Anti-extremist legislation in Russia has been designed to prosecute both common security threats, such as incitement to hatred, and the promotion of views deemed unacceptable by the authorities. The dual nature of this legislation is clearly evident in the religious sphere. In this sphere, we are also observing how legislation and law enforcement mix common security threats with imaginary threats based on anti-cultist prejudices. Consequently, what is emerging is the binary opposition extremism/traditionalism instead of extremism/social order. The author analyzes the anti-extremist legislation, its development in the last ten years, and its application in relation to the religious sphere. As applied the protection of public safety is increasingly taking a back seat to the suppression of non-mainstream beliefs or actions. At the same time, the repressive policy cannot be said to develop in a linear manner: the flywheel of repression in the religious sphere may speed up or slow down unexpectedly, as happened, for example, in connection with the beginning of the large-scale war against Ukraine in 2022. What can be said definitively is that repressive policy covers an increasingly wide range of targets understood as hostile to traditionalism.

The phonological status of Old English (OE) fricatives has been a vexed one, the general agreement being that the distribution of voiced ([v ð z ɣ]) and voiceless ([f θ s x]) fricatives was allophonic (Fulk 2001; Minkova 2011, 2014). We argue that OE was a fortis–lenis language specified for [spread] in terms of laryngeal realism, or ‘glottal width’ (GW) (Avery & Idsardi 2001). We discuss OE lenis and fortis stops, the structure of voiceless geminates ([ff], [ss], [tt], etc.) and voiceless geminate‑like structures ([sp], [st], [xt], etc.) and conclude that OE had phonologically marked fricatives for GW, found as the first member of phonetically voiceless (partial) geminates ([ff] /fGWf0/, [sp] /sGWb0/). Unmarked singleton fricatives, by contrast, were phonetically enhanced with GW in strong positions (foot‑initially in trochees and degenerate feet) and with ‘glottal tension’ (GT) in post‑tonic foot‑internal intersonorant position, which is less controversial. They were, however, unenhanced word‑finally and when couched between unstressed vowels, and thus phonetically variably voiced. We explore some of the consequences of entertaining such ideas.

In the new millennium, amidst a crisis of antifascism as a source of political legitimacy, there has been a revival of antifascism in a more accessible and popular form, integrated into collective imagination and everyday practices. Events and themes of the Resistance have been revisited in venues and contexts beyond the traditional, utilising new approaches and languages outside conventional frameworks. This brief overview highlights the activities of five distinct organisations, spread across the country and all established between 1999 and 2009. Despite their differing methods and objectives, they have all played a significant role in promoting the Resistance through the lens of public history. Their work involves the collection and preservation of sources, the publication of studies and research, dissemination and educational activities. These organisations engage with local memories while addressing major international issues, and they promote original and innovative projects, either digital or conducted in open-air settings. This Contexts and Debates article aims to serve as a tool for those approaching the study of the Italian Resistance, helping them discover new research opportunities, particularly in the form of archival content, as well as alternative outlets to promote their findings.

Migrant care workers are a marginalised group within Austrian society. Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper explores their real-life experiences and the problems they face and asks whether and how the law is relevant to their struggles. In short, migrant care workers are aware of some aspects of the law of the country in which they work, but they are reluctant to mobilise the law. Instead, they avoid disputes by using strategies such as leaving, denying or playing down conflicts. This behaviour can be understood by looking at the situation of migrant care workers in Austria. This paper also highlights the important role of migrant care workers’ networks and how these networks compensate for the lack of individual legal mobilisation.

