In this paper, I review studies of urban integration as analyzed for two groups of mobile newcomers: those designated as “migrants”, that is, mostly marginalized cross-border movers from outside Europe, and mobile EU citizens in Western European cities. This critical and reflexive reading serves to highlight how academic knowledge production on the topic has (re-)produced an image of white urban Europe. While critics of the concept of immigrant integration have suggested that cities and neighborhoods are better sites in which to study migrant integration than the nation-state, the paper demonstrates that studies of urban integration tend to suffer from similar problems, including an ethnonationalist focus and an essentializing of (ethnic) groups. The comparison foregrounds how mobile EU citizens are implicitly thought of as white; their presence in the urban territory is rarely questioned and their practices rarely problematized. In contrast, those designated as migrants are researched with reference to integration, whereby integration means moving closer to white spaces. Thus, studies of the urban integration of migrants use an ethnic framing, while studies of mobile EU citizens focus on class and nationality. The paper thus illuminates how studies of urban integration rely on and reproduce an implicit assumption of whiteness as the norm, even in diverse urban spaces.

The year 2022 marked 30 years since Tanzania re-adopted multiparty democracy in 1992. The number of women parliamentarians has increased from 16 per cent after the multiparty elections in 1995 to 37.4 per cent after the 2020 elections. However, a significant share of women parliamentarians emanates from the special seats system, while only a small share of women hold directly elected seats. For example, in 2023, while women account for 37.4 per cent of the Parliament, only 9.8 per cent were elected from constituencies. This article studies the legal challenges facing women's access to directly elected parliamentary seats in light of 30 years of multiparty democracy in Tanzania. It finds that the legal gaps related to candidacy age, political affiliation, the applicable electoral system, governance of political parties, violence against women in political and public life, campaign financing and challenges related to the implementation of the special seats system hinder women's access to elected parliamentary seats.

Laws seeking to resolve war-related problems face a significant dilemma. While the legal establishment in a war-affected country drafts laws based on normative approaches suited to peacetime and stable settings, the civilian population pursues crises livelihoods that are markedly unsuited to compliance with or use of such laws. What emerges are socio-legal instabilities that aggravate instead of resolve wartime problems. With a socio-legal examination of Ukraine’s wartime housing Compensation Law, this article describes six sets of instabilities that compromise the utility of the law and aggravate or create additional problems: (1) the case-by-case approach, (2) administrative and institutional capacities, (3) legal vs. available evidence, (4) the timeframe for claims submission and awareness raising, (5) excluded segments of civil society and (6) prohibitions on selling properties. Approaches from international best practice that may be able to attend to these instabilities are then suggested.

Novel prediction methods should always be compared to a baseline to determine their performance. Without this frame of reference, the performance score of a model is basically meaningless. What does it mean when a model achieves an $F_1$ of 0.8 on a test set? A proper baseline is, therefore, required to evaluate the ‘goodness’ of a performance score. Comparing results with the latest state-of-the-art model is usually insightful. However, being state-of-the-art is dynamic, as newer models are continuously developed. Contrary to an advanced model, it is also possible to use a simple dummy classifier. However, the latter model could be beaten too easily, making the comparison less valuable. Furthermore, most existing baselines are stochastic and need to be computed repeatedly to get a reliable expected performance, which could be computationally expensive. We present a universal baseline method for all binary classification models, named the Dutch Draw (DD). This approach weighs simple classifiers and determines the best classifier to use as a baseline. Theoretically, we derive the DD baseline for many commonly used evaluation measures and show that in most situations it reduces to (almost) always predicting either zero or one. Summarizing, the DD baseline is general, as it is applicable to any binary classification problem; simple, as it can be quickly determined without training or parameter tuning; and informative, as insightful conclusions can be drawn from the results. The DD baseline serves two purposes. First, it is a robust and universal baseline that enables comparisons across research papers. Second, it provides a sanity check during the prediction model’s development process. When a model does not outperform the DD baseline, it is a major warning sign.

