This article offers a fresh interpretation of the ancient Roman relief at Palazzo Sacchetti, identifying it as a depiction of the senatorial delegation meeting Septimius Severus at Interamna in AD 193. Through iconographic analysis, it argues that the relief embodies the Senate’s expectations for Severus’ rule, grounding his image in the principle of Iustitia and portraying him as a model of moderation and fairness. Ultimately, it reveals how the relief uses a ‘historical’ depiction of a real event as a lens to examine the negotiation of power dynamics between the emperor and the Senate at the outset of Septimius Severus’ reign.

This response to Robert Gerwarth and Gwendal Piégais’s special issue on humanitarianism and civil wars in Europe has three parts. First, it aims to situate the authors’ findings in the broader context of what might be termed the ‘dialectic of humanitarianism’ – namely the reciprocal tendency of the violence of war, and notably civil war, and the mobilisation of humanitarian aid for its victims, to reinforce each other. Second, it considers in more detail some of the implications of the findings of all of the authors on the specific challenges posed by civil wars for ‘humanitarianism’ and for the ways in which we might write the history of the latter in the future. Finally, it reflects briefly on one key aspect of that history, namely the politicisation of humanitarian aid.

Twin highlights from the 2025 summer meeting of the International Society for Human Ethology are reviewed. The value of observing twins in naturalistic and semi-naturalistic settings is revealed. Research reports involving twins with Feingold syndrome, twins with language delays, breastfeeding of twins, and twins with Olmsted syndrome are reviewed. The final section of this article covers timely and informative news of twins in the media. Topics include the loss of young Texas twins in the devasting July 4th flood, a sensational — and singular — musical twin performer, conjoined twin deliveries in Myanmar and India, and two pairs of twins headed to major league baseball teams.

In this paper, we investigate a class of McKean–Vlasov stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with Lévy-type perturbations. We first establish the existence and uniqueness theorem for the solutions of the McKean–Vlasov SDEs by utilizing an Eulerlike approximation. Then, under suitable conditions, we demonstrate that the solutions of the McKean–Vlasov SDEs can be approximated by the solutions of the associated averaged McKean–Vlasov SDEs in the sense of mean square convergence. In contrast to existing work, a novel feature of this study is the use of a much weaker condition, locally Lipschitz continuity in the state variables, allowing for possibly superlinearly growing drift, while maintaining linearly growing diffusion and jump coefficients. Therefore, our results apply to a broader class of McKean–Vlasov SDEs.

We adapt the abstract concepts of abelianness and centrality of universal algebra to the context of inverse semigroups. We characterize abelian and central congruences in terms of the corresponding congruence pairs. We relate centrality to conjugation in inverse semigroups. Subsequently, we prove that solvable and nilpotent inverse semigroups are groups.

In this work, we study rates of mixing for small independent and identically distributed random perturbations of contracting Lorenz maps sufficiently close to a Rovella parameter. By using a random Young tower construction, we prove that this random system has exponential decay of correlations.

The co-creation of new knowledge by combining traditional ecological knowledge and citizen science can empower communities to cope with impending and irreversible changes. However, scholar-activists walk a fine line between driving communities into fields that they are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with, and sharing their wealth of knowledge. This paper uses an autoethnographic approach to reflect on my experience as a researcher deeply involved in community organising in a rural fishing village in southwest Johor, Malaysia, and the tightrope I walked to provide locals with access to resources, networks, and materials, and to amplify their work through myriad media. My accidental scholar-activism is the outcome of 17 years immersed in this community, initially as an environmental education facilitator, then as the community found its voice, as a supporter of efforts to participate in and benefit from the development encroaching onto its neighbourhood and natural habitats. While the villagers simply wanted to safeguard nature-based livelihoods despite increasing habitat destruction and climate change impacts, my work in the background effectively empowered them to overcome restrictive power structures and improve social justice. This was an unplanned social movement that took on a life of its own, analysed through engaged and participative ethnography. While the community made headway in effective and impactful change, the journey demonstrated some failures in youth engagement, but unexpected success with the fishermen. Throughout it all, I questioned the wisdom of my providing people with a near-impossible vision of surmounting entrenched power structures, and the contravention of conservative cultural and gender norms.

