This article provides an overview of the historiography of medical education and calls for greater attention to the connections between medical schools. It begins by reviewing research on medical education in imperial metropoles. Researchers have compared medical schools in different national contexts, traced travellers between them or examined the hierarchies that medical education created within the medical profession. The article then shows how historians have emphasised the ways in which medicine in colonial empires was shaped by negotiation, exchange, hybridisation and competition. The final part of the article introduces the special issue ‘Medical Education in Empires’. Drawing on a variety of sources in English, French, Dutch and Chinese, the special issue builds on these historiographies by juxtaposing cases of medical schools in imperial contexts since the eighteenth century. It considers who funded these medical schools and why, what models of medicine underpinned their creation, what social changes they contributed to, what life was like in these schools, who the students and teachers were and what graduates did with their medical careers. This special issue thus contributes to clarifying the role of medical education in empires and the long-term impact of empires on the medical world.

In most accounts of peacemaking after World War I, “flawed” decisions at “Versailles” caused the ethnically mixed states of Central and Eastern Europe to descend into violent ethnic clashes, while the allegedly more homogenous Western European states faced few issues with minorities. This article challenges this simplistic view by examining the treatment of German-speaking minorities in the borderlands of Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and Eupen-Malmedy between 1918 and 1923 in the immediate post-war and the early interwar period. Building on an innovative comparative framework of five key variables, we find that, in all three cases, post-war borders generated incentives for the respective governments to suppress their new minorities, and that states used ethnic markers to target them. The strength of state institutions and liberal principles account for a reversal (Alsace-Lorraine), moderation (Eupen-Malmedy), or hardening (South Tyrol) of measures. International commitment to defend the new borders and the absence of a tradition of ethnic conflict also had a significant impact.

Poland remained a popular destination for migrants from Ukraine for many years before February 24, 2022, the outbreak of full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine. Ukrainian communities in Polish cities, including local autochthonous Ukrainians (the Ukrainian national minority), are already well-established and well-organized, although they are very diverse. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, this article seeks to address the nexus of the diaspora and culture and explores the imaginations of “common culture” in diaspora-forming processes. We treat “culture” as diasporic imaginings of naturalized and reified representations of what is to be a Ukrainian in Poland. The essentialized notion of putative “common culture” is routinely discursivized and maintained by diasporic elites. Exploring this as an empirical phenomenon captured in the field helps reveal the internal tensions and that this imagining empowers the production of cultural differences. We argue that imagined “common culture” may actually activate “othering” of the diasporic Other and might not be as unifying a factor in diaspora-forming processes as it appears.

In this article, we explore intra-ethnic aspects of co-ethnic migration by members of the Slovak community from Serbia to Slovakia, both at the institutional level and at the level of intra-ethnic relations, and the boundaries between migrants and the established population. In the first part, we focus on the institutional framework of co-ethnic migration: the politicization of diaspora issues in Slovakia, the Slovak community in Serbia in the hierarchy of Slovakia’s diaspora policy, and co-ethnic relations as a subject of negotiations. In the second part, we investigate the role of language in co-ethnic migration, the situation of nonrecognition by co-ethnics in Slovakia, intra-ethnic boundary-making in everyday interactions, and the consequences of migration on intra-ethnic relations among those members of the community who did not migrate. We thus analyze the ongoing migration of the Slovaks of Vojvodina from Serbia into Slovakia, from the early 1990s onward, through a blend of perspectives “from above” and “from below.” This article is based on extensive fieldwork conducted among members of the Vojvodina Slovak community, both migrants and non-migrants who have remained in Vojvodina. Thus, the sending country (Serbia) and the receiving country (Slovakia) represent one research field. The data collected in the field have been complemented by legal documents and statistical data to gain an overview of the wider social and political structures within which the migration is taking place.

In 1821, an expeditionary force of the Bombay Marine imposed an unequal treaty upon the imam of Sana‘a, sovereign of the Yemeni port of Mocha. Previous accounts, depicting the incident as a standard rehearsal of British gunboat diplomacy, have overlooked an important legal innovation enfolded in the treaty wherein the East India Company's claim for extraterritorial jurisdiction over British subjects in Mocha was expanded to include not only British European subjects of the Crown and certain native dependents of the factory, but also the entire Indian merchant population of the port. Bombay's claim stood on shaky ground, however, as the legal boundaries of British subjecthood in the Indian subcontinent were anything but clear, not least to colonial administrators themselves. Prosaically enough, the intervention was foiled by an inaccurate translation of the treaty from English to Arabic, demonstrating the extent to which Company officials were at the mercy of non-Western middlemen and translators who brokered between them and local rulers and administrators. A second line of inquiry in this article thus looks at the structural vulnerabilities of legal imperialism, reflecting upon the potential of contradictions and untranslatabilities between British-imperial and Arab-Islamic legal and epistemological assumptions in shaping the outcomes of the imperial encounter in the western Indian Ocean.

This is an important book. It is important because it connects the study of internal armed conflict to big questions in comparative politics. It is important because it pays attention to the perspectives of ordinary men and especially women who make complex decisions in the context of legal pluralism. It is also important because it offers a window onto one of the most difficult-to-access settings of state-building on the back of protracted political violence and war. In my commentary, I will highlight these contributions of Egor Lazarev’s State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya and areas for further discussion that stem from these contributions.

In this special issue, our contributors move the academic conversation beyond methodological nationalism and approaches that analyze far-right movements only within their respective state contexts by interrogating the circulation of ideologies, funds, and people across sociopolitical boundaries. Our goal is to scrutinize the far right in post-communist Eastern Europe by examining the multitudinous and multidirectional ties that exist between groups at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. Attention, moreover, is paid not just to those factors that facilitate such linkages, but also to the obstacles that hamper these flows via various detours, omissions, and other forms of resistance. In this introduction, we offer a theoretical overview and discussion of contributors’ findings to argue that conduits for the dissemination of far-right discursive frames are hardly unidirectional in nature. As a result, the transitological narratives of progress and regress typically invoked to explain the emergence of the far right offer only a partial understanding of how it mobilizes, builds alliances, and circulates ideas. We unpack the conceptual pitfalls and fallacies of transitological narratives and instead foreground the concept of multidirectionality, which opens up new avenues through which to understand how far-right groups mobilize and disseminate their narratives.

In civil law jurisdictions, plants have traditionally been classified as ‘objects’ (or ‘things’) under private law, reflecting an age-old tendency, certainly in the Western world, to underestimate and undervalue plants. Recent legal debates increasingly acknowledge the special nature of plants. Perhaps the most eye-catching debate in this context is the one on Rights of Nature, which have much potential but pose some practical and conceptual challenges. We propose an additional way of acknowledging the special nature of plants in a legal context: de-objectifying plants in private law and thereby explicating that they are not mere objects. Numerous civil codes already separate animals from objects, often – though not exclusively – based on the sentience of animals. Recent scientific research suggests that plants may be sentient, too. We aim to open the debate on the de-objectification of plants, based on their sentience, in civil codes as a feasible and unobtrusive way to acknowledge in law that plants are living beings, and more than mere things.

The business and human rights (BHR) framework has regularly been considered the superior legal regime of corporate accountability for business-related human rights abuses, which must be both protected from and incorporated into investment treaties. However, investment treaties have surpassed the BHR framework in an important respect: certain investment treaties impose strict international legal obligations, including human rights-related obligations, directly on investors, thereby going beyond the normatively ambiguous corporate responsibility to respect. Investment treaty reform initiatives, including those seeking to align investment treaties with the BHR agenda, should, therefore, take care to avoid inadvertently undoing this advance towards investors’ legal accountability.