I evaluate two contractualist approaches to the ethics of risk: mutual constraint and the probabilistic, ex ante approach. After explaining how these approaches address problems in earlier interpretations of contractualism, I object that they fail to respond to diverse risk preferences in populations. Some people could reasonably reject the risk thresholds associated with these approaches. A strategy for addressing this objection is considering individual risk preferences, similar to those Buchak discusses concerning expected-utility approaches to risk. I defend the risk-preferences-adjusted (RISPREAD) contractualist approach, which calculates a population’s average risk preference and permits risk thresholds below that preference, only.

Antonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major (op. 96, the ‘American’) in June 1893 while visiting the town of Spillville, Iowa, USA. Based on accounts from Dvořák's secretary Josef Kovařík, portions of the quartet's Scherzo movement were inspired by birdsong Dvořák heard in Spillville. Kovařík's account included both Dvořák's visual description of the bird that inspired him and a transcribed fragment of the birdsong Dvořák reportedly used. In 1954, Clapham identified the bird as a scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea), based mainly on the visual description. This widely accepted identification was questionable because of the poor match of the tanager's song to musical material in the Scherzo. In 2016, Floyd proposed the red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus) as Dvořák's inspiration, based on song rather than appearance. The vireo's song is clearly identifiable in the Scherzo as well in the birdsong fragment recorded by Kovařík. The mismatch between the visual description and the transcribed song fragment could have occurred when Dvořák heard and recorded the persistent singing of a cryptic red-eyed vireo, but misidentified the song's source when he caught sight of a brightly coloured tanager. Correct identification of the birdsong changes the interpretation of the movement. Previously, birdsong has been considered the source of a short secondary motif. But red-eyed vireo songs are highly variable, and a slight variation of Kovařík's song fragment could be the basis of the main theme of the Scherzo. Therefore, Dvořák may have used American birdsong in the movement considerably more than previously appreciated.

This article addresses relationships between micro and macro aspects of language use through analyzing online interactions among neighbors discussing racism in their neighborhood. Membership categorization analysis supplemented with critical theory highlights how the ways neighbors name, characterize, and position categories orients to their rhetorical and identity goals (to construct reasonable stances, to seem not racist), which in turn motivates alignment with critical, folk, or colorblind ideologies of racism. Thus, ideologies do not determine interactional choices participants make, but rather are constituted by those choices. Findings also illustrate how discursive strategies such as reported speech, absurdity, three-part lists, and metadiscourse support ways that neighbors organize categories and achieve their aims. Additional contributions to this study include demonstrating the utility of membership categorization analysis for analyzing discourses of racism and providing practical insight into how racially diverse groups can have productive conversations about racism. (Racism, ideology, membership categorization analysis)*

This article briefly considers how the integration of the biophysical world into our analyses of the past can enhance our understanding of the socio-economic inequalities of the modern world. Taking Ulbe Bosma's The Making of Periphery as its central reference point, it argues that the process of “peripheralization” – generally treated as an economic or social phenomenon – can also be usefully approached as an interaction between human and non-human forces. It uses the example of Southeast Asian rubber production to show how the different arrangements of people, plants, soil and water on European estates and indigenous smallholdings gave the latter distinct ecological advantages that boosted their oft-cited economic competitiveness, and that consequently forced plantations to extract even more value from cheap labour. In this sense, the environmental history of Southeast Asian rubber offers further evidence for Bosma's core theses about the heterogeneity of peripheralization processes and the importance of demography and labour relations in shaping them.

For residents of Finnish Lapland, snow frames outdoor and indoor activities during the entire year, both in its presence and in its absence. This article focuses on people’s social and aesthetic perspectives on what is commonly referred to as “snow work”, lumityö. In ethnographic tradition, the aim is to understand “doing living with snow” in contemporary urban society – with snow that falls and, unlike other forms of precipitation, stays around for many months to come, thus creating physical, mouldable obstacles that have mental, social and environmental consequences. The shovelling of snow is considered an important physical activity that allows people to practice their individual expert knowledge and lets them socialise during long annual periods of potential isolation. Hence, apart from its restricting features, snow and ice enhance the meaning of homeowners’ dwelling in the open. In this context, aesthetic and creative concepts are essential where they draw on people’s gardening and artistic skills, and bring satisfaction to those engaging with this mundane and unavoidable activity.

The autonomous position of legal professionals is no longer self-evident. Professionals are under increased pressure to reform. This phenomenon is not only true for legal professionals. A broader trend – which is recognised for the medical profession, academic profession and alike – is that paraprofessionals are gaining a more prominent position. In this paper, we focus on the developments in the Dutch public justice system. We conduct a case-study on the role of paraprofessionals in courts and in the public prosecution service – two understudied legal institutions in this regard. By drawing on empirical data unfolding the working routine of the judiciary and the prosecution service, we find two paradigms that define the thinking about professionalism: a traditional ‘pure professional’ paradigm and a new, more hybrid paradigm that includes (policy-based) managerial thinking. The latter appears to be enhanced by a New Public Management (NPM) approach within these institutions. Although we observe resistance among (para)professionals towards professional changes and ambiguity in the relationships between professionals and paraprofessionals, we also observe that managerialism has changed the work processes and the division of labour between professionals and paraprofessionals.

