While the UN secretary-general maintains in the 2023 New Agenda for Peace that the impartiality of the United Nations is its strongest asset, the UN is increasingly becoming partial on the ground. The trend that started with the inclusion of the Force Intervention Brigade in the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013 is accelerating and taking on new forms. The UN has been supporting the African Union Mission in Somalia and providing logistical support to the Group of Five for the Sahel Joint Force in Mali. In December 2023, the UN Security Council agreed on a resolution that should enable the predictability and sustainability of assessed contributions to African-led counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, on certain conditions. The normative consequences of increased support to African-led interventions are significant and little explored. The UN system, including humanitarian and human rights components, will no longer be able to claim impartiality in countries where the UN is financing African-led interventions that are propping up fledgling regimes against opposition and terrorist groups. This essay will unpack and examine these developments and their consequences for UN peacekeeping and the larger UN system.

This article aims to explain the protean nature of the concept of “legitimacy,” arguing that its variability largely stems from denoting a quality of institutions that is both internally complex and sensitive to variations in institutional context. While this institutional-context sensitivity often leads to confusion and miscommunication, it is also what centers the concept’s meaning and use. To better understand legitimacy’s different forms of institutional-context sensitivity, and how they are interconnected, the article shifts from analysis and comparisons of concepts and theories of legitimacy to analysis and comparison of specific legitimacy arguments regarding specific institutions. It introduces a structured framework for analyzing legitimacy claims, beginning with the identification of the institutional level that the argument is directed at. This approach highlights how legitimacy assessments vary across higher and lower institutional levels—a crucial aspect of institutional-context sensitivity that has been underexplored in recent institutional legitimacy literature. The framework, comprising four steps of analysis and two supporting figures, advances our understanding of the complex nature of institutions’ legitimacy and underscores the importance of distinguishing between the legitimacy of an institution and the legitimacy within an institution. Throughout, the article illustrates the framework with examples drawn from scholarly debates on the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court.

This article makes use of nearly 25,000 observations representing over 95,000 paid workdays across over 300 years to investigate individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. This sample is comprised of workers in the construction industry, and includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled building craftsmen – the industry that is often used to estimate comparative real wages through early modern Europe. Data come predominantly from Scania, the southernmost region in modern day Sweden, and especially from Malmö, the largest town in the region.

Findings indicate that workers probably do not engage in paid labour on a purely labour-supply-based schedule, but are strongly impacted by the demand for construction labour, which was highly seasonal and impacted by local labour institutions. Seasonality was stronger further back in the past, indicating that finding long-term work may have been more difficult in earlier periods. A typical work year could probably not have been longer than 150 days, and would be made up of shorter work spells at several different sites. This is not enough work to meet standard assumptions of 250 days, or enough work for an unskilled man to support his family at a respectable level. Individual workers rarely worked more than a handful of days in a year on a construction site, even when labour demand was high, indicating that they did not maximize their income from waged labour.

The article explores the evolution of household income in India before the late nineteenth century. At a time when criticism of estimates of global real wages challenges the assumptions arising from the Great Divergence Debate, we aim to provide alternative ways of contributing to the discussion. By looking at individual and household income, as well as consumption levels in different parts of India, we found that members of the household other than the head (namely women) supplied a larger part of its total income than an analysis of wage differentials would suggest. Moreover, we argue that India, in the centuries under review, had a functioning labour market, despite several impediments. This adds to the value of our data as building blocks to reconstruct real wages and, consequently, to better understand welfare levels. Nevertheless, the decline in the Indian skill premium suggests that channels of social mobility decreased over time. The implications of all these findings for the Great Divergence Debate depend on the extent to which our approach also has consequences for our view on household income in other parts of Eurasia. Certainly, they call for a nuanced approach to Indian economic development during the period.

