Recent scholarship has significantly advanced social scientific understanding of the socioeconomic consequences of skin tone and ethnoracial identity in several Latin American countries. We update and extend this literature by conceptualizing colortocracies as countries that exhibit a preference for Whiteness as evidenced by lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher levels of socioeconomic status than their darker-skinned counterparts. Specifically, we test the preference for Whiteness hypothesis using data from the 2018 Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)—a nationally representative dataset covering approximately 90% of the Latin American population (about 578 million people) across sixteen countries. We find strong evidence that wealth-based colortocracies are three times as prevalent throughout Latin America as occupational-based colortocracies. Interviewer-rated skin tone is a stronger predictor of inequality than self-designated racial categories, but the magnitude of its strength is far greater when predicting wealth than occupational status. We conclude that the extent to which colortocracies (e.g., preference for Whiteness) exist in Latin America simultaneously depends on the outcome measure and the country under consideration. We document this cross-national variation and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023, a rich body of legal scholarship has tackled various legal issues arising from Israel’s overall military conduct. One issue that has received very little attention is Israel’s destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage. In this article, I demonstrate how Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage has been facilitated through reliance on sources and language of law. Considering this unprecedented level of destruction, I examine the role of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in applying protection and accountability measures in response to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian heritage. I suggest that these three organizations provide the State of Palestine with an entry point to demand recognition, protection, and accountability for the destruction of this heritage. Rather than approaching each organization as an end in itself, I propose engaging with the three organizations simultaneously as tools to be utilized.

War is a lucrative business for the military industry, particularly in contexts of mass and structural violence, extensive violations of international law and genocide. For economically advanced states, the profits generated by military businesses are often seen as beneficial under the dynamics of the military-industrial complex. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has caused untold suffering that has ‘scarred the consciousness of humanity’, aptly illustrates this dynamic.

In such a context, states and corporations arguably have a duty under international law not to contribute to or benefit from the war economy of the state committing such violations. In practice, however, adhering to these obligations conflicts with the lucrative economic and geopolitical opportunities that this war economy provides. This essay reflects on the argumentative techniques used by states and corporations to justify continued military support for Israel, despite its clear contradiction with their international legal obligations.

Russia’s systematic deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories since 2014 is a central instrument of Russian governance. This article conceptualises the abduction of children as politicised captivity – the state-directed, long-term custodial control of a vulnerable population segment for explicitly political ends. The removal of children serves the strategic goals of exerting coercive pressure on local families, disrupting Ukrainian identity transmission, and facilitating demographic restructuring. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ and Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, we analyse how institutional and legal mechanisms, from ‘recreation’ camps to streamlined adoption decrees, are employed to seize control over the identity formation and future political subjectivity of minors. Empirical findings, derived from witness testimonies and interviews, detail the operational pathways of transfer (e.g., filtration, holiday schemes) and the resulting experiences of psychological trauma, educational disruption, and ideological indoctrination. We argue that by targeting children, Russian authorities employ a sophisticated form of biopolitical control that is fundamental to maintaining and legitimising their long-term authority in contested spaces.

This article revisits the often contradictory experience of Allied rule in Italy, challenging the narrative of liberation and proposing instead to embrace more emphatically the lens of ‘occupation’. Building on the author’s own contribution to the field and reviewing the evolution of the literature over the past decades, it explores five central themes that help redefine our understanding of this era: the temporal and spatial backdrop against which Allied rule unfolded, shaped by the notion of ‘co-belligerency’; the impact of total war on Italian society; the role of British and American military and political leadership in shaping occupation policy; the cultural and symbolic influence of American forces; and the impact of war and occupation on women. It argues that the occupation regime profoundly shaped Italy’s experience during the mid-twentieth century as well as its postwar identity, contributing to a persistent national pacifism and ambivalence towards the new superpowers.

Scholars are increasingly interrogating distinctions between ‘war time’ and ‘peace time’, but what happens when time itself becomes a weapon of war or, even, a model of conflict response. Focusing on the case study of the first armed UN mission, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to Sinai and the Gaza Strip during the 1956 Suez Crisis, I examine the mission’s attempt to replace the Israeli invasion and establish an open-ended international administration on the Gaza Strip. Using archival documents and photographs, this paper explores how UN operations in Palestine shaped temporal assumptions about the population and the conflict. I argue that the Suez Crisis ruptured an UN-managed temporal paralysis on the Gaza Strip which opened up opportunities for new futures in Gaza, as well as anxiety to return to controlled paralysis. Examining both Palestinian and international reactions to the UN occupation, I show how the ‘Gaza exception’ policy transformed international perceptions of the region – its past, present, and future. Thus, by focusing on the moment of the brief UN occupation, I argue that this international intervention shifted global perceptions of the strip from a ‘frozen’ site of past conflict into a space of unfinished ownership and future potentiality.