The Oirats were key supporters of the Mongol enterprise and helped to bring Chinggis Khan to power. Chinggis and his family intermarried with the royal lineage of the Oirats who were descended from Qutuqa Beki. As these marriages continued throughout Mongol history, descendants of Qutuqa Beki and Chinggis's daughter Checheyigen became key supporters of various successor khanates. In the Ilkhanate of Iran, one of their relatives, Tanggiz Küregen, and his family were intimately connected with the ruling house. The importance of Oirat military support for the Ilkhanid government was to such an extent that he and his descendants were regularly pardoned for treasonous acts. While other elite lineages such as the Juvainīs, the family of Arghun Aqa, and the Chupanids all had had great power and influence, they met violent ends at the hands of their Ilkhanid rulers. Tanggiz and his descendants however, were not only not overly punished for their acts of lèse-majesté, but in fact outlived the Ilkhanid Dynasty itself. This culminated in the government of ʿAlī Pādshāh, who ruled much of the former Ilkhanid realm through a puppet khan for a short period in 1336. This article investigates how Oirat power was both central to the Ilkhanid regime and helped cause its downfall.

This essay takes as its starting point the newly discovered first state print of the large topographical plan of the Campus Martius of ancient Rome made by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the years around 1760. There are significant differences between the first and the more common second state (which was bound into the Campus Martius volume published in 1762) and they concern the form of the circuses, six of which are included by Piranesi in his plan. This essay will investigate those changes and propose a hypothesis regarding the motivations for them by looking at the antiquarian context with which Piranesi was familiar and taking into consideration his enthusiasm for on-site examination of ancient remains. Particularly relevant are the ruins of the circus of Maxentius on the via Appia just outside the city, a site which preoccupied Piranesi at various times throughout his career in Rome. The antiquarian material examined includes earlier writings on circuses, which had a marked effect on the way that Piranesi drew his circuses in the first state of the plan and on the changes he made, clearly visible in the copper plates from which the prints were made. The circus Maximus and circus of Maxentius as described by Pirro Ligorio, Onofrio Panvinio and Raffaele Fabretti are key to the genesis and development of the Campus plan.

What is the relationship between clientelism and political participation in popular urban neighborhoods? This article addresses the question based on qualitative research in two popular neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, drawing on participant observation and interviews with residents, activists, and party brokers. Adding to a growing literature on “participatory clientelism,” we argue for greater attention to the urban context through which this unfolds. To date, research into participatory clientelism has predominantly considered specific practices—participatory innovations or contentious politics—and been limited to the survival of the urban poor and the demand for political support by party brokers. While these are crucial practices, they are not exhaustive of the relations that sustain participatory clientelism, particularly in contexts of territorialized politics. Based on the socio-spatial approach of Henri Lefebvre, influential in urban studies, we define three interconnected dimensions of participatory clientelism and identify them in the cases under study.

For microscale heterogeneous partial differential equations (PDEs), this article further develops novel theory and methodology for their macroscale mathematical/asymptotic homogenization. This article specifically encompasses the case of quasi-periodic heterogeneity with finite scale separation: no scale separation limit is required. A key innovation herein is to analyse the ensemble of all phase-shifts of the heterogeneity. Dynamical systems theory then frames the homogenization as a slow manifold of the ensemble. Depending upon any perceived scale separation within the quasi-periodic heterogeneity, the homogenization may be done in either one step or two sequential steps: the results are equivalent. The theory not only assures us of the existence and emergence of an exact homogenization at finite scale separation, it also provides a practical systematic method to construct the homogenization to any specified order. For a class of heterogeneities, we show that the macroscale homogenization is potentially valid down to lengths which are just twice that of the microscale heterogeneity! This methodology complements existing well-established results by providing a new rigorous and flexible approach to homogenization that potentially also provides correct macroscale initial and boundary conditions, treatment of forcing and control, and analysis of uncertainty.

