The 1973 Billy Graham Crusade in Seoul witnessed a record-breaking attendance not just in terms of Graham’s career, but in the entire history of Christianity. The event’s success attracted significant American attention. But the Korean side of the story remains largely untold. This article explores the Korean background, aims for the crusade and their interpretation of its success. It argues that Korean Protestants leveraged their American connections to advance their own national agenda, causing tensions in the process, and that the crusade’s numerical success stimulated Korean Protestant exceptionalism which challenged ideas of American uniqueness.

This article offers a fresh account of the colonial processes that upended Muslim juridical regimes in South Asia between 1808 and 1885. Based on unexplored sources in Arabic and English, the discussion is set in the South Indian coastal towns of today’s Kerala and Tamilnad, where Muslims practiced Shafi‘i law and were not subject to continuous Muslim rule at any point in history. Given their longue-durée experience of non-Muslim rule, the Shafi‘i jurists had to rethink classical jurisprudential norms to empower the learned Muslims (the ‘ulama) as alternative sources of authority, so that they could elect and dismiss Islamic law judges (qazis) as their local leaders in the coastal towns. Qazis thus emerged and operated as a bastion of Shafi‘i power and Shafi‘i religious authority in the region. Once the British Empire claimed the mantle of the Mughal Empire that practiced Hanafi law, it could not as easily bring these Shafi‘is into its imperial fold. Their juridical autonomy provoked fears of political subversion for the British Empire in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, prompting its officials to bring the Shafi‘is under direct government control and reconfigure the community-elected qazis, which were the foci of Shafi‘i leadership.

The overturning of the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (1973) in the United States during the summer of 2022 with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated the nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion, leading to the introduction of numerous new restrictions. This article examines how the language used in federally proposed anti-abortion legislation has evolved in the aftermath of the Roe decision. By exploring the gender and power dynamics that shape the contemporary abortion debate, alongside feminist legal theory, this study analyzes the language and effects of five bills that have been introduced since the ruling. After analyzing the proposed bills, there was a noticeable shift in anti-abortion strategies by Republican elected officials. Rather than directly criminalizing pregnant individuals, these bills target abortion providers, state funding, and the dissemination of information. This indirect approach sets to restrict abortion access by making it practically unattainable for many regardless of its legality.

In February 1744 in Paris, the Swedish physician Abraham Bäck (1713–95), better known as Carl Linnaeus’s best friend, dissected the cadaver of an unidentified sub-Saharan man. In contrast to the widespread exploitation of the enslaved dead in North America, cadavers of dark-skinned Africans remained rare in the anatomical theatres of eighteenth-century Europe. Scarcity not only increased their market value in medical circles interested in skin colour: in Europe, empirical anatomists often used these rare remains for building their medical authority. This article explores the rise of an empiricist social culture of racial anatomy in the European Enlightenment by following the case of Bäck, whose research on ‘black’ skin also provides a little-known counterpart to Linnaeus’s racial anthropology. Bäck’s case illustrates not only how European anatomists often wrote accounts of skin colour which best showcased their medical skills but also how the production of racial pseudoscience became increasingly driven by the authoritative rise of empiricism, the expansion of the slave trade, and the Enlightenment’s fascination with human differences.

This article situates the work of famous “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg in current environmental debates, arguing that he represents a shift from a “market” to a “planning” orientation within promethean environmental discourse taking place since the early 2000s. Instead of seeing self-correcting markets as a panacea for all societal ills, “planning” prometheanism aims to address environmental problems such as climate change through public policy, state investment, and technology development. We investigate the genesis of Lomborg’s “planning” prometheanism and locate its key sources of inspiration in the works of American economists Julian Simon, William Nordhaus, and Thomas Schelling. Moreover, we argue that Lomborg’s approach is characterized by a technocratic skepticism toward democracy which derives from his reliance on rational-choice theory. Finally, highlighting the adaptability of promethean discourse, we suggest that Lomborg’s “planning” prometheanism represents a renaissance of 1950s promethean thought at a time when a post-neoliberal world is taking shape.

This article examines the role of religious law in the context of modern state formation in the Arabian Gulf sheikhdoms. It focuses on Qatar, where a dual legal system emerged out of contestations over political community in the aftermath of imperialism and oil. From the mid-twentieth century onward, the ruling family empowered both a sharia and a civil judiciary without fully clarifying the jurisdictional boundaries between the two judiciaries. Until the 2003 unification of the judiciary, litigants were seemingly free to take civil and criminal cases to a court of their choice. I suggest that the appeal of Qatar’s Sharia Courts lay primarily in the socially embedded nature of Islamic legal practice, the extra-legal functions fulfilled by sharia judges, and the transnational networks of Islamic institutions. While the appeal of the sharia was partly produced by the state, Islamic legal institutions also drew force from their oppositional stance toward modern state power. The Qatari case shows how legal actors can secure state recognition by positioning themselves as authentic cultural mediators against the alienating structures of modern bureaucracy when they offer an alternative model of justice grounded in a dense network of social relations and the provision of a wide range of services.

In the years since the 2016 presidential election, questions of partisan identity and partisan polarization have burst into broader public discourse, and they have invariably been intertwined with curiosity about gender and gendered behavior, especially as it relates to partisanship and voting. What is women’s role in creating and sustaining the current political moment, or is politics as we experience it today shaped entirely by and for men? Political science as a discipline has of course tackled these questions for a much longer time, even though for some scholars, the current political moment has bestowed greater urgency on these long-running discussions and puzzles. However, even within political science, these two phenomena and their related questions have not always been examined in tandem.

Indigenous peoples, rural and peasant populations, and Afro-descendants have increasingly disputed mining and other extractive ventures in the territories they inhabit in various regions of Latin America. This article introduces an open-access digital and bilingual curated repository of data that compiles legal and legal-like actions by various actors in the context of paradigmatic conflicts over mining in Central America and Mexico. It situates the relevance of this digital resource against the background of the increasing global recourse to law in socioenvironmental conflicts—a tendency that may be defined as the juridification of environmental politics. The article also places the database in relation to key debates in digital humanities and discusses potential uses as well as future developments and challenges to expanding and improving such a resource.

This article examines the recent transformation of marriage rituals in Turkey from the perspective of young brides. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul and Bursa in 2017–19, it discusses how young women construct their marital imaginaries through extravagant ceremonies and festivities such as proposals, photographs, henna nights, and weddings. Drawing from the theory of ritual economy, the article argues that their gendered desire for lavish spending does not position brides as victims of either traditional Turkish customs or the consumer market. Rather, the article emphasizes young women’s aspirations to romance and a sense of uniqueness, and their desire to feel as if they are “living a fairy tale.” These bridal imaginaries reflect the rise of neoliberal individualism, upward social mobility, and status-seeking in Bourdieu’s sense. The article’s findings contribute to the hitherto limited scholarship on changing marriage rituals and the wedding industry in Turkey.

This article argues that the image of the ‘bad German’ and the animus that accompanied it was tempered by that of the defeated German and the pity Italians in liberal and Catholic circles expressed for German misery. Such sympathetic expressions were not confined to the ruling elite but circulated broadly in media representations and in accounts given by Italians who travelled north in the early postwar years. To view Germans as objects of pity was an empowering act and a humanising one. As an emotion and a practice, pity provided a blueprint for how to think and feel about the former enemy – and oneself – that, in Italy, reinforced Catholic and liberal frameworks for political and social reconstruction. Important to constructions of East–West difference and to the Christian democratic groundings of Western Europe, pity continues to shape debates on European identity, immigration and humanitarian aid.