Global challenges such as climate change demand transnational responses, including from legal clinics. Building on earlier community legal clinic and international human rights clinic models, transnational legal clinics combine the objectives of legal clinics with the framework of transnational law to work across domestic and international planes. This article focuses on a Canadian–Peruvian legal clinic collaboration to research and draft an amicus curiae brief for landmark climate litigation in Peru. While the global north–south axis of collaboration raises structural challenges, adopting a transnational approach unites participants around the principle of solidarity and decentres assumptions about expertise. A transnational approach also contributes to the progressive development of law, in this case by offering insights into remedies in climate litigation. Overall, we argue that transnational legal clinic collaboration can spur participants’ reflective learning and make substantive contributions to the growing number of climate cases.

How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.

Councils of National Minorities (NMCs), connected with the concept of non-territorial autonomy, have been recognized in research as a safeguard of minority rights, offering potential solutions to ethnic tensions. NMCs could be important actors in countries such as Serbia where tensions over the Kosovo issue are still present. Despite various studies on NMCs in Serbia, the specific role of women in these councils and their contribution to peace-making has not been a primary focus. This 2024 research in Serbia examines the involvement of women from NMCs in challenging male/state-centric discourses on women as peacemakers through inductive thematic analysis of interviews with female NMCs’ representatives. The focus of the analysis is on intersections of nation and gender, the impact of women in NMCs on reducing tensions and fostering peace, and the gendered nature of these processes. This study contributes to understanding the role of women from NMCs in peacebuilding using non-territorial frameworks.

This article critically analyzes new cultural production in relation to reality shows to determine not only the major forces behind this new trend but also the future directions of Hallyu production. After discussing the recent surge of reality programs as a major part of broadcasting Hallyu, it uses Jinny’s Kitchen as a case study to discuss the ways in which reality shows develop (g)localization. It analyzes how Jinny’s Kitchen advances (g)localization in the process of production for global OTT platforms. Finally, it maps out whether Korea has become a new global force in utilizing (g)localization strategies to create a new form of cultural production by analyzing the form of relationships between global and local forces in the digital platform era.

Recent scholarship on the democratization and Europeanization of the Western Balkans as well as the field of media studies have not amply dealt with the concept of political clientelism in the media in this region, which has been a major feature of the post-Milošević democratic transition in Serbia. This article examines the gradual political instrumentalization of the media landscape in Serbia under the ruling party since 2012. It will argue that despite the adoption of the new media laws first in 2014 and their amendments in 2023, government influence of the media outlets vis-à-vis more subtle mechanisms of control, has served to undermine media freedom rather than fostering democratic changes through genuine domestic reforms. This type of more subtle mechanism of indirect control is visible through the captured regulatory authority, state subsidies in the media vis-à-vis project co-financing, advertising contracts where the government serves as an intermediary, and the recent amendments to the new media laws adopted in October 2023 that practically “legalized” government interference in the Serbian media.

This article offers the first gendered history of African radio audiences. It uses a comparative approach to demonstrate that colonial development projects in Ghana and Zambia successfully created mass African audiences for radio between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when most radio sets on the continent were owned by white settlers. However the gendered impact of the projects was uneven. In Zambia the promotion of battery-operated wirelesses inadvertently created a male-dominated audience, while the construction of a wired rediffusion system in Ghana attracted equal numbers of male and female listeners. Ghana’s radio project offers new perspectives on the history of colonial development as a very rare example of a scheme that benefitted women as much as men. Differences in the voice of Ghanaian and Zambian radio also reveal that these early radio schemes had a lasting influence on broadcast content and listening culture in both countries beyond the 1950s.

In Croatia, due to local histories of violence, purist language ideologies, and the essentialist belief that nations and languages form an inseparable nexus, the ability to speak pure “Croatian” (čisti hrvatski) is perceived as a sign of morality while the use of “Serbian” indexes immorality. Through repetition over time and institutional support – through ethno-linguistic enregisterment – linguistic practises are able to map ethnicity and morality onto the bodies of speakers, making the use of language in Croatia a delicate and politicized performance. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the ways in which linguistic performances of čisti hrvatski by the newly minoritized Serbs in Vukovar become an integral part of performing political subjectivity. The eagerness of some of my interlocutors to perform čisti hrvatski in the public sphere becomes a way to embody exemplary minority subjectivity and to negotiate their stigmatized ethnic difference by demonstrating a sense of belonging to the Croatian nation-state.

