The widespread use of artificial intelligence technologies in border management throughout the European Union has significant human rights implications that extend beyond the commonly examined issues of privacy, non-discrimination and data protection. This article explores these overlooked impacts through three critical frameworks: the erosion of freedom of thought, the disempowerment of individuals and the politicization of human dignity. In uncovering these dynamics, the article argues for a broader conception of human rights to prevent their gradual erosion and safeguard the core principle of protecting human dignity.

Rugged terrain is a landscape characteristic that has complex and often contradictory impacts on the size, geographic distribution, and economic vitality of locations. The USDA ERS’s Area and Road Ruggedness Scales provide two different types of information on the relative topographic variation of 2010 census tracts. These data characterize both the overall landscape and land where people travel. However, researchers frequently conduct analyses at larger geographic scales, such as counties. In this paper, we describe how the Area and Road Ruggedness Scales data were created and suggest several methods of aggregating the data to the county level. We use correlations and regressions of natural amenities on net migration to compare the suitability of our suggested county-level area ruggedness measures to the topography measure from the Natural Amenities Scale. We find that, despite data loss due to aggregation, county-level area ruggedness measures can serve as reasonable proxies for topographical amenities. However, they do not capture certain landscape features that positively influence migration.

This article draws a comparison between US border policies in the 2020s and the policies implemented by the British colonial regime in 1940s ‘Aden to dissuade Jewish immigration. It makes an original argument, based on documents from the British colonial archives and Jewish philanthropic sources, that the plunder of Jewish migrants was a consequence of British policy, and not, as scholars have sometimes assumed, a vaguely-defined “anarchy” in the Aden Protectorate sultanates (today, southern, and eastern Yemen). The history of British immigration policy – and the unofficial incorporation of both environmental and human forces into the project of dissuading Jewish migration – bears a striking resemblance to American policies in recent years. The perils of the Darién Gap and other deadly routes and the concentration of migrants in dangerous conditions on the US–Mexico border de facto incorporate the jungle, the desert, and criminal syndicates into the border regime’s efforts to disincentivize migration. A look at the archival record of a parallel story in 1940s Yemen/‘Aden allows us to glimpse the construction of policies that utilize unofficial actors and factors (from bandits to the hot desert sun) in a border regime’s campaign of terror against (potential) migrants. The article demonstrates the value of historical comparative cases for understanding the policies of governments today. Scholars of current events lack access to the intelligence reports, correspondence, and other once-classified documents available to historians, which allow for a fuller understanding of the ways in which similar policies have been developed and implemented.

Who is deemed deathworthy, and how is this status produced? What discourses, affects, and histories enable the industrialization of premature Black death while rendering it largely invisible? Rooted in a decolonial queer feminist epistemological framework, this article examines how discursive and affective strategies in U.K. print media and immigration policies during the European “refugee crisis” (2013–2016) justified routine death-making at sea. Conceptualizing Blackness as a relational political and epistemological tool, the article reveals how media and state actors—drawing on racialized mythologies of young single Black men and appeals to imperial nostalgia—constructed these men as objects of panic, disgust, resentment, and fear. Applying collocation analysis and visualization techniques, the article theorizes “affective-racialized networks”—discursive formations that circulate and accumulate affective meanings across space and time, shaping public perception and legitimizing policies of deterrence, externalization, and active abandonment. These networks sustained the routinized deaths of Black migrant men at sea, reinforcing Europe’s imperial border regimes. By foregrounding the mutual constitution of race, affect, and temporality, this study expands migration scholarship’s engagement with race, demonstrating how racial logics operate beyond geopolitical and temporal boundaries through transnational circuits of meaning, power, and governance. The article argues that centering Blackness and affect is essential to understanding how racialization functions and how Black deaths are rendered normative within global bordering practices.

In recent years, the number of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coasts has risen steadily. The arrival of small boats with migrants on board on the Spanish and Italian coasts has received a lot of media attention, and European Governments are investing more than in the past to stop unauthorized arrivals on their shores. Certain narratives from governments and officials of international organizations attribute these deaths to “smugglers” and the dangerous routes they take. However, this article provides evidence that the higher mortality rates are the result of changes in border controls following bilateral agreements between the European Union and Morocco after 2018. By analyzing data from official statistics, microdata, and data provided by NGOs up to 2024, it shows how the increase in the mortality rate of migrants in the Western Mediterranean is the result of changes in the management of sea rescues, the militarization and externalization of the border, and the way in which migrants attempting to cross the sea are taking more dangerous routes than in the past.

