Two primary impulses have historically motivated the Iraqi Shi'i juristic establishment in its relations with the Iraqi state. The first, deeply embedded in centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, is to achieve maximum autonomy for the Shi'i community from the state. The second has developed more recently in response to the modern state's efforts to extend its hegemonic control over areas that premodern empires were content either to leave to the jurists to administer or at least to share the administration of with jurists. This is to have the state recognize and implement Shi'i rules within parts of the state infrastructure that are of core interest to the juristic establishment. There is an obvious tension between these two desires, nowhere more evident than in the subject of this article—namely, the law pertaining to the creation, management, and liquidation of the Islamic charitable land trust known as the waqf. On the one hand, Article 43 of Iraq's constitution declares the followers of religions and sects to be “free” in administering the waqfs and their affairs, suggesting a strong desire for autonomy and separation from state control. Yet the implementing legislation for this provision extends the existence of a thick state bureaucracy and hands its administration over to juristic authorities. The ultimate irony of this arrangement is that it subjects juristic forces to far more potential interference as a legal matter than they have ever been subjected to, even during the totalitarian rule of the Ba'ath. In the end, a religious establishment historically deeply suspicious of political rulers and political engagement—indeed, one that defines itself by virtue of its separation from the state—now finds itself deeply and dangerously entangled in state political and administrative affairs. This article explores how this came to be and some of the significant consequences that arise from it.

Responding to recent calls made within the UK Parliament for a government-backed definition of Islamophobia, this article considers the unanticipated consequences of such proposals. I argue that, considered in the context of related efforts to regulate hate speech, the formulation and implementation of a government-sponsored definition will generate unforeseen harms for the Muslim community. To the extent that such a definition will fail to address the government's role in propagating Islamophobia through ill-considered legislation that conflates Islamist discourse with hate speech, the concept of a government-backed definition of Islamophobia appears hypocritical and untenable. Alongside opposing government attempts to define Islamophobia (and Islam), I argue that advocacy efforts should instead focus on disambiguating government counterterrorism initiatives from the government management of controversies within Islam. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the governmental adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)'s definition of antisemitism by promoting a new definition of Islamophobia, we ought to learn from the errors that were made. We should resist the gratuitous securitization of Muslim communities, rather than use such definitions to normalize compliance with the surveillance state.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is conventionally understood as voluntary and market- based corporate behaviour without direct government involvement. The development of CSR in China challenges this understanding in the light of the growing role of government in promoting it. Over the past decade China has demonstrated a state-centric approach towards promoting CSR. Existing studies focus only on Chinese domestic CSR practices. However, with the rise of Chinese companies in Africa under China's ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, it is important to examine how the state-centric approach applies to the overseas CSR practice of Chinese companies. This article aims to fill the literature gap through in-depth interviews and analysis of the Standard Gauge Railway project in Kenya. It shows that close institutional, relational, and bureaucratic ties between the state and the business community give the Chinese government the power to influence the behaviour of Chinese state-owned enterprises overseas. The Chinese government can influence the CSR practices of Chinese companies overseas through mandating, facilitating, endorsing and partnering in order to minimize the negative externalities of companies’ overseas activities. However, the state-centric CSR approach limits the space for civil society engagement and the effectiveness of the approach abroad is constrained by a variety of institutional contexts and corporate ownership models.

The Shanghai News was the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) first English-language newspaper. The News played an important, but forgotten, role in the development of the PRC's “external propaganda” apparatus, used to fight the ideological Cold War. The News was unusual in that it adopted a commercial business model and juxtaposed vehement anti-imperialist propaganda with advertising for multinational companies from “imperialist-capitalist countries.” This article argues that the News was a product of “New Democracy,” the central political paradigm of the PRC between 1949 and 1953. New Democracy, a policy of cross-class cooperation in the name of national reconstruction, is often dismissed as cynical tactic deployed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to diminish resistance during the takeover of China. The author argues for taking the real world impacts of New Democracy on life and work in early 1950s Shanghai seriously and cautions against teleological narratives.

In normative, academic, and informative works on Basque there are constant debates on the boundaries of what is meant by ‘authentic Basque’ and, alongside that, by ‘authentic Basque speaker’. In the current Basque media, these tensions are often addressed by means of creative practices, as in other minority contexts, by means of satire and other forms of humour, especially parody. In this work my subject is the character Jon Gotzon, who engages in parody on the radio programme Gaztea. Jon Gotzon is a hyperbolic and parodic stylisation of a new Basque speaker. He challenges ‘authentic’ and ‘native’ Basque-speaking styles in his syncretic bilingual stylisation and parodic discourse. In this research, I study the way this parody takes advantages of carnivalesque strategies in order to question fixed ideological hierarchies on Basqueness, and I explore the ideological positions Jon Gotzon's parody reveals, especially with respect to hybrid identities in the Basque community. (Parody, stylisation, authenticity, minority media, Basque, humour)*