This article examines the central role of West Central Africa in the development of a global capitalist economy during the eighteenth century. Using a rich and overlooked set of records in English, Portuguese, and French, the article explains that rulers and brokers on the Loango coast championed ideas and practices of free trade and free markets from the rise of the Atlantic slave trade through at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The article shows that European slave traders opposed a free market by fiercely competing to obtain full control of the trade in African captives along the Atlantic Africa. In contrast, the West Central African states of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango, located north of the Congo River, fully embraced free trade and free markets during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

This article investigates tax disputes between Luyi County, Henan Province, and its two neighboring counties during the Qing. It shows that the Qing central government and the provincial authorities allowed local governments to use an expedient scheme called “equal sharing” to fulfill tax quotas on a particular type of farming land—the former princely estates of the Ming that became known as “renamed lands.” In Luyi local elites’ fight against the perceived unfair tax practice, local gazetteers played an important role as evidence in the disputes and as reminders of the unresolved issue for Luyi people. In the final analysis, this case study points to the Qing state’s flexibility in fulfilling the land tax quotas, while attempting to keep transaction costs low and revenue sources sustainable, both of which were ironically conditioned by its limited tax basis and therefore its limited administrative capacity.

Two important tasks for theorists of justice are to determine the bounds of justice, which explain why some claims are matters of justice and others are not, and to determine the demands of justice, which settle conflicts that fall within those bounds. In this paper, we clarify the distinction between bounds and demands, revealing two striking things. First, while thresholds have typically been understood to be demands of justice, their use as such is confusing and arguably implausible. Second, thresholds appear to be better understood as demarcating the bounds of justice, if a suitable explanation for their use can be found. We explore three explanations for why thresholds can demarcate bounds and assess the prospects for seeing thresholds in this new and different role. These are satiability of the value of goods, satiability of justice, and conceptual engineering.

This piece explores the parallel development of two fisheries management regimes in mid-twentieth-century Lake Malawi: one imposed by the British colonial government over the lake and the other by Senior Chief Makanjira focused on Mbenji Island. The parallel development of these regimes provides opportunity for close analysis of how fisheries management centred on different knowledge and practices led to distinctive legacies of governance legitimacy and efficacy. Given the increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the future sustainability of fisheries globally, we contend that it is imperative to recognise the ways in which colonial pasts have embedded knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary decision-making processes within national fisheries governance regimes that continue to obstruct capacities to bring different knowledges, practices, and management approaches together effectively and appropriately.

The article looks at two electoral cases from the European Court of Human Rights that raise long-disputed doctrinal issues. Bakirdzi and E.C. v. Hungary deals with the preferential representation of national minorities in parliament, while Zsófia Vámos v. Hungary concerns the rights of Hungarians living beyond the borders to vote in general elections. The author argues that the Court would need to critically examine the social and political system when deciding on electoral rules in order not to miss the forest for the trees, i.e., the way authoritarian regimes manipulate elections. If this is not done, even if decisions condemn Hungary, they may have a legitimising function for the regime. Using a feminist approach that introduces critical perspectives by rewriting problematic court decisions, the article will show how these cases should have been decided and argued in light of the real facts and political context. The article highlights the future potential external constraints of an authoritarian regime and empowers the supporters of constitutional democracy in Hungary.

In settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, “memory wars” have, driven by conflicting narratives about colonial history, intensified in recent years. Indigenous counter-narratives challenge Euro-centric master narratives, particularly in public spaces such as museums and monuments. This article explores the impact of such conflicts on national identity, focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand, where the history of colonization has long been framed as a relatively benign process, underpinned by the Treaty of Waitangi. Through application of a comprehensive narratological framework, the article reveals how the Waitangi Treaty Grounds’ permanent exhibition, Ko Waitangi Tēnei: This is Waitangi, employs the quest masterplot to weave Māori memories of the mid-1800s New Zealand Wars into the national master narrative. The analysis highlights that this narrative emplotment – by “naturalizing” the events of the New Zealand Wars – serves to elide difficult questions about colonial violence, thus protecting the image of a tolerant and respectful nation. More generally, the article contributes to our understanding of national identity construction in the context of difficult histories, while also advancing theoretical approaches to narratology in museum storytelling.

This article traces the history of the repression of palm wine and alcohol (sodabi) in Dahomey, now Benin, with varying degrees of intensity, from the nineteenth-century kingdom of Abomey to postcolonial Dahomey. In parallel with the repression, this article also looks at the history of palm alcohol production. Dahomeans learned to distil wine from French peasants during the First World War, and were driven into sodabi production by French economic policies during the Great Depression. Using court sources, this article describes the social organisation, gender division, and economic rationale of sodabi production, as well as the occasions on which it was drunk. Ultimately, it argues that the repression of sodabi made it more difficult for peasants to improve their living conditions.