After 1945 both German states overturned longstanding laws and policies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that designated women as second-class citizens in spousal rights, parental authority and marital property. From the early postwar years, female politicians and activists in the women's movement pursued in both Germanys reforms of the obsolete marriage and family law. The article compares how these women and mainly male legislators in both states envisioned the role of women in the family and in gender relations. It shows that these debates in the FRG and the GDR were influenced on the one hand by earlier, pre-1933 ideas, and on the other hand reacted to Nazi-era politics. Yet, because of their different political, economic and social conditions, discourses and policies developed in the context of the Cold War in both states in different directions, though they continued to be related to each other.

This article examines the resettlement of displaced populations in both postwar German states from 1945 to 1955. Specifically, it investigates who were the displaced populations circulating between the occupation zones, and what methods the German civil governments and occupying military authorities used to aid and resettle them. Through a case study of the Friedland refugee transit camp, this article argues for an expansive understanding of the term “refugee” to include more groups, ranging from Displaced Persons and German expellees to returning prisoners of war and civil internees. It further contends that transit camps were the linchpin in a system to render humanitarian aid, bring refugee movement under state control, and resettle the displaced. Analysis of camp operations and resident populations reveals the state as humanitarian actor in addition to international and charitable organizations, while also complicating the Cold War mythology of Friedland as the “Gateway to Freedom.”

To better understand the position of Jews within Germany after the end of World War II, this article analyzes the rebuilding of Jewish communities in East and West Germany from a Jewish perspective. This approach highlights the peculiarities and sometimes sharply contrasting developments within the Jewish communities in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, from the immediate postwar months to the official East-West separation of these increasingly politically divided communities in the early 1960s. Central to the study are the policies of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which exemplify the process of gradual divergence in the relations between East and West German Jewish communities, that, as this article demonstrates, paralleled and mirrored the relations between non-Jewish Germans in the two countries.

The historiography of the postwar Germanys often examined the Nazi legacy and the remarkable efforts needed for economic and social recovery after 1945. In both the FRG and GDR, the consequences of the war and resulting “flight and expulsion” featured prominently in public discourse and were among the most pressing challenges in the early postwar years. Examining how the competing regimes in East and West Germany attempted to solve the humanitarian crisis caused by the forced migration of 10 to 12 million German refugees in the first years after World War II reveals that the discourses and policies started from common points of departure yet diverged into competing narratives underpinning the states’ political and social agendas. Reconstructing the evolution of how the forced migrations were discussed and leveraged in the neglected period immediately after the war opens new perspectives on how Germans shouldered the burdens of dictatorship and defeat.

Most non-consequentialists “let the numbers count” when one can save either a lesser or greater number from equal or similar harm. But they are wary of doing so when one can save either a small number from grave harm or instead a very large number from minor harm. Limited aggregation is an approach that reconciles these two commitments. It is motivated by a powerful idea: our decision whom to save should respect each person who has a claim to our help, including those whom we fail to save. However, it has recently been argued that it is open to decisive objections. I develop a new limitedly aggregative view: Hybrid Balance Relevant Claims. This view is well grounded in the reasons we have to be skeptical of aggregation and resolves all recent challenges by paying careful attention to the rationale for limited aggregation.

This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data. As such, the study not only adds specificity to recent attempts to enrich the field of pre-modern public health, but also demonstrates that the Bolognese administration had a sophisticated and evolving understanding of communal health risks, and exposes several discrepancies between policy and practice.

This article situates the 1830 cholera epidemic in the provincial Russian city of Kazan within the context of broader local discourse on endemic disease and public health over the first half of the nineteenth century. In the decades before cholera, the city gained important local institutions, and began to perceive itself as a potential site of public health intervention. During the outbreak, Kazan's local institutions supported a comparatively robust response to the disaster. And, afterward, the resulting trauma helped spur those institutions to implement long-discussed public health improvements. Thus, the article emphasizes the interplay between cholera as an emotional catalyst, and the broader institutional and conceptual frameworks necessary to enact lasting change.

The connection between nationalism and sport seems at once both obvious and manifest, with the most lavish praise of the nation often arising at sporting events. While a sizeable body of academic literature exists on the connection between the two concepts, it remains overlapping and unstructured. This state of the field review essay accounts for the major works in this field and categorizes it according to the function it fulfills in the subfield. Specifically, it focuses on sport as a mechanism for the diffusion and creation of nationalism, sport under conditions of globalization at Sporting Mega Events (SMEs), and the connection between sport and the distinction between civic and ethnic definitions of nationality.

In the literature on toleration, epistemic arguments are commonly equated with John Stuart Mill's fallibilism according to which toleration of opinions is a necessary means to the attainment of truth. This conflation does not capture the variety of those arguments and it results from the fact that a proper analysis of epistemic arguments for religious toleration and a systematic account of their different types are still lacking. The purpose of this article is to provide such an analysis and to argue that those arguments come in four different types, which I name fallibilism, religious belief-forming process, epistemic parity, and differentiated access to religious truth or divine message. I also offer a mapping of those different types of arguments using the standard epistemic notions of justification, truth, and belief coupled with a distinction of focus in the epistemological approach – whether individually or socially focused.

Political debates on the Baltics, and in particular Estonia, have often pointed to “nationalisting” and exclusive narratives constructed at the institutional level. Accordingly, emphasis has been put on the lack of opportunities for Russians to integrate into an Estonian context. While acknowledging the shortfalls of the Estonian political project, this article contrasts these views in two ways. By emphasizing people’s agency and their capacity to question, contrast, or even reject the identity markers proposed by Estonian official narratives, we maintain that the integration of Russians might be more advanced than insofar claimed by other studies. We then look at the way identities are lived in an everyday context by inhabitants of Estonia to counterpose national narratives proposed by the state and its political institutions, with the way people live and whether they accept these narratives. By doing this, we explore the role of the everyday in the reconstruction of national identity narratives, in which citizens actively participate in their individual capacity. We suggest that, from a James Scott “infrapolitics” perspective, these micro-actions have a fundamental role in the reshaping of a national identity and its acceptance among citizens.

This article assesses Russian strategic narratives towards its interventions in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014–16) based on a new database of 50 statements posted on the websites of the Russian Mission to the United Nations and the President of Russia homepage. By looking more broadly at Russian strategic narratives aimed at persuading other global actors and publics abroad and at home, this article identifies how Russia attempted to develop a story that could win global acceptance. This analysis shows that contrary to traditional Russian emphasis on sovereign responsibility and non-intervention, Russia supported claims for self-determination by separatist groups in Georgia and Ukraine. Russia used deception and disinformation in its strategic narratives as it mis-characterized these conflicts using Responsibility to Protect (R2P) language, yet mostly justified its own interventions through references to other sources of international law. Russian strategic narratives focused on delegitimizing the perceived opponents, making the case for the appropriateness of its own actions, and projecting what it proposed as the proper solution to the conflicts. It largely avoided making any references to its own involvement in the Donbas at all. Additionally, Russia’s focus on the protection of co-ethnics and Russian-speakers is reminiscent of interventions in the pre-R2P era.