping and diverse official and non-official narratives. By surveying textual content and conducting interviews with those who carry these narratives, including textbook authors, the article reveals that while both official and unofficial narratives converge on the subject of statehood for the Alash movement, the non-official narratives and textbook authors use its legacy to express dissatisfaction with post-1991 developments in Kazakhstan. This study sheds light on the differing perspectives and debates surrounding the Alash movement’s legacy in shaping post–1991 Kazakhstani society and politics.

This article demonstrates how Crimean Tatars use memories of past displacements in their narratives of contemporary emigration and coping strategies in occupied Crimea. First, I present the significance of the first annexation of Crimea in 1783 by the Russian Empire and the 1944 deportation in the collective memory of Crimean Tatars. Second, I discuss the main motives for the displacement of internally displaced persons of Crimean Tatar origin in 2014 based on interviews conducted in L’viv. Drawing from interviews and focus groups that were conducted in Crimea between 2017 and 2019, I describe the influence of the memory of forced displacements on contemporary discourse and how it has evolved since Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine. Finally, I focus on how Crimean Solidarity activists employ memories of the first annexation and deportation to legitimize their resistance against Russia’s repressive policy in occupied Crimea. I argue that the 2014 annexation of Crimea was a retraumatizing event for many Crimean Tatars and that it has become an integral part of the grand narrative of their forced displacement from the late eighteenth century to the present.

In this paper, I analyze an intricate morphological pattern in Murrinhpatha which involves reordering of the dual marker ngintha and an alternation in the form of its adjacent morpheme. I will argue that the pattern strongly suggests an analysis in Stratal Optimality Theory: first, phonological correlates of morphological structure provide evidence for cyclic domains within the word. Second, the phenomenon can be derived using independently motivated morphological constraints, thus supporting the idea that morphology is an independent module of grammar with different optimization mechanisms, but the same stratal split as phonology. The cyclic architecture of the word provides a straightforward explanation for the placement of the dual marker and the resulting allomorphy of the classifier stem without resorting to ad hoc mechanisms such as position classes. Furthermore, the cyclic structure neatly accounts for multiple exponence of [dual] through the daucal (dual/paucal) classifier stem and ngintha. My analysis suggests that this overexponence results from the blocking of ngintha in the first cycle and the selection of the featurally more specific daucal stem. However, ngintha is not strictly bounded to the first cycle, and its realization is delayed until the second cycle.

European countries have been important supporters of Ukraine since the 2022 invasion by Russia. Responding to the invasion, however, was not the only challenge facing these countries in 2022. A tough domestic economic situation caused by high inflation and skyrocketing energy prices gave rise to public resentment accusing governments of favoring Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees over their own citizens. Yet, communicating governments’ policies on Ukraine efficiently and having the public on board matters because lack of public support may endanger the countries’ ability to help Ukraine in the war. Given the importance of political communication, we use the case of Czechia to explore the role of empathy in political communication between Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees. We build on existing studies which suggest that empathy in communication has the potential to decrease polarization of public opinion and that candidates using empathetic communication are viewed more positively. First, in a rhetorical analysis, we demonstrate that empathy with citizens’ concerns is not a part of the government’s defense of its refugee policy. Then, in an original survey experiment, we show that contrary to expectations, expressing empathy with citizens’ concerns does not significantly increase public support for help to refugees.

The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbitration settlements, often using the accounting technique of discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, have increasingly relied on a conception of investor-oriented time that offers an expansive future, a time of long-term unbroken integrity. I trace the complex but often uneven shifts in arbitration practices through which the future is reconfigured not as a proximate and conditional object but as a category, encoded in DCF, which is endlessly expansive. The time of the unbroken asset, I argue, is in urgent disjuncture with the time of transition.

Studies of cinema's emergence from nineteenth-century cultural forms have historically privileged its visual attributes over its sonic ones. This article redresses the balance by examining a musical device commonly associated with early film exhibition across Europe: the fairground organ, whose spectacular audiovisual appeal was exploited in public squares and fairgrounds long before the invention of cinema. Drawing on insights from the field of media archaeology, I ask whether we can locate an archaeological layer of cinematic prehistory in the fairground organ itself. In so doing, what emerges is the critical importance of Italy in the cultural history of the mechanical organ. Partly this is because the individual widely acknowledged as the ‘father of the fairground organ’, Ludovico Gavioli, was an Italian. Yet the Italianness of mechanical organs was also rooted in the stereotypical repertoire of such instruments (well-known excerpts from Italian opera), and on discursive tropes that emphasized an affinity between portative barrel organs – said to have been invented in Italy – and the itinerant operators of such instruments, often perceived to be Italian. Ultimately, I suggest that instead of treating fairground organs as the backing-track to early film exhibition, we might profitably conceive of early cinema as the latest visual enhancement to grace the exhibition of the mechanical organ.