ABSTRACT This article contrasts political discourse on the threat posed by terrorism today from the US and UK. Three arguments are made. First, there is significant overlap in the characterisation of today’s threat as more fragmented, more ideologically plural, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous than that which dominated the immediate post-9/11 period. Second, counterintuitively, this consistent framing of terrorism’s recent transformation is situated within two very different constructions of terrorism’s wider temporalities. In the UK, a model of historical discontinuity dominates in which today’s terrorism is seen as radically different from the violences of the twentieth century and of the post-9/11 period. In the US, in contrast, a model of historical cyclicity sees contemporary terrorism positioned as a return to much older violences including those associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Third, these differences highlight the considerable political significance of constructed temporalities around terrorism, with their capacity to (de-)emphasise ostensibly pertinent similarities and differences, and to legitimise or foreclose policy responses to this threat.

ABSTRACT Since the introduction of out-of-country voting in 2014, often portrayed as a mechanism of democratic inclusion, the number of Turkish citizens abroad has acquired new political significance, leading parties to invest more actively in the diasporic political field. By analyzing the opposition party repertoires, this article demonstrates how, by contrast to its democratic promise, diaspora voting has become a contested transnational political arena. The analysis reveals that Turkey’s case illustrates a broader paradox of out-of-country voting dynamics: while bureaucratic control and electoral manipulation serve to reinforce autocratic governance, it also opens transnational arenas in which opposition actors enact everyday forms of democratic resilience and counter-mobilization.

This article examines the essence and content of the concepts of secularism and the secular state, their role in social development, and their legal and political significance. It analyzes the importance of the principle of secularism in ensuring human rights and freedoms, as well as the organization of relations between the state and religion on the basis of mutual independence. Furthermore, the article discusses the main characteristics of a secular state, including the rule of law, freedom of conscience, and equal rights for all citizens. Through this analysis, it is possible to gain an understanding of the implementation of secular state principles in Uzbekistan and their importance in building a democratic society.

ABSTRACT While some have welcomed climate litigation as a potential instrument for climate justice, others have dissmissed courts as a futile weapon against the carbon economies in which they are embedded. This paper investigates a paradigmatic case filed by Russian civil society against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights. It asks: Why pursue climate litigation against an authoritarian regime that is unlikely to implement an international court decision, at the risk of personal persecution? The paper theorises the Russian case as co-production of prefigurative legality. It explores how the political significance of strategic climate litigation is co-produced by involved actors, and what futures, normative principles, subjectivities, political messages, and knowledges the case generates and is shaped by. The paper contributes to an understanding of climate litigation as a practice of democratic resistance in authoritarian contexts and a technique of just future-making.

ABSTRACT The introduction situates this collection of essays at the intersection of postcolonial and memory studies. It begins by highlighting the role of historical forgetting in the long-term persistence of colonial power relations. Against this backdrop, it brings into focus the revisionist nature of postcolonial culture and its political significance, tracing the cross-fertilization of memory studies and postcolonial studies and the emergence of a postcolonial awareness in the public debate. Building on the notion of public history, it develops and broadens the category of the “historical imaginary” and argues that it can usefully contribute to a transmedial understanding of postcolonial cultures. Highlighting the interplay of history and memory, it focuses on the role of aesthetic artifacts and discourses in producing an awareness of the colonial past and on its social and political implications. In the final section, it situates the contributions included in the collection within this framework.

Transformation of public administration in the sphere of forensic science activity in Ukraine under martial law

Foreign Orders and Decorations Presented to the Rulers of the Muhammad Ali Dynasty and its political significance : A Study of the Collection Preserved in the Orders and Decorations Museum at Abdeen Palace (1863–1952 AD)

Voices of the crowd: Exploring user evaluations of ChatGPT using structural topic modeling.