This rejoinder is part of the round table discussion on the book The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor. It pays tribute to the development economist and Nobel Prize winner Arthur W. Lewis, who studied the predicaments of plantation societies. The rejoinder addresses critical observations made about the above-mentioned book by Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Pim de Zwart, Corey Ross, and Alberto Alonso-Fradejas. It underscores the importance of the role of demography and long histories of labour coercion to explain processes of peripheralization and mass emigration. It also points out the limits of classical development economics, namely a relative neglect of the ecological damage attending plantation exploitation. The commodity frontier approach is suggested as a way to address this shortcoming.

With his latest book, The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma makes a successful attempt to “decompress history”. Apart from praising his work, I want to offer two critical comments and a suggestion for global comparison. First, I argue that the role of colonialism/imperialism is somewhat downplayed in the book. Second, although I am impressed by the vast body of literature cited, I believe that at several instances the book might have benefited from its arguments being underpinned by more solid empirical quantitative data. Finally, I raise the question how unique the “plantation economies” of Island South East Asia actually were, which also implies a suggestion for further research along the lines of Bosma's impressive monograph.

Cultural, discursive, and technological differences notwithstanding, the peripheralization effects of plantation agriculture-based development pathways seem to be as vibrant today as during the height of the modern era's imperialism. This, at least, is what Bosma suggests, and I fully agree with him. The plantation, that modern labour-expelling periphery-making machine, is alive and kicking hard amid convergent socioecological crises nowadays. And this is an analytically but also politically salient phenomenon. Most often, development models which rely on predatory extractivism not only leave the majority of the population behind the well-being bandwagon, thereby turning a deaf ear to the pledge of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to “leave no one behind”; they also erode the ecological base, socioeconomic fabric, and institutions that enable more just and environmentally sound life projects to blossom. Thus, the careful examination of the complex and generative interplay between the model and intensity of resource extractivism and the broader political economy, as developed by Bosma in The Making of a Periphery, calls into question any non-transformative climate stewardship and sustainable development efforts, like the “business as usual” one represented by the flex crops and commodities complexes of the twenty-first century.

Saint-Saëns's incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (Comédie-Française, 1893, trans. Meurice and Vacquerie) gives witness both to his engagement with culture classique and an experimental orientation in the context of fin-de-siècle music theatre. This essay situates Saint-Saëns's highly idiosyncratic score within the frame of late nineteenth-century research into ancient Greek music by François-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. It documents how Saint-Saëns aimed to participate in the creation of an authentic experience of ancient Greek theatre, one enhanced by the initiative of the Comédie-Française to stage its production at the open air Théâtre d'Orange in southern France. The article also shows the limitations of authenticity resulting from the nature of the translation as well as from Saint-Saëns's own compositional instincts.

In this paper, I will focus on the emergence and uses of political economy in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century China. I will discuss how the concept of “economy” came to be conceived as an autonomous sphere of human life, with its own rules and its own order, and how the production of “wealth” was conceptually divorced from ethics, politics, and administration. For this purpose, I will focus on a group which played a key role in reshaping the social and political discourse of the empire: a group of nationalist reformers who wanted to transform the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. I will explore how these reformers brought together two different sets of traditions – the Chinese imperial traditions of literati statecraft on the one hand, and mostly British, French, and German traditions of political economy on the other – and how they used them to naturalize a particular idea of what the “Chinese nation” was and should be.

It has become received wisdom that the pandemic has “exposed” the political incompetence of far-right parties in government and that far-right parties in opposition have become its (first) “victims.” This is largely based on the generalization of one or two individual cases—most notably US president Donald Trump—who is the exception rather than the rule. This article provides a comparative analysis of far-right responses to the COVID-19 pandemic within the European Union. Based on theoretical insights from previous research, we expect the responses to reflect the main ideology and the internal heterogeneity of the contemporary far right as well as to show the increasing mainstreaming of its positions. We analyze four different, but related, aspects: (1) the narratives about COVID-19 from far-right parties; (2) the proposed solutions of far-right parties; (3) the electoral consequences of the pandemic for far-right parties; and (4) the success of far-right parties in dealing with the pandemic. Finally, in the discussion we shortly look ahead at the possible consequences of a highly likely second outbreak of COVID-19.

