This study explores the experiences of Russian relocants in Turkey, focusing on their migration trajectories through overlapping waves of shock, relocation, and partial mobilization, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Initially, Turkey was an attractive destination due to its visa-free access, air connectivity, affordable cost of living, and established post-Soviet community. However, among the nearly one million people who fled Russia, many relocants – primarily young, educated, and entrepreneurial individuals from the information technology sector and oppositional groups – face various uncertainties in Turkey. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this research first examines the migration journeys of Russian relocants through their self-narratives, tracing the waves of the exodus in 2022. It then critically analyzes the legal, economic, and social uncertainties they encounter in Turkey. Finally, it explores how the physical and virtual “bubbles” formed in İstanbul function as coping mechanisms to navigate these challenges. Blending staying and returning, bubbles function as temporary “in-between” spaces, allowing Russian relocants to encounter Turkey’s novelties, while maintaining a “transnational double presence” through ongoing ties to their homeland, resulting in a form of “functional adaptation.”

This article reads Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015) as an expression and interlocutor of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s method of potential history. Thinking alongside Walter Benjamin’s media theory and philosophy of history, Azoulay reconceives the camera shutter as a material apparatus that executes the imperial violence of expelling, and making obsolete, the past from the present in the name of progress. Azoulay’s critical practice finds its artistic analog in Liew’s comic, which contests official accounts of Singapore’s pre-independence history by remediating archived photographs of the nation’s former politicians. My bilateral reading of Liew and Azoulay advances ‘potential legal history’ as an emerging methodological-theoretical perspective that orients legal scholars to photographs, graphic novels, and other visual-narrative forms as vital matters for the reimagining of national histories.

This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others represent something new, being responses to novel twenty-first-century anxieties and imperatives of nation-building, development, and the place of humanities knowledge in those aspirations. Unlike old conceptions of instrumentality, this new turn signals a more explicit agenda of problem-solving through historical research. It also entails a rather formulaic embrace of proposals for solutions to problems identified in or through historical research.

Independent Christian Churches were an important aspect of African anticolonial activism, but the political afterlives of these movements in the immediate postcolonial period have been broadly overlooked. This article studies the African Independent Pentecostal Church, focusing on its entanglement with the politics of reconciliation and state-building in a decolonising Kenya. During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, the church lost its entire portfolio of land, churches, and schools. The article explores how church adherents sought to re-establish themselves on these holdings. These contests reveal that churches were political agents engaged in debates about the boundaries of postcolonial political community and the nature of post-conflict reconciliation. Churches’ roles as landowners and education providers meant denominational rivalries masked political struggles over justice for past violations. Embedded in intra-ethnic conflicts, churches negotiated with elites seeking to establish ethnic constituencies. Through this conflict and compromise, the brokered nature of the postcolonial nation-building project is revealed.

The years immediately following the issue of Magna Carta and the death of John were of fundamental importance in determining the trajectory of the nascent common law legal system. Although the existence of the Bench had functionally been permanently established under chapter seventeen of Magna Carta, the central royal court faced an uncertain future under conciliar rule and in the aftermath of extensive civil conflict. The extensive extant records of the common law fines made to initiate actions in the Bench as recorded the Fine Rolls offer a window into the roles played by the court in relation to litigants, within the wider structure of royal governance, and in relation to a rapidly evolving legal system. An analysis of these sources can therefore both illuminate the early workings of the common law legal procedures and characterize the demand for royal justice that survived the First Barons’ War before continuing to grow across the thirteenth century. What emerges is a picture of a judicial system at the onset of a period of rapid development and widespread demand that would come to lay the foundation for the massive expansion of royal justice that was to follow throughout the reign of Henry III and beyond.

The 20th biennial conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS) was held in Hong Kong, China. Through a comprehensive analysis of the keynote speeches, panel presentations, roundtable discussions, excursions and IPHS awards, this report highlights key insights from the conference that are especially relevant to urban historians. It suggests that planning history not only acts as a tool for informing urban strategies but also offers critical perspectives on socio-political, environmental, and cultural dimensions of urban transformation. The report presents three key insights for urban historians: (1) the entangled planning histories of Hong Kong and Shenzhen reflect broader political, ideological and international ambitions of dominant powers; (2) the evolution of environmental histories when rethinking human–natural relations in urban transition; and (3) the emerging attention to marginalized voices and alternative archives to enrich dominant planning narratives. These together demonstrate how planning history offers a critical historiographical lens for interpreting urban transformation.

