This article1sets out to reassess the idea, repeated by many scholars, that there was a bishop from the Central Asian city of Qumul (or Hami) who was present in Baghdad around the time when one patriarch of the Church of the East – Makkika II – was buried and another – Denḥa I – was consecrated. After an initial consideration of what we know about the city of Qumul/Hami, we examine the various authors who have held to this idea and the sources, both primary and secondary, which they invoke as proof that the idea is correct. Gradually moving back to the earliest witnesses, we eventually arrive at the Maronite scholar Joseph Assemani’s Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana and the fourteenth-century primary source, Ṣalībā ibn Yūḥannā. A suggestion is made for how the idea originated and developed, thanks in part to the account of Marco Polo, but more definitively to Michel Le Quien’s Oriens Christianus.

Since the late 2010s, Rwanda has advertised its Visit Rwanda logo on the jerseys of prominent European football teams and has built new sports stadiums to host international sports competitions. Such strategies reflect the practice of sportswashing, which refers to the utilization of sports by political actors to gain global legitimacy while diverting attention from unjust processes occurring in their home countries. Dubinsky analyzes the effectiveness of Rwanda’s sportswashing through the concept of authoritarian image management, arguing that the mutual interests shared between authoritarian and Western actors facilitate the country’s sportswashing, despite the critiques it attracts.

Recent disruptions in technology, geopolitics, and the environment have contested what it means to be human, a source of social and political anxiety about the future. Taking inspiration from African and African diaspora writers and scholars, Lee attends to theories of the human that emerge from contemporary experiences on the African continent. The essay provides a countercanon by centering debates about the human and their attendant attempts to transcend it (more-than-human, posthuman) in African experiences and knowledges. Doing so offers alternative conceptions of human–nonhuman relations that unravel the co-imbrication of colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Black racism that undergird the modern condition.

Associational life in Cape Town is a mechanism for migrants from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to find belonging in South Africa. We trace the internal politics of associational membership from 2000 to 2019 to illustrate how membership in eastern Congolese associations has minimized community ties to other foreign Africans and South Africans. An increase in election violence in the DRC, divided into pro- and anti-combattant camps, and the threat of xenophobic violence in South Africa have led to a closing of ranks that presumes only other eastern Congolese can be trusted. In tracing gender, class and language cleavages, we find that eastern DRC associational life reproduces the xenophobia associational membership is intended to ameliorate.

This article explores the interaction between the Conseil de la Concurrence (Competition Council) and the Autorité de Régulation de la Poste et des Communications Électroniques (Telecommunications and Postal Regulatory Authority) (ARPCE) in the Algerian legal system. Algerian policy-makers have given special consideration to the issue of overlapping jurisdiction between these two authorities. The article discusses the Algerian strategy to resolve regulatory overlaps in the electronic communications market and also highlights the intervention of the ARPCE as a competition authority for the electronic communications market. Furthermore, the article analyses the Optimum Telecom Algeria case as a turning point in restoring the Competition Council’s role and highlights the need for systematizing the intervention of the two authorities. Finally, the article provides a forward-looking perspective through proposing a memorandum of understanding to promote cooperation between the Competition Council and the ARPCE.