United Nations peacekeeping is experiencing a generational shift as several large missions downsize and close. Amid this change, this essay considers the future of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) mandate, which has been a priority of UN peacekeeping since it was first authorized twenty-five years ago. It argues that PoC has evolved significantly, expanding from a narrow focus on physical protection from immediate threats to a holistic approach that includes establishing a protective environment. It suggests that while the PoC mandate has proven effective in reducing violence, the future is fraught with four significant challenges: waning state commitment to UN peacekeeping, the fragmentation of global peace and security mechanisms, shifting local perceptions in a rapidly changing information landscape, and mounting disillusionment among UN personnel. This essay contends that these obstacles underscore the inherently political nature of PoC, where power dynamics and perceptions profoundly impact mission success. As peacekeeping missions scale back, PoC remains essential but increasingly precarious, demanding strategic adaptability and sustained commitment. Ultimately, the essay argues that without renewed political and institutional dedication, PoC’s effectiveness—and the UN’s credibility—will be difficult to uphold in the face of evolving conflict dynamics and geopolitical shifts.

This paper provides an account of a specific operation – the removal of the thymus gland (thymectomy) to treat the rare neurological condition myasthenia gravis – from its first performance in 1936, by the American surgeon Alfred Blalock, to the publication in 2016 of an international multicentre randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the technique. Thymectomy was the subject of a transatlantic controversy in the 1950s, in which the main players were the English surgeon Geoffrey Keynes, and American neurologists and surgeons from New York, Boston, and the Mayo Clinic. The resolution of this controversy involved the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, but also crucially other influences including the social transformation of thoracic surgery, and competition between the leading American centres. The consensus achieved after this controversy was challenged in the late 1970s, eventually prompting the implementation of a trial acceptable to twenty-first-century evidence-based medicine. This account will demonstrate that surgical innovation in the period covered required increasing attention to the statistical basis of patient selection and outcome evaluation; that the processes of technical innovation cannot be regarded as separate from developments in the professional culture of surgery, and that one of the consequences of these changes has been the gradual eclipse of the prestigious autonomous surgeon.

Travel accounts provide both benefits and challenges to survey archaeologists. This article presents a case study, generated by the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, which aims to reconstruct the medieval (tenth to fifteenth centuries ad) landscape of Vayots Dzor in the Republic of Armenia, ‘excavating’ literary accounts of its landscape. Knowledge of this region in the Middle Ages is dominated by a core text written in the thirteenth century by Bishop Step’anos Orbelyan. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the region was visited by travellers who found links between the places they visited, the inscriptions they recorded, and the events and locations attested in Orbelyan’s text. Through examples from the site list of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, the authors explore how these and other sources accumulate, creating local knowledge about places that inform archaeologists and heritage professionals. They argue for reflection on the ways that local memory, archaeology, and the physical landscape inform complex makings of place.

Since the 1978 discovery of an islet “Oodaaq Island” north of Greenland, then considered to be the northernmost island in the world, multiple islets have been reported and apparently disappeared with regular intervals in the permanent sea ice-covered area offshore the northernmost part of Greenland. In this paper, we report results of comprehensive investigations at all quoted positions of reported islets, with bathymetry measurements, as well as supplementary lidar, ice thickness and gravity measurements during a helicopter reconnaissance. The bathymetry measurements confirm the non-existence of all the reported islets, and the northernmost land in the world is thus confirmed to be the moraine island “Inuit Qeqertaat” (Kaffeklubben Island) at latitude 83°39′54″ N, 30°37′45 ″ W. All reported islet positions are found at ocean depths from 26 m to 47 m, with no indications of shallow banks or submarine rocks at the reported positions. It is therefore concluded that all reported islets or new islands since 1978 have been stranded icebergs, likely originating from marine-terminating glaciers near Cape Morris Jesup, and stranded for up to several years in the relatively shallow and nearly permanently sea ice-covered areas around Inuit Qeqertaat.