Addiction was considered ‘alien to Socialism’. At least, that was the narrative upheld by the socialist East German state, which thus followed the traditional argumentation of socialist and social democratic movements since the turn of the century. While the state clung to this ideological claim, the consumption and abuse of beer, spirits, and benzodiazepines continued to increase. However, there was never a central strategy for the treatment and prevention of addiction in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The hesitation and ignorance of the state authorities created a vacuum that was filled by local initiatives and expert discussions aimed at improving the situation of people with addictions. In this article, I analyse the introduction of new treatment methods in a psychiatric hospital in the GDR and show that doctors, psychologists, patients, and local officials had certain freedoms to test new approaches, many of which originated in the West. Even though they had to adapt concepts such as the ‘therapeutic communities’ of British reformer Maxwell Jones to the specific socialist and East German context to avoid restrictions by state authorities, the Berlin Wall did not prevent the transfer of knowledge. This article, therefore, paints a nuanced picture of the therapeutic methods used to treat people with addiction in the GDR. From condemning individuals as outcasts of socialist society for socially deviant drinking behaviour and relying exclusively on aversion therapy and moral accusations, there was a shift towards a mixture of treatments that became increasingly specialised and individualised, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, comparable to Western standards.

Understanding how law is articulated by computer means becomes crucial amid the widespread use of algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMs) in public policies. Based on a case study of the profiling algorithm deployed in labour market policies in Poland, this article contributes to the debate on computer representation of law. Using unique data concerning ADMs and their development, we address the following questions: How is the law articulated through algorithms? Who produces, and how, what kinds of discrepancies between the law and ADMs? Our analysis revealed discrepancies that were indicative of political decision-making that go far beyond adaptations of law to the requirements of ADMs. Furthermore, contrary to what the literature suggests, these discrepancies were a product of backstage decision-making by traditional policy-makers – executive and public administration – rather than system-level bureaucrats. Thus, we argue for the need to incorporate the political dimension more systematically into the analysis of computer articulation of law.

The current state of Arctic research and its community continues to exhibit high levels of political polarization and fragmentation by establishing a number of questions regarding the societal relevance of the process and its results for the benefit of present and future generations. The ASSW2025 (Arctic Science Summit Week) conference devoted to the ICARP IV (International Conference on Arctic Research Planning) process took place in Boulder, Colorado (March 2025), and had special importance in this regard. The conference was a summary meeting of the Arctic research planning process for the next 10 years and set the foundation for the upcoming IPY-5 (International Polar Year). The Summit, attended by nearly 1200 international scientists and researchers, Indigenous Knowledge holders, and community members from across the Arctic and beyond, exhibited the lowest ever attendance of Russian Arctic scientists representing Russian science organizations. This group studies and advocates for almost half of the Arctic’s social and human capital (roughly 2.4 million people live in Arctic Russia). In order to preserve scientific discourse and guarantee the societal and environmental benefits of science for the fragile socio-ecological systems of polar regions and their delicate geopolitics, effective transition strategies and approaches should be taken into consideration where possible.

This article reconstructs the mining practices and social activities of Chinese migrants in Maliwun, a tin-rich Burmese village on the Siam-Burma border between the 1840s and 1890s. Despite its natural resources and repeated mining attempts by various stakeholders, Maliwun could not materialise its potential and was slow in tin production and community development throughout this period. By focusing on the internal dynamics among its Chinese miners, especially around the rivalling Chinese “secret societies,” this article situates the frontier mining settlement within a larger regional network of the Southeast Asian Chinese and traces its Chinese community’s evolving relationships with fellow countrymen along the southern Siamese and northern Malayan coastlines. It argues that grassroots organisations played a crucial role in the early formation of this frontier Chinese migrant community, which was sitting at the intersection of political, labour, resource, gender, and ethnic frontiers and exhibited key features of fluid boundaries and transnational networks. Yet, these impacts should not be overstated, individually or collectively. The slow development of Maliwun calls for a careful reassessment of the limitation of roles played by porous borders, hybrid interactions, and transnational networks at a historic frontier.

The article focuses on the export of cadaveric pituitary glands from communist Bulgaria in the 1980s, used for the production of human growth hormone. The case is explored in the broader context of practices and transnational networks for the supply of pituitaries. Special attention is paid to the changes resulting from the turn to the production of recombinant growth hormone in the mid-1980s, which put an end to the international ‘market’ of pituitary glands. In the last sections, different perspectives are explored to make sense of the case under scrutiny: those of bioethics and biolaw, on the one hand, and of bioeconomy in a globalising world, on the other.