There are any number of arguments against the idea that it is possible to write the history of Habsburg Jews, or even to locate a common, coherent, Jewish experience in the Habsburg lands. These include the inherent disunity of the empire itself, the geographic dispersion of its Jewish population, and the multiplicity of legal jurisdictions under which Jews lived. This essay nevertheless makes the case for a Habsburg Jewish experience that surpassed differences in geography, legal jurisdiction, local culture. The Habsburg monarchy itself, in its quest for imperial expansion, administrative and legal reform, and social control, had much to do with this process. So, too, did the consolidation of an Ashkenazi rabbinic leadership that was both authoritative and distinctive to Central Europe, and the laying down of an intricate network of cross-regional family and communal ties, which themselves were partly a response to repressive state legislation. Jews in the Habsburg Empire moved about, reassembled and regrouped in ever new ways, while maintaining an overarching structure of human connection.

The right to protection from violence should be conferred upon all people regardless of their nationality. However, migrant women in Japan face exceptional risks, including that of domestic violence. This paper focuses on the vulnerability of Nepalese women, most often in Japan as dependents of their husbands, who are engaged as cooks in the ubiquitous Indo-Nepali restaurants. Shut out of the male-dominated support networks within the Nepalese community, they are forced to rely on Japanese state support in a time of crisis. Yet, despite the fact that most of these women are working and paying taxes in Japan, many are unable to effectively access the state support system, leaving them particularly at risk in times of calamity, as we are seeing now with COVID-19. This paper outlines their vulnerability and calls upon the state to recognize that these migrants are not free riders, but residents entitled to equal rights and protection under the law. At a time when we often hear about the national imperative to “Build Back Better” in the post-COVID-19 period, I hope that these vulnerable populations are included in such building.

Muslim migrants in Japan suffer from the lack of access to burial grounds when 99.9% of the nation is cremated. Muslims are usually met with opposition from the local community where cemetery construction is planned. Using ethnographic data, the study shows how Muslim associations inadvertently fail to respect the codes of Japanese rurality when seeking a cemetery in a community to which they do not have membership, leading to a conflict. This paper closes with policy prescriptions for the central government in ensuring the cultural rights of immigrant minorities in Japan.

Though not among the most famous of the Baroque’s architects and builders, the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders, who were heavily involved in the creation of a sacred landscape of churches and monasteries in the wider Lake Constance area, have attracted scholarly attention since the nineteenth century. This article attempts to recontextualize these builders by taking them out of the usual framework proposed by art historians who, not least due to a chance discovery of an important source in the mid-twentieth century, tended to interpret the remote alpine valley of the Bregenzerwald as some kind of “rustic Florence.” Instead, this article rereads these builders in the context of the more mundane social and political realities of the Bregenzerwald. It suggests that in order to better understand this fascinating group of builders and craftsmen, it may be helpful to avoid reconstructing their sociopolitical history from their artistic achievement (How were they able to accomplish this?), and instead to reverse this approach to uncover the sociopolitical structures in which they lived (Who were they before they accomplished this?).

Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for refugees hoping to reach the Western Bloc. Those transiting were mainly, but not exclusively, escapees from various countries in the Soviet bloc. A few refugee groups also settled in Yugoslavia against the backdrop of shifts in international constellations, tense relationships with neighboring countries, and transnational mobilizations. This article will first investigate the dichotomy between transit and the few instances of refugees integrating into socialist Yugoslavia. Next, it will investigate the ease of the resettlement process by exploring how the length of time spent in the country was influenced by hierarchies among different refugee groups based on ethnic origin, political allegiances, class, and which opportunities for resettlement were available to whom. Finally, it will reflect on how the changing role of temporary refuge or permanent haven that Yugoslavia ascribed to itself was constructed and challenged by the host society, potential countries of resettlement, and the refugees themselves.