Anxiety about nuclear war emerged after the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan and has risen and fallen over the following decades. It is grounded in future thinking shaped by narrative form and function in policy discussions and especially in film and television. These media have repeatedly drawn on three basic narrative templates organised around three different endings: destruction, judgement, and renewal; human extinction; and permanent and irreversible societal collapse. Several film and television productions are used to illustrate the internal organisation of these narrative templates and to examine how both nuclear fear and nuclear anxiety are involved.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has, over almost 35 years, developed into a model for effecting science-led governance for global environmental change. However, on the back of the sixth Assessment Report, and with preparations underway for the seventh, the IPCC arguably faces an identity crisis. With many inside and outside the IPCC perceiving a persistent disconnect between this immense scientific enterprise and meaningful political action, some argue the IPCC is failing to fulfil its social contract. At this important juncture, which could have implications for other spheres of global governance, a pilot study was conducted, interviewing IPCC authors about how they perceive the IPCC’s social contract has evolved according to the interplay of key elements that IPCC members draw on to define the organization’s identity and authority. Building on a long history of critical social science about the IPCC, this study found that authors discussed a weave of identity elements, which were categorized under three headings: (i) task identification and interpretation; (ii) mode of operation; and (iii) shifting key concerns. As scoping exercises ramp up for the seventh Assessment Report, IPCC leadership will need to be mindful of how groups inside and outside the IPCC are re-crafting the identity and authority of the organization.

When the adjective “vegetarian” first appeared in a published text, in 1842, it was hardly intended as a daring neologism: derived from the Latin vegetus, it was meant to indicate a healthy state of body and mind, and was employed as an alternative to various other terms such as “abstinent,” “Pythagorean,” or “frugivorous.” The nineteenth-century “vegetarians” sought to emphasize the conceptual continuity between their choice to abstain from meat, or from animal products altogether, and the long tradition of ancient philosophers like Porphyry and Plutarch, as well as biblical imagery regarding human diet before the Fall. This article examines the intellectual milieu in which the word “vegetarianism” was coined in order to establish the connections both with current understandings of this diet and with discussions on abstaining from meat before the term itself started to be employed. The result is a case study of the intersections between the history of a concept and the entangled histories of the various words accompanying it. The methodology of controlled anachronism is presented as a productive tool that allows historians (of philosophy) to identify conceptual trajectories while safeguarding contextualization, and thus to trace the history of an idea amidst terminological change. The article is a plaidoyer for the application of anachronisms to historical research, moving beyond the view that they are incompatible with history’s alleged need for neutrality.

This article examines the role of associations as protest and riot brokers during the Badeni crisis of 1897 in Habsburg Austria. Drawing on concepts from political science, it demonstrates how these collective actors acted as crucial intermediaries between political leaders and local communities. Through meetings and rallies, associations facilitated the translation of parliamentary conflicts into street politics, while at the same time enabling demonstrations to escalate into violent riots. The article shows how civil society organizations deployed narratives to legitimize street politics and provided emotional framing and organizational capacity that individual activists often lacked. In doing so, associations expanded political participation in Habsburg Austria by bringing broader strata of society into the political arena, while simultaneously destabilizing it by fostering exclusionary violence. By conceptualizing associations as both protest and riot brokers, the article reinterprets the Badeni crisis not simply as evidence of national hatred but as a manifestation of mass political mobilization in a rapidly modernizing society.

We present new line drawings of the hieroglyphic inscriptions on Stela 4 (a.d. 796) at the ancient Maya royal capital of Ixkun, Guatemala. Lichen growth makes these texts almost illegible in person, but a photogrammetric model, rendered monochrome in Agisoft Metashape and imaged in Blender 3D, permits almost all the glyphs to be read or reconstructed. According to our interpretation, the main inscription records the journey of a prince of Ixkun to be fostered at Tikal, coordinated between the ruler of Ixkun and Yax Nuun Ahiin II, the king of Tikal. We think this arrangement cemented a new alliance between Tikal and Ixkun, in exchange for which the Ixkun king received a newly elevated royal and ritual status. Another text indicates that a prisoner from the neighboring Ho’kab’ kingdom, represented six years earlier on Stela 1, had survived in captivity for at least that long.

