Hallyu has expanded significantly through digital platforms since the 2010s. While Netflix has played a crucial role in distributing Korean content worldwide, its platform-driven strategies typically favour commercially optimised and formulaic narratives. This article examines an alternative dynamic through the 2021 Netflix docuseries My Love: Six Stories of True Love, which builds upon South Korean director Moyoung Jin’s earlier independent documentary My Love, Don’t Cross That River. Produced with local teams across six countries under Jin’s executive oversight, the series preserves an aesthetic and political sensibility rooted in Korea’s minjung documentary tradition. Its sustained focus on marginalised elderly couples and the intimate relationship between camera and subject represents a significant departure from Netflix’s standard original docuseries, which often centre on scandalous crimes, sensational narratives, or planetary issues such as climate crisis. The article investigates how culturally specific narratives can achieve global resonance without diminishing local contexts. The analysis traces the culturally sensitive translation of a local independent documentary to a transnational Netflix series, arguing that such cross-cultural initiatives signal a multidirectional and inclusive reimagining of Hallyu that challenges its predominantly market-driven circulation patterns.

In 1959 and 1960, Cameroonian women nationalists visited the People’s Republic of China. These members of the Union démocratique des femmes camerounaises (UDEFEC) practiced what I term a “diplomacy of intimacy,” which highlighted the effects of colonialism on their bodies, fertility, and intimate relationships to create a shared affective experience of anticolonial solidarity with their Chinese counterparts. Expanding the definition of “diplomat” to reflect how diplomacy functioned in the decolonizing world reveals that women played a much larger role than previously understood. These women diplomats remained largely invisible to the Western powers and to the postcolonial Cameroonian government, but Chinese sources provide a valuable vantage point on their diplomacy. By drawing on sources from Cameroon, China, France, and the UK, I demonstrate that during decolonization African nationalist women represented their parties on the world stage, exercising far more diplomatic power than appears in histories of decolonization focused on the West.

This introduction to a special issue of BJHS concerned with intermedial approaches to the history of the public culture of science (those that pay attention to the forms of different science media and how they relate to each other) also stands as an argument for such approaches. It amplifies a trend within humanities and social-science approaches to its subject of studying the interactions between science, media and publics as complex historical phenomena – in comparison with evaluative research approaches that seek to make science communication more effective. It argues for the virtues of going beyond most existing scholarship in the field by considering many media together. Drawing on the work of media studies scholars Irina Rajewsky and Klaus Bruhn Jensen, it introduces working definitions of intermediality. It then explores historically the genealogies of intermediality, which emerges as an entanglement of changing disciplines, technological change and media practice. Two brief sections take the example of museum display in this intermedial context with the aim of showing first that museum practice was already intermedial before it was considered to be ‘one of the media’. It then concludes by showing how, and in what circumstances, the mediatization of museums came to seem necessary.

The domination and exploitation inherent to colonialism entailed casting Africans as violators of European standards, expectations, and even aspirations. This article identifies messaging which permeated the everyday experiences of African wage earners by locating the ways in which employers embedded their understanding of Africans as potential violators into the employment relationship. It examines the records of the Tribunal de Première Instance in Dakar, Senegal, during the decades of high colonialism to reveal the nature of that dynamic, exploring implicit expectations among employers regarding their employees, particularly related to allegations of theft or abandonment of work brought against workers. Analysis of such cases particularly highlights domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly male. The interactions and claims in the justice records reveal clear constructions of violation within the attitudes and actions of non-African employers in colonial Dakar and present the court as a venue for perpetuating that rhetoric.

