Histories

This study critically examines the structure, mechanisms, and enduring relevance of character education embedded in the indigenous knowledge systems of the Greater Horn of Africa. Pre-colonial African societies upheld sophisticated educational frameworks that emphasized holistic moral formation and communal character development, values that continue to influence rural communities today. Drawing on an integrative literature review, the paper identifies preparationism, functionalism, and communalism as core philosophical foundations shaping these systems. Moral and civic values were cultivated through informal, lifelong learning, guided by the collaborative roles of the home and community in fostering respect, responsibility, and social cohesion. Central pedagogical instruments included initiation rites, which provided structured moral instruction, and oral literature, which transmitted ethical reasoning and cultural wisdom. The findings underscore the continued relevance of indigenous character education in addressing contemporary societal challenges and advocate for Decolonizing the Mind as a pathway to revitalizing these traditions. The study concludes that reformed rites of passage, when purged of harmful elements, preserve cultural identity and strengthen communal ethics, offering a sustainable model for moral and civic education in modern Horn of African contexts.

This paper introduces an AI-assisted human-centered and minimalist software stack and data model to structure and store early modern serial sources related to early-modern Catholic Church administration. The Vatican Archive preserves vast quantities of documents recording its administrative history. To date, the sheer volume and technical character of these Latin manuscripts have made systematic study appear nearly impossible. The multinational project GRACEFUL17 unfolds seventeenth-century Church governance on a large scale with the help of AI. It leverages simple but efficient NLP (NER, span categorizer, fuzzy searches) and classifier (gradient boost) techniques that run fast, reliably, and reproducibly to allow for multi-user offline work environments, as well as quick but controlled data modelling in a knowledge graph. By documenting this workflow, the paper enhances replicability and provides a rationale for specific design decisions beyond technical documentation. This paper advocates the use of “weak AI” on several grounds. Functionally, non-LLM pipelines offer stricter controllability and avoid many of the semantic biases introduced by large language models. They also require fewer training overheads and run locally with ease. Methodologically, the combination of simple AI models and symbolic reasoning underscores the indispensable role of human expertise: only experts can provide the ground truth necessary for models to reproduce and formalize complex semantic concepts and phenomena, rather than outsourcing this interpretive work to foundation models.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Ottoman–Iranian relations entered a new diplomatic phase shaped by Russia’s expansion in the Caucasus and Britain’s growing influence in the Persian Gulf. This shared perception of external threats led to the establishment of a more structured and representative diplomatic framework between the two empires. This study examines the embassy of Yâsincizâde Abdülvehhâb Efendi, who was appointed as Ottoman ambassador to Iran between 1810 and 1813, in the context of a shifting diplomatic mindset. Yâsincizâde’s mission is analyzed not merely as a temporary diplomatic engagement, but as a form of ideological, sectarian, and cultural representation by a figure from the ulema class. Based on archival sources, the study reveals that his diplomatic reports and observations provided critical input to the central administration, contributing to the development of more institutionalized and long-term strategies in Ottoman policy toward Iran. By focusing on the transitional character of his embassy, the paper reassesses the evolving role of religious scholars in Ottoman foreign relations and situates this case between the classical sefaretnâme tradition and emerging modern diplomatic practices.