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.

Drawing from the experiences of thirty-two refugee women who fled with their children from Ukraine to two German cities, Berlin and Frankfurt Oder, this article explores how being a refugee and a mother affects the anchoring, along with the un-anchoring and embedding of Ukrainian refugees in their new environment. It illustrates that solidarity practices and (inter)actions play a crucial role in mobility considerations, as the interlocutors engaging in solidarity work find meaning in building lives in their new environment. The identities of the interlocutors as refugees and mothers play an important role in shaping the solidarity they articulate as they work to support others in a similar situation in cultivating agency, which, at the same time, gives the interlocutors comfort in their own struggles. This article also makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on transnational family ties through the case of Ukrainian refugee women in Germany, who often have family members remaining in/returning to Ukraine. The interlocutors positioning as mothers and refugees means that they engage in negotiating mobility considerations with these positions in hindsight — providing new avenues of enquiry into the agency of refugee-mothers, reflecting on life aspirations, and considering their specific positionalities and forced migration context.

Egor Lazarev has given his readers more of an epic story than a grand theory, and everyone who reads State Building as Lawfare will be the richer for it. The setting for this riveting tale is the war-torn Russian province of Chechnya. We quickly learn from Lazarev’s mise-en-scene that Chechnya’s famously mountainous terrain is as choppy and uneven legally as it is topographically. Three separate legal systems coexist and commingle in this single subnational domain: 1) customary law, or adat; 2) Islamic law, or Sharia; and almost as an afterthought, 3) state law, “courtesy” of Russian central authorities in Moscow.

This article reviews the literature on nationalism and ethnic mobilization. I first discuss the different strands of research in the field, highlighting three key sources of division that characterize existing literature: geography, ethnic cleavage type, and strategy of mobilization. Arguing that the lack of dialogue between different niches of research can undermine the accumulation of general knowledge, I propose an integrated perspective on nationalism and ethnic mobilization that serves to assimilate findings from these separate niches. I conclude by discussing how such an integrated perspective can enhance our knowledge of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of ethnic mobilization.

In the former districts of Eupen and Malmedy, present-day East-Belgians, in particular academic and socio-political elites, draw their collective identity, amongst others, from the historical injustices inflicted upon them ever since the adoption of the Treaty of Versailles. The transfer of sovereignty from Germany to Belgium was then the subject of a popular consultation organised by the transitional Belgian authorities in those territories. Favouring national over popular sovereignty, those authorities de facto undermined the freedom of choice and imposed their annexation to Belgium which the League of Nations, despite criticisms, consecutively endorsed. Much has been said about this petite farce belge yet not from a legal point of view. Thus, this article sheds a different light on the historical accounts of those events which are instrumentalised to construct the contemporary collective identity of the German-speaking Community of Belgium.

Even after seven decades since it came into force, examinations of the Indian Constitution remain partial and incomplete. It is not widely known that the original ratified copy of the Constitution also makes a visual argument through the opening pages of every part. These elaborately crafted artworks, which are entirely negated in Indian scholarship, are structured in the form of a teleological and linear narrative, encompassing a claim of an unbroken link to an immemorial civilisation. Based on archival research and a hermeneutic that combines imaginal analysis, literary theory, historical scholarship and constitutional jurisprudence, this article will demonstrate that these constitutive images are the aesthetic foundation that imaginally binds the constitutional subject and the collective citizenry, and this article will show how its negation is closely tied to a foundational ambivalence that endures in constitutional law.