The article is set against the near absence of external protection responses to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Querying the interplay between four recognised international legal norms in the context of armed conflict, it seeks to provide doctrinal clarity in a context where the range and interaction of diverse legal standards may generate uncertainty or claims of apparent norm conflict: the prohibition on forced displacement, the right to leave any territory, non-refoulement and the right to return to one’s ‘own country’, including as part of the realisation of a collective right to self-determination. The article posits that a future realisation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination has been coopted by external actors as a justification for infringing, in an immediate and tangible sense, the individual rights of Gazans to leave the strip in order to seek and to enjoy elsewhere protection from rights violations, some of which breach jus cogens norms. This latest manifestation of ‘Palestinian exceptionalism’ has had dire consequences for individual Palestinians and, unless unwaveringly rejected, could detrimentally affect those fleeing future armed conflicts.

The Bologna Process is advancing at full speed, although the unintended effects it is causing are complained about everywhere. Yet, we do not witness unintended effects alone, but a fundamental societal change that embraces more than is widely recognised. This change is geared to replacing the occupational professional model of mediation between education and employment with the market model. Against the backdrop of the traditional German focus on occupations, that change appears as particularly radical.

Droughts are becoming increasingly common in India, where 50 per cent of the labour force works in agriculture, and most agricultural production is rainfall-dependent. This paper investigates the extent to which rural households adapt to drought – defined as rainfall deficiency – by reallocating labour from agriculture to other sectors of the economy. We estimate a household-level fixed-effects regression model and find that household agricultural employment declines in the year following a drought. Furthermore, these effects are mediated by job skills and land ownership. We find that households with working members who have completed primary education account for most of the workers who exit the agricultural sector. In contrast, we find that households that own land increase their agricultural labour share after experiencing a drought. Thus, while we find that drought causes households to diversify away from agriculture on aggregate, the extent of this structural change is mitigated by the behaviour of landowners.

This article considers two arguments raised by the Government of Israel to explain why it does not regard the West Bank as occupied territory and may therefore establish Israeli settlements there. The first is that this territory was not the sovereign territory of another state when occupied by Israel in June 1967; the second is that the trust created by the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine still applies in those parts of Mandatory Palestine that did not become the sovereign territory of another state in 1948. After a short introduction, the article argues that in the modern era, in which peoples have the right to self-determination, the law of belligerent occupation may apply in territory that was not the territory of a state before it was occupied. Relying on a large body of historical research, the article then shows that the mandate system was a compromise between the colonial aspirations of Britain and France and the principle of self-determination propagated by US President Woodrow Wilson. The Mandate did not give rights to Jews or the Jewish people. It merely obligated Britain to facilitate its commitment under the Balfour Declaration to create the conditions that ‘will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home’ in Palestine. This obligation, and its parallel right, ended with the termination of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, which was the ultimate realisation of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. Even if one were to accept the argument that the trust established by the Mandate continues to apply in the West Bank, in an era in which colonial ideas have been rejected, the conclusion is not that Jewish citizens of Israel have a right to settle there, but that the right of the Palestinian inhabitants of that area to self-determination should be respected.

Small business owners play a central role in all advanced economies. Nonetheless, they are an understudied occupational group politically, particularly compared to groups that represent smaller portions of the population (e.g., union members, manufacturing workers). We conduct a detailed investigation of the politics of small business owners and offer new insight into the evolving role of education, class, and occupation in electoral politics. Leveraging diverse sources of data – representative surveys from around the world, campaign finance records, voter files, and a first-of-its-kind, bespoke survey of small business owners – we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties. We find that this tendency cannot be fully explained by factors that cause people to select into being small business owners. Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.

In its Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled not only that Israeli policies and practices in the occupied territory systematically violated international law, but also that Israel’s ‘continued presence’ (i.e. occupation) as such had become illegal, so that Israel was required to withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territories as rapidly as possible. The ICJ’s finding that Israel engaged in a sustained abuse of its position as an occupying power, through annexation of territory and frustration of Palestinian self-determination, was central to its reasoning, as was its holding that the legality of the occupation was to be judged against the jus ad bellum. This article unpacks the concept of an illegal occupation. It argues that, as matter of the jus ad bellum, it is only the right to self-defence that could, in theory, justify Israel’s continued occupation. Curiously, however, the Opinion does not mention self-defence, although it preoccupied many of the judges writing separately. The article argues that two approaches to the occupation’s ad bellum illegality are most persuasive: first, that the occupation could not meet the necessity and proportionality criteria of lawful self-defence; and, second, that even a valid self-defence claim can be vitiated by a predominant ulterior purpose.