The informal exit of the United States from the WTO under Trump is the culmination of US frustration with the organization's legislative and judicial rigidity, a frustration that has been building on a bipartisan basis for two decades. The WTO's commitment to a single undertaking, its reliance on consensus-based decision making, and an activist Appellate Body that imposed de facto stare decisis eroded political support for WTO rules in the United States and opened the door for political opportunists to cast them aside. We argue that the original GATT was, on balance, a more flexible and politically savvy bargain despite its imperfections. The 30-year history of the WTO that replaced it suggests the folly of trying to rein in powerful countries with a ‘rules-based’ institution, at least when the rules are unable to adjust to political shocks.

In Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle offers a Sartrean account of prereflective self-awareness to explain the essential link between self-consciousness and rationality, moving away from standard Kantian interpretations that he claims presuppose rather than explain this connection. I argue that Boyle’s account provides useful tools for re-interpreting Kant’s claim that the “I think” must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. I also aim to show that Boyle’s model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant’s account (construed as a kind of prereflective consciousness) has the resources to address this challenge.

This article analyzes the interplay between medicine and politics in East Germany. It analyzes the meetings of the Politburo medical commissions (1958–60) to frame and define the habitus of a generation, the “Tenners” (born 1910–20), which included most of the experts in the Politburo meetings. This generation consisted of politically committed doctors who were also influential medical scholars, many with international reputations. The Politburo meetings revealed major quarrels between these experts and the Party. The communiqué (1960) issued by the Politburo showed a partial victory for the experts, because the Party acknowledged many of their claims, proving that “totalitarian” interpretations do not hold. However, this was not a victory of medicine over politics. The experts formulated their claims by combining medical and political arguments and defended the jurisdiction of their medical expertise over the Party, precisely because they believed it could more decisively contribute to achieving the goals of socialism.

Despite extensive literature on political participation, little is known about the role of motivational psychology. This study examines whether Locus of Hope (LoH), a personality characteristic that captures individual differences in strategies for goal attainment, is a predictor of political engagement. LoH theory considers both individual variations on self-assessed efficacy for goal attainment (high versus low efficacy) and whether efficacy is characterized by an internal (self-actualized) or external (inter-reliant) sense of agency. Using a novel measure of political goals, we examine the relationship between LoH and political engagement with a demographically representative sample of 784 Canadians. LoH and goal attainment were found to predict political engagement over and above measures of political efficacy and interest. The findings open new avenues of research that can help us better understand why and how some people engage in politics.

The founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often interpreted as a top-down transmission of Bolshevik ideology. This article challenges that view by asking: how did individuals with divergent ideological backgrounds – anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks – coalesce into a centralized political organization? Rather than emphasizing ideological convergence, it foregrounds the role of interpersonal networks and organizational capacity in early party-building. Focusing on the activist network around the Zhejiang Provincial First Normal School in Hangzhou (Hangzhou First Normal School, HFNS), the article reveals how provincial actors with prior organizing experience helped translate competing doctrines into coordinated revolutionary practice. HFNS-affiliated figures brought anarchist-socialist traditions to Shanghai, played key roles in the Weekly Review editorial board, and built ties with both Chinese and Russian Marxists. Drawing on archival materials from police records, newspapers, and personal writings, the article reconstructs HFNS’s cross-regional impact and strategic contributions to the early CCP organization. It argues that the CCP’s foundation was less a product of ideological clarity than of social trust and regional mobilization. By centering the HFNS network, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to provincialize CCP origins and foreground the hybrid, contested nature of revolutionary subjectivity in modern China.

