Contemporary just war theory is increasingly remote from the grounded realities of warfare. This is problematic because it diminishes the utility of just war theory as an action-guiding framework. This article asks how just war theorists can better incorporate the lived experience of war into their analysis. The argument it develops places war writing front and center. Drawing inspiration from Martha Nussbaum’s argument that moral philosophers should use the literary works of writers such as Henry James to fill out and work through their own positions, it proposes that just war theorists should engage war memoirs in a similar manner. This argument is substantiated via a close reading of Frank Richards’s World War I memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die. By incorporating experience into their ethical frame, this article concludes, just war theorists will be better able to account for the ambiguity and messiness of combat—ambiguity and messiness that simply fall out of the frame when the ethical questions that war generates are examined from a detached perspective.

When religion and politics become entangled with each other, which one has the upper hand? Do politicians simply instrumentalize religion for their own purposes? Or does involvement with religion constrain what politicians can get away with? If it does, is that because of the content of religious doctrine? Or is it simply because religious movements, like any other coordinated movements of citizens, have political weight?

While the neoliberalisation of social democracy has been extensively studied, the embrace of neoliberal ideas and policies by Christian Democratic parties has received far less attention. This article examines the contested early stages of neoliberalisation among West German and Austrian Christian Democrats during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on two prominent advocates of neoliberalism within these parties – Franz Josef Strauß and Wolfgang Schüssel – it traces the influence of their ideas at a time when Christian Democrats were in opposition and seeking to renew their electoral appeal. Particular attention is paid to the role of the transnationalisation of Christian Democracy in facilitating the gradual diffusion and adoption of neoliberal positions. By doing so, the article sheds light on an understudied chapter in the history of Christian Democracy, one that is crucial for understanding both the transformation of Christian Democracy since the post-war era and the long-term development of centre-right parties in Europe.

Addicts, an already vulnerable population, can be made worse off by certain kinds of popular and well-intentioned research programs and beliefs about addiction, agency, and responsibility. Perspectives of backwards-facing responsibility that focus on blameworthiness and liability highlight the injustices that addicts have faced. Likewise, the disease model of addiction, pursued as an alternative to the stigmatization and moralization of the choice model, takes responsibility away from the addict. However, each of these fails to help the addict to recover or to care for herself. If anything, embracing these perspectives and models can rob addicts of agency and lead them to further suffering. Drawing on feminist philosophy, this paper shows there is good evidence for us to reconsider those models and perspectives, and instead ask what kind of understandings about addiction aid in fostering agency and recovery.

L’affaire Canada et Pays-Bas c Syrie devant la Cour internationale de Justice (CIJ) repose sur des accusations de violations systématiques de la Convention contre la torture et autres peines ou traitements cruels, inhumains ou dégradants par la Syrie. Ces violations s’inscrivent pourtant dans un contexte également marqué par des atteintes massives au droit international humanitaire (DIH), qui ne font toutefois pas l’objet de la procédure engagée devant la Cour. Cette absence soulève une question: pourquoi le DIH, cadre juridique de référence en situation de conflit armé, n’a-t-il pas également été mobilisé dans cette affaire ? Pour y répondre, l’article met d’abord en lumière le rôle que la CIJ peut jouer dans la promotion du respect du DIH, avant d’examiner les contraintes juridictionnelles qui ont empêché l’invocation de ce régime juridique dans cette affaire. Après avoir identifié ces contraintes, il analyse comment le DIH pourrait néanmoins jouer un rôle indirect dans la procédure, notamment comme outil interprétatif. L’article soutient que, même en l’absence de compétence directe de la Cour pour en connaître, un tel recours au DIH contribuerait à en promouvoir le respect. Au-delà de cette dimension interprétative, l’article s’intéresse enfin aux mécanismes complémentaires susceptibles de soutenir la mise en œuvre du DIH et la lutte contre l’impunité en Syrie. Il conclut que, bien que la procédure engagée devant la CIJ constitue une avancée importante pour la justice internationale, elle demeure insuffisante sans une mobilisation parallèle du DIH et d’autres mesures complémentaires. Pour autant, loin de représenter une occasion définitivement manquée de renforcer le respect du DIH, cette affaire devrait plutôt être envisagée comme une étape vers une approche plus globale, où l’action contentieuse intentée devant la CIJ s’articulerait avec d’autres efforts afin de garantir une justice plus large et renforcer le respect du droit international des droits humains et du DIH en Syrie.

The infection fatality risk indicates the probability of death among infected individuals. The age-dependent heterogeneity of infection fatality risk is crucial for severity assessment and prioritization of countermeasures. However, infection fatality risk estimation requires infection data from a large-scale seroepidemiological survey combined with either direct ascertainment of deaths caused by infection or excess mortality estimates. To overcome the difficulty in ascertaining death, we propose an alternative approach to estimating the age-specific infection fatality risk for SARS-CoV-2 using medicolegal death investigation data in Tokyo with systematic post-mortem polymerase chain reaction testing. We integrated (i) polymerase chain reaction positivity among all deceased individuals at the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office, (ii) age-specific all-cause mortality risks from vital statistics, and (iii) age-stratified cumulative infection risks derived from seroepidemiological surveys. Infection fatality risk was computed using Bayes’ theorem. Results showed that infection fatality risk increased steeply with age. Our estimates (0.02% for ages 0–39 years, 0.30%–0.50% for ages 40–64 years, and 3.8%–4.2% for those aged ≥65 years) were consistent with published pre-vaccination meta-analytic estimates. Systematic testing within medicolegal death investigation systems can provide rapid, age-resolved severity assessments, improving the timeliness and comparability of infection fatality risk estimation across jurisdictions.

Given a countable group A with trivial bounded cohomology for all semi-separable coefficients and any group $\Gamma$, we prove that the bounded cohomology of certain restricted verbal wreath products $\Gamma \wr^{_W} A$ vanishes in positive degrees, for all semi-separable coefficients. Examples of such verbal wreath products include the standard restricted wreath product (extending a recent result by Monod for lamplighters groups) as well as verbal wreath products arising from n-solvable, n-nilpotent and k-Burnside ($k = 2,3,4,6$) verbal products. Moreover, we prove that the stable commutator length of any verbal wreath product $\Gamma \wr^{_W} A$ vanishes. As an application, we show that every group of type $F_p$ isometrically embeds into a group of type $F_p$ with vanishing bounded cohomology in degree $n\geq 1$ for all semi-separable coefficients.

Researchers have speculated that proficiency in a language could affect the production of both referential and beat gestures. The primary purpose of the present study was to test whether bilinguals produced more referential and beat gestures than monolinguals, particularly in their second language. We also tested for possible effects of culture on gesture production by comparing speakers of both Farsi and Canadian French (on the one hand; English on the other). In the present study, Farsi–English bilinguals’ gesture production when telling a story was compared to that of French–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. We found effects of proficiency on gesture production: participants tended to use more beats in their second language than in their first. We also found effects of culture: Farsi–English bilinguals used fewer referential gestures in both languages than the other participants. We discuss these results in light of the multiple factors that contribute to gesture production.