In this article, the author develops an Islamic normative legal theoretical framework by using three key Islamic methodological approaches—(1) juridical theory of law (uṣūl), (2) legal maxims (qawāʿid), and (3) purposive-based theory (maqāṣid)—in light of Ronald Dworkin’s notions of rules, principles, and policies, respectively. While uṣūl is used to develop rules, qawāʿid and maqāṣid provide the normative values that govern rulemaking. In addition to presenting a coherent model of Islamic normative legal theory, the author examines legitimacy issues of Islamic law that relate to links of rules to sharīʿa revealed texts and applies the Islamic normative legal theoretical framework to contemporary rulings on the environment, organ transplants, and Islamic finance. The case studies show that using the integrated normative framework would yield more ethical rulings than those that focus on juridical methods (uṣūl) only. The author argues that while the extent of legal legitimacy can vary across different rulings, the application of the Islamic normative legal framework ensures normative legitimacy in all cases, ensuring the moral character of Islamic law.

Ulbe Bosma’s book on the global history of sugar offers fundamentally new insights into the nexus of technology, corporate capital, government policies, and ideologies of progress in the making of commodity frontiers. From the perspective of historical materialist anthropology, it is important to broaden the research agenda even further. With reference to Maussian historical personae in the making of global capitalism, for example, a long history of raiders of state budgets emerges from Bosma’s work. Incorporating Sidney Mintz’s work on Sweetness and Power on a critical extension of world-system theory reveals, for the case of colonial and postcolonial Mauritius, that economic subsystems and local responses to slavery and indenture have a permanence for kinship structures, social policies, real estate markets, trade union legislations, and postcolonial development policies in special economic zones. Such a widened focus allows for the incorporation of the Caribbean Plantation School theorists into our analysis of sugar commodity chains within a comprehensive world systems perspective beyond the commodity frontiers agenda.

This study analyzes Turkey’s political landscape by harnessing computational social science techniques to parse extensive data about public ideologies from the Politus database. Unlike existing theoretical frameworks that focus on the ideologies of political elites and cadres, this study examines public ideologies in a contentious political manner. Exploiting an artificial intelligence-based data generation pipeline on digital traces, it distills the eight most prevalent ideologies down to the city level and employs exploratory statistical analyses. Principal component analysis delineates two fundamental axes: the traditional left–right political spectrum and a separate spectrum of secular–religious inclination, encompassing both political and cultural dimensions. Then, cluster analysis reveals three distinct groups: left-leaning and religiously inclined; center-right-leaning and religiously inclined; and those with a center-right-leaning focus and a pronounced secular orientation. The outcomes provide valuable insights into the political and cultural axes within political society, offering a clearer understanding of the most recent ideological and political climate in Turkey.

Can desires be irrational? This paper focuses on the possibility that desires might be irrational because they fail to cohere with other mental states of the person in question. Recent literature on structural irrationality has largely neglected structural requirements on desire, and this paper begins to rectify that neglect. This paper endorses various rational requirements on desire, but primarily focuses on the instrumental requirement to desire the means to our ends. It explains how this requirement should be understood, and defends it from numerous objections, such as the worry that there are no real instrumental desires but only combinations of ultimate desires and beliefs, and the worry that it would require us to desire even very foolish means to our ends.

The global diffusion of state power has led to a decline in global governance; that is, in the attempt to build authoritative rules and institutions that represent the common goals of the international community. The rise of China and other powers has increased the heterogeneity of the international system, and the erstwhile hegemon has turned against the international order. The major powers today have vastly different domestic characteristics and pursue strongly divergent interests. This has gridlocked and marginalized multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization and seen a worrying disregard for international law. In response, the institutional ecosystem of global governance is adapting by lowering its scope, weakening its commitments, and splintering into partly competing institutional orders. Adaptation and decline are not mutually exclusive: Today, we can witness the adaptation of global governance to its own decline. Theoretically, this points to the enduring relevance of hegemonic stability theory for global governance. The result is a reduced normative ambition for global governance, signaling a retreat from the grand internationalist vision of organized cooperation among all the members of the international community.

The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma offers an ambitious and sweeping account of the global history of sugar. Readers interested in sugar’s role in shaping economies, environments, and societies will find it a captivating synthesis of its past and present trajectories. In this commentary, I engage critically with the book, focusing on the areas most closely aligned with my own research on the Brazilian sugar industry. I highlight key points related to labour, race, and resistance in order to broaden the debate on the sugar frontier.