This article analyzes Vladimir Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” as an example of political rhetoric invoking the language/dialect dichotomy. Curiously, Putin argued both that Ukrainian is a “dialect” of a greater Russian language and that Ukrainian is a distinct “language” different from Russian. As a form of political rhetoric, the language/dialect dichotomy draws its power from normative isomorphism, the idea that languages, nations, and states ought to coincide. According to the logic of normative isomorphism, claiming that Russian and Ukrainian are separate “languages” gives the Russian Federation a claim to annex the Russian-speaking south-east of Ukraine, while claiming that Ukrainian is a “dialect” of Russian would justify the Russian Federation’s annexation of Ukraine in its entirety. By endorsing both positions, Putin’s speech provided pre-emptively justifications for different policies, giving him room to maneuver. All that said, neither the language/dialect dichotomy nor normative isomorphism offers a solid basis for political legitimacy.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Austrian schools effectively developed a robust system of civic education that attempted to cultivate the patriotism of all students, regardless of their nationality. While the ultimate goal of Habsburg civic education was loyalty to the imperial state, officials realized that this loyalty would not be able to supplant regional or national identities. Instead, officials designed a curriculum that would enhance these other identities hoping they would contribute to imperial patriotism. Students learned they shared their home with different national groups and that they belonged to a larger family of nations. While this concept was earnestly supported by the school curriculum, the way in which this material was taught may have impacted its effectiveness. For example, when discussing national groups, educators often drew from prevailing ethnographic theories that relied on stereotypical assessments. Moreover, compromises made in the early 20th century complicated these efforts. As nationalists gained increased control over school administration, the emphasis on shared local identity weakened. These factors did not necessarily alter Austrian civic education, but they do point to the ways in which it would have needed to adapt to the Monarchy’s changing political circumstances.

Recently, convergence liberals, such as Kevin Vallier, argue that the principle of social insurance could be publicly justified. Our paper challenges this marriage of convergence liberalism and welfare state. We begin by examining Vallier’s three reasons for the principle of social insurance: risk aversion, injustice and the promotion of political trust. We then argue that all these reasons are intelligibly objectionable. After examining five possible responses that convergence liberals may offer, this paper concludes that the principle of social insurance is not conclusively justified in the convergence conception of public justification.

The Antarctic Treaty System has put in place international agreements to provide comprehensive protection of the Antarctic environment. Despite this high degree of protection, human presence on the continent has resulted in environmental contamination, particularly at locations established prior to the development of the more stringent codes of conduct in recent decades. Rehabilitation of legacy contaminated sites is a priority for environmental management, and a framework for such efforts has been established. In this contribution, we re-evaluate the rehabilitation of the site of the former Vanda Station, a New Zealand outpost occupied from 1969 to 1991. We describe the design and implementation of the restoration, which included the removal of many tonnes of contaminated soils and groundwater, along with the post-action monitoring of the site. Our goal is to determine where challenges to the use of recent guidelines would have arisen. We found that while guidelines on clean-up of contaminated sites in Antarctica are valuable, challenges to implementation remain. These largely reflect a lack of understanding of the consequences of contamination on Antarctic ecosystems and the trajectory of natural rehabilitation. We present recommendations on how to address some of these challenges.

The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) faces serious demographic challenges. One of the most important among them is the imbalance of population flows within internal migration. This paper examines the patterns of internal migration in the Republic, based on the distribution of municipal districts (uluses) by economic zones designated by the authorities for administrative purposes. The six most common indices characterising the intensity of migration of the population were used for the analysis. The homogeneity of Yakutia’s districts according to these indices was tested using the van der Waerden test. The article reveals that the intensity of migration in Yakutia has increased since 2011. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant but temporary impact on internal migration in Yakutia. Only Yakutsk has experienced population growth due to internal migration throughout the period studied. The intensity of migration in the Arctic uluses was not statistically different from central and eastern uluses, but differed from the most economically developed districts in southern and western Yakutia. The Republic was homogeneous with respect to the balance of migration inflows and outflows, but there was considerable heterogeneity in terms of the impact of migration on the size of the population.

This paper constructs the intellectual histories of learned societies in Ghana to illuminate African agency in pursuing knowledge production and dissemination. Academics and politicians founded some of Africa’s first scientific societies in Ghana. Previous scholarship on scientific research and higher education in Africa has overlooked the role of disciplines-based learned societies and national academies. This paper contributes to that literature using a historical comparative approach to construct the histories of learned societies that emerged during the colonial and postcolonial periods to understand how such scientific associations contributed to research productivity. I advance two arguments based on case studies of three scientific societies. First, there is linearity in the evolution of learned societies. Second, the institutionalization of scientific communities along interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary lines provided flexibility and enabled learned associations to contribute relevant knowledge to the “developmental state” that the political leaders were constructing.