This article traces the reproduction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of domestic labor. Articulated in dialogue—and at times in tension—with Britain, what it meant to be white was forged through representations and practices of domestic service and household management, shaped by the legacies of slavery and the shifting colonial relationship. Anxieties about a declining white population and attempts to rejuvenate the island's image contributed to prescriptions of domestic labor management that positioned the white creole mistress as a model of respectability and colonial modernity. Black domestic servants were repeatedly presented as the mirror through which white creole womanhood was constructed, and this article argues that these representations served to consolidate class/color hierarchies that privileged whiteness into the twentieth century. Yet mapping these discourses onto the daily interactions between mistress and maid also exposes the persistent work required to secure racialized hierarchies. Through photographs, diaries, and correspondence read alongside published oral histories, the article argues that domestic servants persistently exercised agency that disrupted and spoke back to popular depictions, demonstrating the fraught reproduction of creole whiteness at the intersections of race, class, color, gender, and colonial identity.

This article examines the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington Police Station, Hackney, in 1983, and explores the emotional politics of the campaigns that followed his death. These campaigns were focused on both determining the circumstances of Roach's death and highlighting tensions between the police and the Black community of Hackney. Using hitherto unpublished archival sources, local newspapers, and visual sources, the article documents racial politics in Hackney in the early 1980s and examines the relationship between race and policing at that time. The article argues that the experience and expression of grief and anger were critical to understanding the political problem of race and policing in London in the 1980s, to forming and mobilizing political communities, and to interrogating the power of the state. The article also argues that a critical element of the emotional economy around race in Hackney in 1983 was the indifference and lack of empathy of the police in Stoke Newington to ethnic minority communities. This lack of empathy not only illustrated the problem of race within the police force at this time but further fueled local campaigns to make the police accountable. This links the Roach case to a later turning point—the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which characterized the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist.

This article seeks to cast a critical eye on musical modernism through the experiences of its percussionist practitioners. It charts the origins and accepted truisms of percussion ontology as it is understood through the modernist sensibility, and demonstrates how certain modernist assumptions have been inherited by many contemporary practitioners. Some of these individuals’ resulting expressions of grief, anger, and sadness in the wake of modernism's waning are presented, and a reparative reading of modernist percussion that seeks to make the repertory inhabitable and sustaining is instead offered. This practice is illustrated through a feminist and performer-led analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte (1958–60), for piano, percussion, and tape. It is ultimately argued that performer knowledge and affective attachment is essential to understanding modernism's history and aesthetics, as well as its place in the contemporary moment.

Due to the provisions of the Svalbard Treaty, Russia has kept a presence on this Norwegian archipelago – primarily based on coal mining – and has regularly made it clear that ensuring the continuation of this presence is a political goal. Since the late 2000s, Russia has attempted to revitalise its presence, stressing the need for economic efficiency and diversification away from coal. This includes tourism, fish processing and research activities. In recent years, Russia’s official rhetoric on Svalbard has sharpened, i.a. accusing Norway of breaching the treaty’s provisions on military use of the islands. The article contrasts the statements with the concrete actions undertaken by Russia to preserve and develop its presence. Russia’s policy of presence on Svalbard is not particularly well-coordinated or strategic – beyond an increasing openness to exploring new ways to sustain a sufficient presence. Financial limitations have constrained initiatives. The search for new activities and solutions is driven primarily by the need for cost-cutting and consolidating a limited presence deemed necessary for Russian security interest, not as strategies aimed at increasing Russian influence over the archipelago.

This article explores the relationship between musical aesthetics and evolving submarine imaginaries in an age of unprecedented threats to the ocean. The discussion is structured around two case studies: Björk's performance of the song ‘Oceania’ at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics, and John Luther Adams's 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean for orchestra. In these examples, culturally and historically situated visions of the ocean are modulated by compositional and sonic devices that ground oceanic imaginaries in bodily sensation. Björk and Adams cultivate an oceanic aesthetics: musical sensations that align with the phenomenology of submersion or that address the materiality and ecology of the undersea. Throughout the article the author asks what music and musicology can offer to the interdisciplinary endeavours dubbed the ‘blue humanities’. A turn to music foregrounds listening as a mode of perception and scholarly enquiry less defined by terrestrial categories. Music and sound-based art can be an intellectual resource in cases where visual terms and frameworks have a tough time accounting for the specificity of the oceanic environment.