This article explores the ‘moral turn’ in contemporary sociological theory, positioning it as a response to the global crisis of democracy and the erosion of civil society. I argue that beyond institutional (or ‘hard’) democracy, the sustainability of democratic life depends on the moral fabric – or ‘moral space’ – that underpins civil society, constituted by values such as trust, reciprocity, solidarity and justice. As populism and authoritarianism gain traction globally, these moral underpinnings are increasingly threatened. Against this backdrop, contemporary sociological theorists are returning to foundational moral questions, not by imposing normative codes, but by uncovering value systems embedded in social practices and human interactions. This article examines this shift through three major theorists, who respectively advocate for a cosmopolitan morality grounded in empathy and tolerance toward diversity, promote a gift paradigm emphasizing reciprocity as a basis for convivial social life, and identify moral injury and misrecognition as key drivers of social struggle and transformation. Ultimately, the moral turn reflects the renewed ethical responsibility of social scientists to act as public intellectuals, restoring the normative vision of a just and democratic society from within sociological inquiry itself.

Building on a newly compiled database of all extant respondentia contracts from Manila’s notarial protocols between 1736 and 1800, this article examines the overlooked role that the Manila correspondencia played as the crucial private-order institutional mechanism financing Manila’s long-distance silver trade. This instrument organized the structure of long-distance capital flows stretching out from Manila across its intra-Asian and trans-Pacific commercial lines, allowing investors to make claims on future returns and apportion risks in the absence of an adequate public-order institutional framework for high volumes of exchange. Combining the respondentia dataset with account books for institutional lenders (the obras pías), we argue that the Manila correspondencia’s contractual elements offered a specific solution to the Fundamental Problem of Exchange between Asia and the Americas. The contract’s flexibility proved ideal for Manila’s diverse combination of individual and institutional investors to participate in the profits of cross-cultural trade, while offering security and guarantees.

This essay argues that understanding Black philanthropic histories recasts Black people from being mere recipients to donors. This recasting demonstrates how and where Black people resisted racism, sought transformation of themselves and society, and took approaches that were not always liberatory and transformational in their giving. This essay fills a gap in the literature on the politics of philanthropy which, to date, has omitted a direct focus on Black philanthropists. By focusing on the philanthropic traditions of Black people, the myth of Black people being only recipients is dismantled. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I provide a definition of Black philanthropy. This definition reveals that Black philanthropy historically has been viewed as expansive and shaped by the conditions Black people faced. Second, I examine select examples of Black philanthropy through the framework offered by the expansive definition. Third, I review current Black philanthropists and offer pathways for a future research agenda.

This article provides a close study of ‘Nice pickings’, a short piece of political disinformation generated within the London radical press. It examines the means and methods by which this became a viral text and reconstructs its pattern of circulation. It argues that, by passing rapidly and widely around a range of different media and audiences, by being susceptible to revamping and adaptation, and by providing a gateway onto a series of powerful stories already in circulation, this single paragraph illuminates some of the ways in which a national reform movement was forged in 1830.

Critiques of religion in Arab political life have long been framed as a project of the left. Since the uprisings of 2011, however, the most forceful critics of theology’s presence in politics have been conservatives. This article reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari. Revisiting the intellectual and historical context of the 1990s, it advances a new genealogy of conservative Arab political thought, one that saw in all transcendental and religious identifications not only the dangers of revolution but also a forfeiture of politics itself. In decoupling conservatism from Islam, the article advances an understanding of conservatism as both contingent and structural, or permanent in its formal presence but not necessarily in content, to suggest that histories of conservatism not only provide resources for a better understanding of the present, but also can complement the task that radical and ecumenical accounts of the Arab past have long pursued in disputing the religious or cultural nature of conservatism. In that sense, intellectual history of secular conservatism is important not because it is more or less dominant than theologically inflected varieties of it today, but because of how it might help free the historian from the need to restrict her endeavour to the correction of essentialist misrepresentation and to write histories where contingency is assumed rather than histories whose burden it has been to prove it.