ABSTRACT Purpose: This article presents the theoretical framework of the physical culture circle, grounded in an analysis of the culture circle − a participatory and dialogical popular education approach developed by Paulo Freire. Methods: The study examines Freirean pedagogy, particularly the culture circle, in dialogue with decolonial studies and physical cultural studies. This interdisciplinary engagement seeks to articulate a theoretical and pedagogical proposal that integrates critical bodily experience into educational practice, highlighting the convergences and divergences among these perspectives. Results: The physical culture circle is proposed as a pedagogical framework that values collective, critical, and engaged learning, challenging the logics of body colonization and hierarchies of knowledge. By fostering awareness of social markers of difference and encouraging empowerment through embodied practices, this approach contributes to transforming experiences into acts of resistance and emancipation. Conclusion: By consolidating the physical culture circle as a robust theoretical framework, the study offers educators, researchers, and community practitioners a structure that fosters participatory spaces for dialogue, resistance, and collective knowledge construction. This framework challenges dominant paradigms by centering the moving body as a site of political, cultural, and pedagogical significance, affirming its role in the struggle against social hierarchies and injustices.

The article analyses the functions and meanings acquired by the Russian national costume within the ritualised space of contemporary Russian state holidays. The author considers this process as a deliberate element of state cultural policy aimed at consolidating society and providing a visual representation of symbols that unify the nation. The empirical basis of the study is a narrative analysis of posts from the official website of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation over a five-year period.The main findings of the work point to a consistent trend of the purposeful incorporation of folk costume, especially during holidays of historical and political significance (Russia Day, National Unity Day, Victory Day). The costume plays a dual role: on the one hand, it serves as a demarcating sign of cultural distinctiveness and “spiritual bonds,” and on the other, it acts as an integrating element visualising the unity of a multinational people. The author identifies key forms of the costume’s utilisation (flash mobs, theatricalperformances, immersive installations) and differentiates its roles (key/background, focused/participatory).The article argues that within the context of a state holiday, the Russian national costume undergoes decontextualisation and stylisation, transforming into a “simulacrum of tradition” - a universal visual code transmitting official values (patriotism, sovereignty, continuity). Despite the risks of losing authenticity, this process is assessed as natural and functionally justified from the perspective of the tasks of symbolic politics and the construction of collective identity. Thus, the costume emerges not merely as a decorative element, but as a complex semiotic resource in the dialogue about contemporary “Russianness.”

ABSTRACT This paper explores the pedagogical and political significance of love in times of global affliction, marked by war, inequality, ecological devastation, and enduring colonial legacies. Bringing Hannah Arendt’s conception of antipolitical love into dialogue with decolonial understandings of love as an insurgent and world-making force, the paper examines how contrasting visions of love illuminate different risks and possibilities for education. Arendt’s scepticism cautions against the sentimentalisation of politics and highlights the need for plurality and responsibility, while decolonial thinkers reframe love as a praxis of refusal, repair, and solidarity. The paper argues that holding these perspectives in tension enriches pedagogical openings to confront the affective legacies of coloniality and to cultivate love as a critical, ethical, and transformative orientation towards the world. The paper concludes by proposing pedagogies of decolonial love as practices of collective care, resistance, and world-making.

ABSTRACT The personal and political significance of social identity is well studied; this paper contributes to those studies a discussion of the metaphysics of identity. Three features of an adequate theory of identity are specified, two existing theories are considered, and concerns about them are leveraged in order to craft a new theory. An identity group is a group whose members value and commit to valuing enough of the activities and products of cultures associated with the group. Theories of culture and commitment are provided. Some hard cases are discussed.

ABSTRACT This poem offers a reflective account of an English teacher’s pedagogical journey within socially complex and linguistically diverse classrooms. Rather than viewing language teaching as a mere transmission of grammar or vocabulary, the poem reframes English education as a site of identity negotiation, emotional labour, and empowerment. It captures the fragile confidence of students navigating a foreign language, foregrounding the teacher’s role as both witness and guide. Accents and so-called “errors” are reimagined as valid traces of cultural belonging, challenging dominant norms of linguistic correctness. The teacher becomes a map, a mirror, and a bridge facilitating not only language acquisition but also self-expression and dignity. Ultimately, the poem argues for a more humanistic and inclusive approach to English language education, where both teacher and student learn, unlearn, and transform. Through poetic narrative, this work invites educators to reflect on the affective dimensions of teaching and the political significance of making space for marginalised voices within the classroom.