This article traces changes in Polish administrative approaches toward indigenous Upper Silesians in the 1960s and 1970s. By commissioning reports from voivodeship leaders in 1967, the Ministry of Internal Affairs recognized that native Silesians held reservations toward Poland and, moreover, that postwar “Polonization” efforts may have backfired. These officials further understood the need to act quickly against “disintegration” trends. Although administrators in Katowice and Opole noted that relatively few Silesians engaged in clearly anti-Polish activities, these leaders still believed that West German influence threatened their authority in Silesia. Increasing West German involvement in the area, particularly through care packages and tourism, seemed to support this conclusion. In response to fears of West German infiltration and the rise in emigration applications, local authorities sought to bolster a distinctly Silesian identity. Opole officials in particular argued that strengthening a regional identity, rather than a Polish one, could combat the “tendency toward disintegration” in Silesia. This policy shift underscored an even greater change in attitude toward the borderland population: instead of treating native Silesians as an innate threat to Polish sovereignty, as had been the case immediately after the war, the administration now viewed them as essential for maintaining authority in western Poland.

This article examines the motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to support the Euromaidan from abroad. Existing research has documented social movements within their national boundaries and the participation of young people in them. However, it has rarely examined the expansion of social movements beyond their national boundaries and the engagement of young immigrants in such movements. Drawing on a larger qualitative study, this article presents the findings about what motivated 24 young Ukrainian immigrants residing in the USA to support the Euromaidan movement of 2013–2014 and compares their motivations to those of the protestors in Ukraine. We argue that motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to support the Euromaidan from abroad manifest themselves in symbolic or psychological causes. Our findings demonstrate that the individual motivations were driven by an ideological commitment to systemic change in Ukraine, manifested through young Ukrainian immigrants’ (1) desire to end injustice, (2) solidarity with fellow Ukrainians, (3) moral obligation to raise awareness among the US public, and, most prominently, (4) sense of agency to contribute to the long-awaited change in the homeland. Our findings also show that overall, the motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to join the movement aligned with those of the protestors in Ukraine.

The historical literature on interwar Polish policy on Belarusians and other minorities focuses primarily on the relationship between the regime in power and minority groups as a single block, failing to note instances in which regime policies toward specific organizations have not been uniform. Despite the fact that Belarusian ethnic identity was ambiguous and national consciousness low, no fewer than 13 political organizations in interwar Poland claimed to represent the minority. The most influential organization was the Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Union Hromada. Less than two years after the organization’s inception, it was banned in 1927. This article examines why an organization like Hromada, which did not resort to violence and in fact took pains to operate within the legal framework of the Polish constitution, was shuttered by the state, while other organizations with similar profiles were allowed to operate. The article reveals that Hromada was not banned strictly due to what the government considered its radical ideology or because it was an antisystem party, but rather it was banned for its ability to suppress organizational pluralism among Belarusian organizations. The article advances the existing literature by (a) shifting away from analyzing the dynamics between a state and an ethnic group as a whole, by disaggregating the level of analysis to focus on minority political organizations, and by (b) going beyond ideology as the main explanatory variable dictating state policies toward minorities.

Why do some post-communist countries regularly experience democratic overturn of power while others do not? This article analyzes the role of authoritarianism, adopting a novel approach concentrating on three separate dimensions (authoritarian submission, conventionalism, authoritarian aggression). Examining Montenegro, a country that has not changed its incumbent government since the breakdown of communism, the article argues that authoritarian submission, which stands for an obedient relationship to a political authority, is a relevant factor for the domination of a single party—the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS). I test my assumptions using two surveys: the Montenegrin National Elections Study (2016) and a self-designed student survey. Notwithstanding the Montenegrin and Serb ethnic cleavage and economic preferences that remain significant for voting patterns, findings from both analyses confirm that submissive tendencies are important for voting behavior both for the national sample and for the educated young. This emphasizes the importance of psychological factors and the need to break submissive mindsets for successful democratic transformation in post-communist countries.

What role do nationally celebrated holidays play for groups that are not considered—or do not consider themselves—to be part of the majority nation of a state? What function do holidays specific to minority group cultures serve under regimes that discriminate against those groups? This article explores holidays as a forum for contestation for the national identity proposals promulgated by the state in repressive regimes. We argue that national holidays are meaningful sites of identity contestation for four reasons: the role of holidays in heightening identity salience, the malleability of identity narratives, the relative lack of institutional barriers to acts of celebration, and the significance of refusing to participate in celebrations. We collected the data through interviews and participant observation of the Hui in China and the Kurds in Turkey. We employ ethnographic observation and intertextual analysis to compare these identity narratives. We find that the Hui legitimize their group’s existence by co-opting the traditional Spring Festival, or by outwardly insisting they are not celebrating while still engaging in festivities. In contrast, Turkey’s Kurds resist the government’s co-optation of the spring celebration of Newroz as a Turkish national holiday.