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This article advances a partially epistemic justification of democratic authority by defending what David Estlund has called the democracy/contractualism analogy: the idea that democracy can track justice due to crucial similarities between effective democratic politics and the hypothetical deliberations employed by contractualist liberals to explicate or construct correct principles of justice. According to this analogy, the collective decision making definitive of democracy is best conceived as an attempt to realise the process of intersubjective justification that (according to contractualist liberals) defines what is just; therefore, any tendency democracy might have to produce just outcomes could conceivably be attributed to the success of such an attempt. This article explains why Estlund's arguments against the analogy fail. It argues that in a society in which the modes of reasoning specified by the analogy are widely entrenched, there is a justifiable presumption that majoritarian voting will have a tendency to result in reasonable outcomes. Adapted from the source document.

US President Woodrow Wilson and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd were separated by institutional contexts, relative power positions and decades in time. However, each confronted a similar dilemma - of reconciling rhetorical idealism with policy practicalities. Building on insights from studies of the US rhetorical presidency, we offer a framework highlighting the tensions between 'outside' moral appeals which raise expectations and the 'inside' technocratic rhetoric of policy administration. We argue that norms encouraging moral appeals have come to transcend institutional differences between 'presidential' and 'prime ministerial' systems. Despite the different contexts of the Wilson-era League of Nations debate and the Rudd-era carbon tax-Kyoto controversies, we argue that pressures to 'speak in two voices' engendered credibility gaps that undermined each leader's congressional and parliamentary support. In concluding, we suggest that this analysis supports a more nuanced appreciation of the rhetorical imperatives that can impede policy efficiency - and the need to limit tendencies to either populist or intellectual partisanship. Adapted from the source document.

While China's ruling Communist Party has benefited from a reservoir of political trust engendered by more than three decades of rapid economic growth, it is confronted with rising social tensions and the prospect of instability. The number of mass incidents, which is a key measure of instability, has risen enormously, and a major source of such incidents stems from local governments taking land from farmers, often at below-market prices. This article draws upon data from two surveys to assess the political trust implications of land takings. It is found that, as expected, land takings are associated with a decline in political trust. However, the decline affects trust in local authorities only and leaves the central government largely unscathed. Nonetheless, the gap between villagers' trust in central and local authorities is not unalloyed good news for the regime and has major implications for policy implementation and governance. Adapted from the source document.

Children are expensive to raise. Ensuring that they are raised in such a way that they are able to lead a minimally decent life costs time and money, and lots of both. Who is responsible for bearing the costs of the things that children are undoubtedly owed? This is a question that has received comparatively little scrutiny from political philosophers, despite children being such a drain on public and private finances alike. To the extent that there is a debate, two main views can be identified. The Parents Pay view says that parents, responsible for the existence of the costs, must foot the bill. The Society Pays view says that a next generation is a benefit to all, and so to allow parents to foot the bill alone is the worst kind of free-riding. In this article, I introduce a third potentially liable party currently missing from the debate: children themselves. On my backward-looking view, we are entitled to ask people to contribute to the raising of children on the basis that they have benefited from being raised themselves. Adapted from the source document.

In this article I offer a response to recent debate over direct action animal advocacy and legitimate public deliberation in liberal democracies. Mathew Humphrey and Marc Stears and Stephen D'Arcy have argued that liberal democracies ought to tolerate direct action animal advocacy in the interests of promoting the right of proponents of non-mainstream views to inform public deliberation and decision making. I argue that the precise scope of Humphrey and Stears' and D'Arcy's analyses is unclear and important parts of their theory are under-described. I highlight the logical and practical implications of their claim that direct action is useful as a means of overcoming the stifling influence of conventional wisdom. I conclude by arguing that tolerance for direct action advocacy ought not to extend to controversial animal rights campaigning tactics such as making threats, using incendiary devices and damaging property. Adapted from the source document.

SUMMARY: In 2005 a several-week-long riot across multiple prison colonies in Kyrgyzstan culminated in a bloody standoff between a parliamentary delegation and the mafia syndicate known as the vory v zakone (thieves-in-law). With roots in the social upheaval of imperial Russia and gaining organizational strength and notoriety in the Soviet gulags, the vory control many aspects of prison life in Kyrgyzstan (and elsewhere in former Soviet countries), as well as the drug and weapons trades. Operating with their own legal code (the Understandings), their own justice system ( skhodki ) and their own taxation and redistribution system ( obshchak ), the vory operate very much like a parallel state in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing on legal geography and understandings of state power as performance, this article investigates the multiple sovereignties and forms of spatial power that are embodied in the blurred lines between law and criminality, state and mafia. We argue that the power of the vory rests not on their takeover of state structures – that is, not just on being thieves of the law – but on producing new spaces that make them thieves within the state's law. The vory and the state are not opposed to one another, but rather co-constitute one another through the performance of governance and the establishment of multiple legal spaces. 2005 год ознаменовался длившимися несколько недель беспорядка-ми во многих исправительных колониях Кыргызстана. Они достигли своей кульминации в кровопролитном столкновении парламентской делегации и мафиозного синдиката – воров в законе. Институт воров в законе зародился в ходе социальных катаклизмов имперского пери-ода и организационно укрепился в советском ГУЛАГе. Воры в законе контролируют многие аспекты тюремной жизни в Кыргызстане (как и в других странах бывшего СССР), а также торговлю наркотиками и оружием. Они живут по своим законам – по понятиям, имеют соб-ственную систему "правосудия" – сходки, систему сбора налогов и перераспредения доходов – общак. Таким образом, в Кыргызстане они представляют параллельную государству структуру. Настоящее иссле-дование развивает подходы юридической географии и перфомативную трактовку государства. В нем рассматриваются множественные формы суверенитета и пространственной власти, возникающие благодаря нечеткости разделения между законом и криминальностью, государством и мафией. Авторы показывают, что власть воров в законе основывается не на захвате государственных структур, т.е. не на воровстве закона, а на производстве новых социальных пространств, превращающих их в воров внутри государственного закона. Воры и государство не противо-поставлены друг другу, но, скорее, взаимно конституируют друг друга посредством перформативного управления и создания множественных пространств легальности.