Abstract How war is anticipated has become a central problem of contemporary security governance. Across liberal democracies, simulated exercises, ranging from tabletop wargames to civil-military drills, are increasingly used to render uncertain futures actionable in the present. Drawing on ethnographic participation in two wartime simulation exercises in Taiwan—a state-led civil-military drill and a civilian–organized drill—this article examines how different modes of simulation shape the temporal and affective conditions under which war is imagined, inhabited, and performed. Situating these cases within critical scholarship on affect, anticipation, and security, the article argues that the political significance of simulated exercises lies less in their representational realism or future prediction than in their capacity to produce distinct temporal–affective subjectivities. The state-led exercises predominantly operate on a logic of preparedness, seeking to manage uncertainty by standardizing roles and procedures and mitigating adverse outcomes. In contrast, the civilian-led exercises mobilize a preemptive logic that treats uncertainty, disorientation, and embodied vulnerability not as failures but generative conditions of action and subject formation. Conceptualizing exercises as temporal-affective machines, the article shows how bodies, objects, infrastructures, emotions, and environments actively participate in shaping how war is sensed and lived in the present. In doing so, the study of simulated exercises opens new analytical space for understanding how security is constructed not only through policy, procedures, and institutions, but through the shaping of perception, temporality, and human-material relationships.

Antifeminist and antigender rhetoric and campaigns have grown over the last decade, especially, but not exclusively, voiced by ultraconservative and far-right parties, movements and actors, and have prompted political and societal repercussions, with an increasingly visible participation of women in these attacks on feminism. These mobilizations are frequently articulated also through racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic discourses, in which feminism and gender equality are framed as external threats to the nation, the family, or “Western values.” From an intersectional perspective, such narratives reinforce and reproduce multiple overlapping systems of domination, simultaneously targeting gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality, while legitimizing exclusionary and hierarchical social orders. These features are globally shared and have proliferated across a wide range of contexts with some degree of similarities and coordination; however, conceptualizing them only as a singular transnational movement is unwarranted. Understanding how these campaigns are articulated differently in specific contexts and mobilized toward a range of goals is key to grasp both the similarities and the uniqueness of these narratives, agendas and campaigns in specific contexts. Portugal remains an under-researched case study primarily due to the slightly later emergence of far-right movements and parties with political significance. Based on the analysis of published materials and online content produced by the far-right party CHEGA (CH) from 2022 to the 2024 national legislative election, namely news, op-eds and interviews with women from CH, and their social networks content, this article reflects on how the success of CH in mobilizing women to antifeminist agendas has been key to normalizing undemocratic antifeminist, antigender agendas in the public sphere. Through the critical analysis of CH’s discursive positions on feminism and gender, it will also examine the instrumentalization of “women’s rights” in order to put forward homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigration, racist and xenophobic agendas, namely through the participation of women in leading roles in the antifeminist campaigns.

The relevance of this article stems from the need to establish the stable identity and to strengthen the integrity of contemporary Russian society. Along with successful commemorative practices and a well-conducted memory policy, working with futurological meanings is intended to serve this purpose. The effective functioning of a society presupposes a clear understanding of how it produces its future. The aim of this article is to explicate the methods of generating the future characteristic of late modern society, which, under the influence of recent history, experienced disillusionment with large-scale socio-political projects. The study is based on the methodological principles and insights from social philosophy and an interdisciplinary approach. Methods from intellectual history and the history of concepts are applied. The article explicates the theoretical potential of the history of the future (Zukunftsgeschichte), a field of knowledge that is virtually unrepresented in Russian humanities. Over its centuries of existence, humanity has developed numerous ways of working with the future and mastered various ways of representing it, which have become part of history. A significant research approach implemented within the framework of contemporary intellectual history is shifting attention from the content of futurological projects/scenarios to the conditions and methods of their genesis. The article reveals the reasons for the memorial turn, which has led to the dominance of images and meanings of the past in the consciousness of our contemporaries and, simultaneously, to a lack of ability to project the future. The imperatives of constant activity and adherence to high professional and living standards can serve as factors provoking escapism into the past. The author attributes the following ways of generating the future in late modern society: firstly, the future can be constructed on the basis of the past; secondly, secondly, the future as a response to someone else’s future (perceived as “risk future”); and thirdly, the future can be a minor transformation of the present (the practice of “small deeds”). The conclusion is substantiated that not only memorial sovereignty (the ability of a political actor to independently interpret its own past) has political significance, but also futurological sovereignty — the right and ability to generate its own future.

