This article examines exile as a mode of punishment and governance in the late Ottoman Empire. Drawing on foreign ministry and diplomatic records, intergovernmental correspondence, and penal legislation, I argue that exile was part of an expansive and legally entrenched system of punitive mobility characterized by the forced movement of convicts. Against narratives that treat imprisonment as the defining mode of modern punishment, I show how the lines between exile and incarceration were blurred in law and practice across the Tanzimat (1839–1876) and Hamidian (1876–1909) eras. At the center of this analysis of attempts to expand the exile regime are proposals—inspired by Imperial Russia but consistent with Ottoman policies of internal deportation and settlement—to establish settler penal colonies in Yemen and Libya that would simultaneously purge the imperial interior of seditious subjects and develop frontier provinces through convict labor. In tracing the emergence and denouement of these plans for creating an “Ottoman Siberia,” the article explores how proposed convict settlement intersected with the pressures of managing Muslim refugees and migrants (muhacirin). While plans for both free and unfree settlement were shaped by overlapping spatial imaginaries and developmentalist logics, the article considers why migrants were prioritized. Recovering this history situates the Ottomans within global histories of convict transport that have been dominated by the study of maritime colonial empires. It raises productive questions about the place of exile in governing an empire defined by movement and about how Russian exile shaped the parameters of Ottoman punitive mobility.

The prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from the works of early just war theorists to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest to the contemporary moral injury discourse. In this article, I show how this history has contributed to the ongoing infliction of devastating harms on civilians, as evidenced in the case studies of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, and I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of noncombatant civilian perspectives in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I demonstrate, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.

Social scientists have long examined the relationship between war and state formation, especially in Europe and Latin America. However, work on non-European and colonial cases questioned the significance of war for state formation. Analyzing the Israeli case, I examine the relationship between war and state formation in a colonial context by focusing not on war itself but on the crises war may cause. I argue that war can shape state formation in a colonial context and suggest that theorizing crisis in political development reveals novel ways in which the relationship between war and state formation plays out. Empirically, I show that some of the main obstacles that hampered Zionist colonization and state formation in Palestine were the country’s health conditions, which seriously deteriorated during World War I. These health-related obstacles to colonization and state formation were removed by the work of American Jewish organizations after the war. Importantly, the critical work of these public health organizations stemmed from the local and global crises caused by the war. I also consider how responses to the postwar health crisis in the Jewish sector shaped the plight of Palestinian Arabs. Having noted the significance of crisis, I build on existing literature to theorize it as a potentially structurally transformative “event.” But unlike eventful analyses, I claim that transformative crises are not necessarily rifts or radical breaks from past patterns. Rather, preexisting patterns and conditions that precede eventful crises shape how transformation plays out.

Working closely with a detailed 1582 register of the free Afro-Peruvian population of Cusco, Peru, this article explores how the strategic representations of individual registrants reflect the intersectional impact of unfree labor practices and increasing racial marginalization in the early colonial Andes. The growing population of free Afro-Peruvian men and women navigated practices and policies that promoted racial inequalities and coerced labor based on race, class, and gender. The 1582 registry reflects municipal attempts to subject Cusco’s free Afro-Peruvians to ordinances that acknowledged the relative independence of skilled workers (oficiales), while requiring others to reside and serve in the homes of Spanish masters (amos). Analyzing entries for the nearly 150 people registered reveals ways that intersectional status and identity affected the experience of registration and the strategies for providing personal information to the Spanish notary. The declarations and omissions contained in the document highlight personal choices that people made to preserve their independence and that of their families. The social and economic independence displayed by many oficiales contrasts with the silence of individuals who lived and worked in the households of wealthy and powerful Spaniards, navigating unequal and enmeshed relationships. The range of individual experiences and statuses evident in the 1582 registry helps explain why the restrictive goal of the proceeding failed in the following years, as well as why a free Afro-Peruvian community did not flourish in Cusco during the later colonial period.

What is the relationship between Chinese migrants and China? Can modern Chinese migration be compared to colonization? This article examines how Chinese intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century grappled with these questions through their writings in Dongfang zazhi (东方杂志, 1904–1948) and Nanyang yanjiu (南洋研究, 1928–1944). It shows that although these intellectuals acknowledged the territorial dimensions of Chinese migration—particularly in Southeast Asia—they defined colonization through the European model and stressed the fundamental differences between Chinese migration and Western or Japanese colonialism. Their perspectives also evolved over time, from initially advocating colonization and racial vitality in the early twentieth century, to proclaiming a different path after the Republican Revolution in 1911, and later to reimagining post-Second World War Chinese migration as not just a nationalist project but also a movement of decolonization and localization. The article highlights the case of Li Changfu, a pioneering scholar whose writings epitomized these evolving perspectives and illustrated the efforts among Chinese intellectuals to move beyond both the Western colonial framework and the China-centred national model in formulating a world-historical approach. Yet their attempts also revealed enduring tensions, including the tendency to essentialize Chinese identity even as they sought to break from colonial and national paradigms and construct new narratives. Their engagement with the ‘colonial question’ offers fresh insight into contemporary historiographical debates over the role of colonialism and empire-buiding in Chinese history.

As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to connect the subject matter to language evolution in general, the framing of LEL as deleterious almost exclusively to ‘indigenous peoples’, a lack of historical time depth, and the omission of the ecological factors in typical approaches to LEL, I argue that linguistics should theorize about language vitality more adequately than has been the case to date.

Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz's (2020) target article details the urgent need for linguistics as a field to develop its theoretical, analytical, and political engagement with issues of race and racism. We agree with Charity Hudley et al.'s assertion that the ‘hegemonic whiteness’ of linguistics as a field ‘has been profoundly damaging both for linguistic scholarship and for linguistics as a profession’ (p. e211). In this response, we wish to expand upon this point specifically in regard to how linguists and linguistics relate to Indigenous peoples and their languages. We outline key respects in which academic linguistics has, or might be seen to have, perpetuated harm against Indigenous peoples. We also outline strategies for mitigating harm and supporting the language work done by members of Indigenous communities.

In this response to Mufwene's (2017) target article we discuss the benefits and disadvantages of extending the ecology metaphor into studies of language vitality, focusing on contexts from the South Pacific. We show that an ecological perspective allows us to focus on the local and particular and can help us to avoid a simplistic reliance on broad phenomena such as ‘globalization’ to account for language endangerment and loss (LEL). However, we contend that this endeavor runs the risk of abstracting away from the human experience of LEL into a ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘balance sheet’ approach. We conclude that, while it has benefits, the ecology metaphor does not ultimately offer a compelling basis for an overarching theory of language vitality.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, a view that interprets Russian-Ukrainian relations as colonialism has gained ground in historical scholarship. However, based on an analysis of the terms “colonization” and “colonialism” and a comparison between Ukrainian territories and the Governorate-General of Turkestan in late imperial Russia, this article argues for a more cautious use of the term “colonialism” in relation to Ukraine. It shows that contemporaries rarely viewed tsarist rule in Ukraine through the prism of colonialism, while in the case of Central Asia this perspective was pervasive. Moreover, tsarist policy toward Central Asia and its predominantly Muslim population was much more in line with colonial practices than it was in the case of Ukraine. While colonial rule is generally based on the institutionalization of difference, the opposite was the case in Ukraine: Ukraine was appropriated as part of the Russian nation. Therefore, this article argues that Russia’s claims on Ukraine, which deny Ukraine’s right to national self-determination and statehood, are not an indication of colonial subjugation, but rather of nationalist usurpation.