Chapter 8 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled "The Dilemma of Stability and Progress: Empire and Reforms in the Nineteenth Century." By the end of the eighteenth century the Russian Empire had incorporated almost the entire loosely defined region of Northern Eurasia with its overlapping and contesting local cultures, social hierarchies, and regimes of difference. From then on, the stability of the imperial regime became conditioned by its ability to accommodate and rationalize spontaneous self-organization processes of the societies and cultures that it had incorporated. This predetermined the systematically reformist and modernizing character of the Russian Empire, regardless of the reactionary political views of some of its rulers: only constant customization of the social and political order sustained the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of various social elites. Part 1 of the chapter, "Modern Empire in Search of Nation," focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century and the efforts of the imperial rulers (both Alexander I and Nicholas I) to accommodate the emerging phenomenon of modern nation, in its various renderings, toward the needs of the reforming empire. Traditionally viewed as an "empire-killer," nationalism was used purposefully from the very beginning in an attempt to design a future imperial regime – one that was more dynamic and competitive.

The article reconstructs spatial thinking about Belarus as a national territory in the early twentieth century. Different approaches to national mental mapping, suggesting and revising boundaries with analogous national territories of other national groups (first of all, Poles and Lithuanians), were developed within the rising nationalist movement. The author reconstructs the most influential discursive practices of Belarusian nationalism by looking into political documents as well as the few national Belarusian periodicals existing at the time, belles lettres, and educational materials. Targeting the broad Belarusian public (first of all, peasantry), these literatures collectively pursued the goal of their nationalization. Intertextual analysis allows the author to discuss the rival projects of the territorialization of Belarus (including the supranational idea of restoring the ancient Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a commonwealth of Belarusians, Lithuanians, and other nationalities); various criteria of identifying belonging to a nation, with language becoming the primary factor; and the political implications of different versions of the Belarusianization of territory.

SUMMARY:
The article traces the process of transformation of the idea of Lithuania in the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Grand Duchy had all but disappeared within the Polish kingdom in the eighteenth century, and the partition of Poland seemed to be delivering the final blow to the medieval and early modern concept of Lithuania. Incorporated into the Russian Empire, the lands of the Grand Duchy were redistributed among new provinces in such a way that administrative borders would not coincide with historical ones. Later on, the very mention of Lithuania was prohibited in the names of provinces and titles of periodicals. And yet, precisely during this period, when even the cultural elite of the region was exclusively Polish-speaking, a radical transformation of mental mapping took place. The archaic concept of a historical region inhabited by a multiconfessional and multicultural population, "Lithuania" was reinvented as a national territory of the Lithuanian ethnic nation. This transformation proceeded over several stages, and was influenced by the rise of a Herderian linguistic understanding of the nation, a Romantic obsession with nativism, and the development of population statistics. Russian imperial anti-Polish policies helped the process of differentiation of the Lithuanian cultural elite from the former common Polish public sphere. Parallel to this, the Lithuanian lower classes were differentiated from the local Slavic population, and for the first time was imagined as belonging to the same horizontal community of solidarity as the elite – the community of culturally, historically, and territorially defined Lithuanians. The scene was set for the rise of a modern Lithuanian nationalist movement.

SUMMARY: The article reviews some of the empirical and terminological problems associated with examining the autonomous military formations active in the current war in Ukraine. The article suggests that an understanding of a historical example of such independent bands – otamanshchyna during the Russian Civil War, 1917–1922 – might offer a means of studying the current participants in the war in the Donbas. This approach shows how military men actively engage in the construction of identities to make sense of their activity. It also reveals that the current commanders have often drawn on a set of invented traditions similar to their Civil War counterparts – above all related to the early modern Cossacks. Статья посвящена обсуждению некоторых сюжетов и терминологических проблем, связанных с феноменом независимых вооруженных формирований в современной российско-украинской войне. Для лучшего понимания того, что движет участниками войны на Донбассе, автор предлагает обратиться к историческому прецеденту подобных самостоятельных банд – "отаманщине" периода гражданской войны 1917−1922 гг. Этот подход позволяет увидеть, как взявшие в руки оружие люди начинают конструировать собственную идентичность, пытаясь разобраться в смысле своих поступков. Статья также показывает, что современные полевые командиры часто опираются на "изобретенные традиции", подобно своим предшественникам времен гражданской войны – прежде всего, выбирая себе в пример историческое казачество раннего Нового времени.

This is the Russian translation of the second chapter of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage. The book's main focus is a critique of the shortage of long-term thinking that, according to the authors, characterizes the social imagination of our time and the dominant mode of history writing. They propose a return to longue durée history as a tool of social analysis directed toward the future. In a crisis of short-termism, Guldi and Armitage claim, our world needs somewhere to turn for information about the relationship between past and future. History – as a discipline and a subject matter – is an ideal candidate for the job, just the arbiter we need at this critical time. In Chapter 3 the authors argue that from ca. 1970 to 2000, long-term thinking about the past and the future proliferated largely outside the discipline of history, notably around questions of climate change, international governance, and inequality. They show how recent historical studies have productively engaged these topics, thus verifying some assumptions and providing a firmer foundation for more nuanced conclusions.