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The Campaign for the Abolition of Torture launched by Amnesty International in 1972 represents a key moment to understand the rise of human rights activism in the 1970s. This campaign not only contributed to promote Amnesty International as a popular and influential non-governmental organisation, but also set the modus operandi of this sort of activism: on-field missions, reports, emotional campaigns and lobbying on governments and international organisations.

The authorities of the Belgian Congo imposed a series of compulsory workloads to the local communities under the argument that these tasks contributed to the ‘education’ of the native populations, which they called ‘Travaux d’ordre e´ducatif’ (TOE). Such workloads represented the main legal form of forced labour which existed in the Belgian Congo from their creation in 1933 until independence in 1960. Unlike what happened in most colonial empires, these workloads were not abolished after the Second World War.

Settlement patterns have been one of the central products of Stone Age archaeological research. Because of long time spans and very scarce information, scientific explanations of the patterns are usually limited to just defining the areas of the phenomena of interest. Any further deductions about past communities tend to be without additional proof and thus presented as hypotheses in scientific literature.

The connection between settlement sites and water bodies has been the most prominent characteristic of the Stone Age settlement patterns in North-Eastern Europe. Geologist and archaeologist Constantin Grewingk stated already in 1865 that in the Eastern Baltic region “Stone Age people lived by the sea and rivers”. Although there was no empirical data at that time, the following discoveries confirmed this claim.

On July 10-14, 2018, the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) held its Second World Conference in Vienna and Budapest. The meeting was attended by around 450 participants from 54 countries, including renowned experts and practitioners, spanning all fields of the humanities and the social sciences. The ABS is the world’s largest academic organization dedicated to the systematic study and exchange of ideas, information and analysis of international border, and the processes and communities engendered by such borders.