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Common conceptions of user production overstate its novelty while understating its variety. To respond to these lacks, this article develops an analytic map that enables a more nuanced historical and critical understanding and investigation of user production. Historical approaches are well suited for capturing the multifarious forms of user production while also avoiding the problem of a-historicism. The article develops a contextual typology of user production by theorizing it as a cultural form. Primary forms discussed include those of buyer; source, subject, interviewee; contestant; supplier; financier; inventor; activist; and member, all of which are related to their generative formations and conditions. The article concludes by suggesting the kinds of questions and studies that such a framework makes possible.

The social context of Hobbes's political thought is ripe for reassessment in light of advances in the social history of seventeenth-century England in the past half-century. The evidence does not support C. B. Macpherson's claim that England had a "possessive market society" which became the social model for Hobbes's political theory, nor the case that Hobbes was a bourgeois ideologist. A new examination of his social theory, his social identity, his social prejudices and his understanding of what we today call social class instead produces a picture of an intellectual of the "middle sort" with strong aristocratic, pro-court sentiments. A clearer understanding of his social views would probably have prevented the current controversy over his political sentiments or channeled it in a different direction. The issues make a strong case for more social contextualization at the macro level of analysis in intellectual history.

I argue from The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan that Hobbes constructed his state of nature drawing on an eclectic range of ideas – from Plato, Thucydides, Pyrrhonism and Chillingworth, and even Descartes. Sometimes he adapted themes and ideas from his reading and sometimes he reacted against them. His early humanist studies and work on Thucydides and Aristotle provided an important foundation. His account of primitive history was based on the ancient theory of historical progress, which he thought was validated by native Americans. The traditional view of the anarchy of civil war was a ready companion to this theory. He developed a theory of moral relativity based on Pyrrhonism, the Protestant exaltation of the individual conscience, and a radical theory of subjective natural right that seems to owe much to Fernando Vázquez. His novel theory of natural equality rejects the traditional juridical and theological idea for one that capitalizes on contemporary fear of social equality. Finally, his theory of the passions that produce the war of all against all are almost certainly drawn from Thucydides.

The multiple parallel humanitarian crises of 2011-12 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have challenged the traditional humanitarian system because of constraints of access, adaptation and funding. At the same time, non-traditional actors have had a great impact in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen by being close in space and time. They have filled a gap by acting earlier than the international community and having better links into the local community and to informal governance structures. The same is true in Somalia. Adapted from the source document.