This article advocates for an entangled practice history of interwar anti-colonialism and youth by exploring the political and cultural significance of the Indian News Service and Information Bureau in interwar Berlin. It was a place where young socialists from the left wing of the German-Jewish youth movement mingled with Indian anti-colonial activists, as well as a space for international encounters more widely. But how exactly did this fusion between these different groups occur, in what practices did it materialize, and how did it impact on the activists‘ lives in the 1920s, but also beyond? One of the connecting lines that stretched from the left wing of the youth movement to the anti-colonial activists was a progressive, experimental approach to sexuality that aimed at the overcoming of class, racial, and religious boundaries. Mixed relationships between cosmopolitan men from Asia and independent young women from GermanJewish homes, who had grown up with and in the youth movement of the early twentieth century, had more than an erotic appeal, however. They were also a political statement, a lived rejection of the middle-class conventions of the prewar period and, from the perspective of the Indian activists, also a critique of colonial emotional regimes and the regulation of intimacy that often accompanied them.

The study of international student resilience is of paramount psychological, political, and sociological significance. To date, however, no comprehensive mapping of the existing research on this topic has been undertaken. In response, our systematic literature review screened 5,635 publications retrieved from more than 80 databases and analyzed the 66 most relevant studies in-depth. We examined the contextual, conceptual, methodological, and empirical complexities of international student resilience through a concerted inductive–deductive approach to descriptive and thematic analysis. This examination was initially grounded in psychological theories of resilience, particularly the conceptual triad of challenges, facilitators, and positive outcomes, as well as the protective, compensatory, and challenge models. We then extended and problematized this psychological orientation by incorporating political and sociological debates on individual responsibilization and social justice, alongside engagement with the multi-Rs sociological model of resilience. Building on this review, we propose an interdisciplinary, multilayered model that serves as a heuristic for studying international student resilience and resilience more broadly, across empirical, conceptual, real, and ideological levels.

Abstract This article investigates the populist trajectory of the Portuguese political party CHEGA since its foundation in 2019. Employing Ernesto Laclau’s discursive framework, it examines party programmes, official documents, and speeches delivered up to 2025, with particular attention to the rhetoric of its leader, André Ventura. The analysis shows how immigration has been elevated as a central empty signifier, enabling the articulation of diverse grievances into a polarising opposition between “the people” and “the elites”. Over time, this discourse has become increasingly personalised, with Ventura positioned as both mediator and embodiment of popular authenticity. By situating CHEGA within a Southern European context, the study contributes to a comparative understanding of contemporary populism while highlighting the analytical value of discourse theory for exploring its symbolic dimensions. In doing so, it demonstrates how populist logic can be strategically deployed to challenge institutional structures and reshape democratic contestation in Portugal, revealing its evolving political significance.

ABSTRACT Roadblocks and checkpoints have become ubiquitous features of conflict‐affected borderlands, yet their political and economic significance remains unevenly theorised. While existing scholarship has documented their role in financing armed actors and shaping everyday mobility, less attention has been paid to how roadblocks relate to the underlying transport geographies within which they operate. This article advances debates on extractivism, circulation and conflict by conceptualising roadblocks as micro‐sites of extractive power embedded in broader logistical landscapes. Building on transport geography and literature on the politics of circulation, it argues that variations in transport infrastructure—ranging from informal paths to paved corridors and global logistics hubs—systematically shape who can extract rents from movement, where, and with what distributive effects. The article develops a typology of roadblock geographies based on two dimensions: the number of checkpoint‐wielding actors and the types of routes on which they operate. Drawing on comparative evidence from multiple conflict settings, it identifies five ideal‐typical configurations: gatekeeper states, intra‐route competition, green/grey divisions of power, diffuse authority, and inter‐route competition. Rather than mutually exclusive, these configurations are complementary, scalable and often coexist within the same conflict landscape. By foregrounding the interaction between transport infrastructure and extractive practices, the typology offers a heuristic for mapping patterns of authority, rent distribution and political power in conflict‐affected borderlands, and contributes to politicising transport geography as a key site of contemporary extractive governance.