Comme arriver, atteindre, aboutir et accéder, notamment, parvenir relève de la catégorie des verbes spatiaux dynamiques dénotant un changement de relation final précédé d’un déplacement antérieur présupposé. En dépit de ce schéma spatio-temporel commun, les verbes intransitifs ou transitifs indirects de cette classe semblent manifester un comportement hétérogène vis-à-vis de certaines constructions, comportement qui distingue, en particulier, arriver de aboutir, accéder et parvenir. Basé sur une analyse approfondie en corpus, cet article examine les constructions auxquelles donnent lieu les emplois spatiaux de parvenir. Concomitamment, l’étude qualitative des exemples s’attache à dégager les propriétés conceptuelles qui sous-tendent le contenu du verbe et ses situations d’emploi, et le singularisent au sein de sa classe d’appartenance : obstacle ou difficulté du déplacement, intentionnalité, « déplacement réglé », processus perceptifs. L’hypothèse est également faite que certaines constructions minoritaires de parvenir (exclues par aboutir et accéder) sont rendues possibles par des facteurs sémantico-pragmatiques liés aux propriétés préalablement mises en évidence.

There is no consensus on how to infer welfare from inconsistent choices. We argue that theorists must be explicit about the values they endorse to characterize individual welfare. After formalizing a set of values and their relationship with context-independent choices, we review the literature and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each approach. We demonstrate that defining welfare a priori may violate normative individualism, arguably the most desirable value to maintain. To uphold this value while addressing individuals’ errors, we propose a weaker version of consumer sovereignty, which we label ‘consumer autonomy’.

What gives the benefit principle its moral appeal as an idea of tax justice? And what can count as a benefit for that purpose? My claim is that we can trace the moral force of various versions of the principle to five ideas: individual justification, causal feedback, reciprocity, opposable valuation and non-objectionable baseline. I develop those ideas into an account of the moral permissibility of benefit-based taxation, and explain how that account addresses problems about the quantification and valuation of benefits and the relationship between benefit and the justice of the background distribution.

The oeuvre of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d.1973) pivots on the audacious thesis that political esoterism – the protective covering of truth through an exoteric shell – has been central to Islamic intellectual life. Strauss’s work focusses on philosophy, but this article argues that it can be productively extended – while not applied integrally - to Sufism, Islam’s similarly contested, primary esoteric tradition. It investigates the Straussian thesis in a Sufi discussion on valāyat, “spiritual authority” or “Friendship with God,” which idea is central both to Shiite Sufism and Shiism generally. The discussion concerns the Valāyat-nāme, an Iranian treatise of the early twentieth century by the Neᶜmatollāhī master Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909), revealing the dilemmas that Shiite Sufis have faced in simultaneously retaining identity and acceptance to the juristically dominated canon. Four sub-topics are elaborated to assess the validity of Straussian analysis in rendering the treatise and its author: persecution as a context for esoterism; esoterism as a veil for dangerous knowledge; the drive for epistemic subordination; and the political nature of religious knowledge. It is proposed that rather than as “between the lines” dissimulation, as per Strauss, the Neᶜmatollāhīs’ political esoterism ought to be read more subtly as accommodation “along the lines” of Shiite orthodoxy.

This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive evaluation of Carl Gustav Carus’s writings on race and human inequality. We demonstrate that Carus, an eminent nineteenth-century physician emblematic of romantic medicine, was deeply engrossed in racial science, exploring anatomical, anthropological, and craniological dimensions of race across no less than twenty-five works spanning three decades. Carus’s engagement with race stemmed from naturphilosophisch anatomical and physiological considerations, which evolved into physiognomic and psychological inquiries. While previous research has construed Carus as a precursor of Arthur de Gobineau, we argue that he was intellectually much more closely aligned with the ‘American School’ of ethnology, represented by figures such as Samuel G. Morton, George R. Gliddon, and Josiah C. Nott. Closely monitoring international discourses of scientific racism, Carus sought to propagate these notions among German readers and position himself within international debates. The international reception, however, was limited by the Romantic framework of Carus’s scientific racism, which was unintelligible to contemporaries. While sharing an implicit methodological bias with Morton and his followers, affirming white superiority and legitimising colonisation, the Romantic underpinning of his race treatises made it difficult for mid-nineteenth-century race theorists to fully endorse him. Nonetheless, Carus, often lauded as polymath with a humanistic orientation, besides his achievements, helped to create a theoretical basis for the othering and dehumanisation of large parts of the global population.