We consider the random series–parallel graph introduced by Hambly and Jordan (2004 Adv. Appl. Probab. 36, 824–838), which is a hierarchical graph with a parameter $p\in [0, \, 1]$. The graph is built recursively: at each step, every edge in the graph is either replaced with probability p by a series of two edges, or with probability $1-p$ by two parallel edges, and the replacements are independent of each other and of everything up to then. At the nth step of the recursive procedure, the distance between the extremal points on the graph is denoted by $D_n (p)$. It is known that $D_n(p)$ possesses a phase transition at $p=p_c \;:\!=\;\frac{1}{2}$; more precisely, $\frac{1}{n}\log {{\mathbb{E}}}[D_n(p)] \to \alpha(p)$ when $n \to \infty$, with $\alpha(p) >0$ for $p>p_c$ and $\alpha(p)=0$ for $p\le p_c$. We study the exponent $\alpha(p)$ in the slightly supercritical regime $p=p_c+\varepsilon$. Our main result says that as $\varepsilon\to 0^+$, $\alpha(p_c+\varepsilon)$ behaves like $\sqrt{\zeta(2) \, \varepsilon}$, where $\zeta(2) \;:\!=\; \frac{\pi^2}{6}$.

The thought that intellectual arrogance consists in, roughly, overconfident resilience in one’s beliefs has been influential in philosophy and psychology. This thought is in the background of much of the philosophical literature on disagreement as well as some leading psychological scales of intellectual humility. It is not true, however. This paper highlights cases (of “stubborn fools” and the “arrogantly open-minded”) that cause trouble for equating intellectual arrogance with overconfident belief resilience. These cases are much better accommodated if we see intellectual arrogance as, instead, a form of vicious intellectual distraction by the ego.

Over the last 15 years, scholars, universities, and foundations have promoted numerous efforts to link the scholarly and policy communities of international relations. Increasing evidence suggests that scholars are succeeding in getting their ideas and findings in the press, and their success bodes well for their ability to influence public and elite opinion. Despite these strides, we know little about when journalists may pick up on academic ideas and evidence or how they will report it in their stories. We seek to fill this gap. To explore the role of media as a conduit for academic knowledge, we surveyed more than 1,000 foreign policy journalists about their views on IR experts and expertise. We asked when, how, and how often respondents seek out IR scholars and scholarship in the course of their reporting. We also asked about the barriers to consuming peer-reviewed, scholarly research, if and how journalists interact with IR scholars on social media, and how IR scholars’ influence compares to that of scholars in other disciplines. Finally, we asked whether respondents cover a story differently if there is consensus among experts than if there is little agreement. In addition to providing empirical answers to these questions, we used our first-of-its-kind survey of foreign policy journalists to test several arguments from literature on the media and experts, including that journalists rely heavily on experts and expertise in developing and writing their stories, they rely more heavily on social science experts than other specialists, and they tend to inaccurately portray the level of consensus among the relevant experts. Our findings largely support these claims. First, foreign policy journalists often seek out IR experts and expertise for use in their stories, suggesting that the media acts as an important conveyor belt for academic knowledge. These journalists use academic expertise at several key stages, especially when researching background information. Second, foreign policy journalists, like journalists more generally, favor social science experts and expertise over experts from other disciplines. Finally, foreign policy journalists are no different than journalists overall in their tendency to create “false balance;” they underrepresent the degree of consensus among experts and oversample dissenters when scholars overwhelmingly favor a particular policy or interpretation of events.

This article investigates whether campaign contributions and lobbying are complementary, substitutive, or distinct forms of organizational political engagement. Our study reveals minimal overlap between organizations that engage in lobbying and those that make campaign contributions despite the perception that these activities are interchangeable forms of “money in politics.” Using comprehensive contribution and lobbying report data from 1998 to 2018, we find that most politically active organizations focus exclusively on either lobbying or making campaign contributions. Only a small percentage of organizations engage in both activities. This finding challenges the assumption that these forms of political activity are inherently linked. The majority of organizations engaged in political activity do so exclusively through lobbying. However, the top lobbying groups spend the most money and almost always have affiliated political action committees (PACs). Most lobbying money is spent by a small number of big spenders—organizations that also have affiliated PACs. Organizations that both lobby and make campaign contributions tend to be well resourced and rare.