Unlike with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in clinical research, little has been said about the ethical principles that should regulate the use of RCTs in experimental development economics. One well-known principle in clinical research ethics is the principle of clinical equipoise. Some recent commentators suggest that an analogue of clinical equipoise should play a role in experimental development economics. In this article, I first highlight some difficulties with importing the concept to experimental development economics. I then argue that MacKay’s (2018, 2020) notion of policy equipoise avoids these difficulties and has a role to play in experimental development economics.

This article examines Coimbra City Council’s role in meat supply from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on public–private dynamics, it highlights how private contractors were tasked with providing fresh meat. The article explores how transaction costs and risk influenced contract delegation, revealing the council’s risk-averse preference for indirect supply. While this approach shaped contract decisions, it proved insufficient in limiting rising real meat prices or boosting per capita consumption. Using Coimbra as a case study, the article illustrates broader challenges in municipal supply systems and their limited ability to ensure both the affordability and availability of essential foodstuffs.

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought have now come to so thoroughly structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner reinforcing liberal myths about historical evolution. This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect critiques by minoritized scholars, extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to well-established knowledge that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery. This essay places Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in conversation with work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past, to illustrate how the framing of these books eases the downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.1

In December 1937, influential physician and politician Lord Dawson of Penn introduced an Infanticide Bill into the House of Lords. Seven months later, following minor amendments, Dawson’s Bill passed into law as the Infanticide Act, 1938. This legislation significantly altered the earlier provisions of the Infanticide Act, 1922, which introduced the offence of infanticide into English and Welsh courtrooms for the first time. Under Dawson’s reforms, a woman could be found guilty of infanticide rather than capital murder if the killing of her child, aged no more than one year old, could be attributed to a disturbance in the balance of the mother’s mind following childbirth or from lactation. Although the language and implications of the 1938 Act have ignited significant debate within legal scholarship, the creation of Dawson’s Bill and the leading role medical practitioners played in its enactment have received limited attention from historians. This article helps to address this gap by analyzing the critical response of the inter-war British medical profession to the question of infanticide reform against a backdrop of growing psychiatric ambivalence about a causal link between insanity and female reproductive states. Crucially, this paper contends that ancillary concerns over citizenship, motherhood, and the health of the nation informed Dawson’s motivations and justification for infanticide reform during the 1930s. It also seeks to foreground the physician’s distinct contribution to the birth of the 1938 Act by underscoring his efforts in devising and promoting the Bill within Parliament and among inter-war medical and legal communities.

In the late 1930s, children in three Malawian villages were subjected to a peculiar test for vitamin A deficiency devised by Dr. Benjamin Platt, director of the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey and a leading colonial nutrition scientist. Platt constructed a makeshift adaptometer, appropriate for field conditions, that could be placed over a subject’s head to measure retinal adaptation to light. He built this contraption from simple materials, including a five-pound tea-box and sticking plaster. This article takes the curious commingling of commodity objects and scientific materials (where a discarded tea-box finds new life as an experimental technology) as an entry point for examining how scientific practices are woven from semiotic and material threads, demonstrating how heterogeneous social and material elements overlap and influence one another. The article first analyses how Platt’s tea-box adaptometer – and the discourses and ambitions framing the Survey – imagined a new kind of nutrition research hinged to the space of the field rather than the laboratory. It then proceeds to consider how the tea-box, an incipient manifestation of ‘appropriate technology’, points us towards the more tacit ways that tea wove itself into the fabric of the Survey and colonial society, as a gustatory discourse steeped in racial anxieties. Attending to the ‘stuff’ of scientific work cued me to broader imperial circuits and interests that shaped colonial nutrition research.

We present a model that locates the source of vagueness as the speaker’s inability to perfectly perceive the world. We show that the agents will communicate clearly about the world as the sender perceives it. However, the implied meaning about the actual world will be vague. Vagueness is characterized by probability distributions that describe the degree to which a statement is likely to be true. Hence, we provide micro-foundations for truth-degree functions as an equilibrium consequence of the sender’s perception technology and his optimal, non-vague communication in the perceived world – connecting the epistemic and truth-degree approaches to vagueness.