The snake robot can be used to monitor and maintain underwater structures and environments. The motion of a snake robot is achieved by lateral undulation which is called the gait pattern of the snake robot. The parameters of a gait pattern need to be adjusted for compensating environmental uncertainties. In this work, 3D motion dynamics of a snake robot for the underwater environment is proposed with vertical motion using the buoyancy variation technique and horizontal motion using lateral undulation. “The neutral buoyant snake robot motion in hypothetical plane and added mass effect is negligible”, these previous assumptions are removed in this work. Two different control algorithms are designed for horizontal and vertical motions. The existing super twisting sliding mode control (STSMC) is used for the horizontal serpentine motion of the snake robot. The control law is designed on a reduced-ordered dynamic system based on virtual holonomic constraints. The vertical motion is achieved by controlling the mass variation using a pump. The water pumps are controlled using the event-based controller or Proportional Derivative (PD) controller. The results of the proposed control technique are verified with various external environmental disturbances and uncertainties to check the robustness of the control approach for various path following cases. Moreover, the results of STSMC scheme are compared with SMC scheme to check the effectiveness of STSMC. The practical implementation of the work is also performed using Simscape Multibody environment where the designed control algorithm is deployed on the virtual snake robot.

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and quality of pension funds. It measures growth in terms of changes in the number of participants and cash flow transfers and appreciates the quality of the funds through the set of information on past results and costs published in the official prospectuses. The results show that growth rewards the best performing funds in the long term, while annual performance and costs have no relevance. Nevertheless, other factors, such as market power and commercial pressure, appear to be more powerful. The existence of conditions of market power capable of attracting investors beyond the actual quality of pension products is undesirable as it harms future pensioners. These results have implications for the Authority, as mandatory information should be suitable to induce investors to identify the best products and direct individual choices toward the public objective of a more efficient market.

This article presents the results of AMS radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and FRUITS dietary modelling to investigate dietary variability among sixty individuals buried at Varna in the mid-fifth millennium bc. The principal pattern was the isotopic clustering of some forty-three per cent of the population, which suggests a ‘Varna core diet’, with the remainder showing a wider variety of isotopic profiles. While there is a slight trend for heightened meat and fish consumption among male individuals compared to female and undetermined individuals, the authors found no clear correlation between dietary variation and the well-attested differentiation in material culture in the graves. Three children had isotopic profile and estimated diets unmatched by any of the adults in the sample. Two scenarios, dubbed ‘regional’ and ‘local’, are presented to explain such dietary variability at Varna.

This study investigates how agents in contested occupations justify and legitimize their work. It examines Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys who prosecute immigrant removal cases on behalf of the federal government, delving into the narrative strategies that attorneys use to attain self-legitimacy within the agency. While existing literature suggests that self-legitimacy stems from either public support or an intrinsic belief in one’s deservingness of power, this study introduces a third pathway to self-legitimacy, agency entrenchment, in which government prosecutors draw on a highly internalized sense of patriotism and a duty to their organizational role, in the face of heightened public protest and changing administrative priorities. Analyzing forty in-depth interviews with ICE attorneys, this study identifies two primary approaches to agency entrenchment. The first is a bureaucratic approach, in which attorneys derive an internalized sense of duty from the existing law. The second is an enforcement approach, in which attorneys derive moral authority from what they see as their protector status. By deploying these narratives of self-legitimacy, ICE prosecutors attempt to resolve perceived conflicts between their legally mandated responsibilities and the ethical and reputational criticisms they encounter. The findings contribute to the broader understanding of the occupational dynamics between political polarization and law enforcement prosecution.

This article examines how a former Ottoman bureaucrat claimed his retirement pension in interactions with state officials in post-Ottoman Turkey, Syria–Lebanon and Cyprus in the 1920s. Born in Cyprus in 1856 and in Ottoman state service for more than three decades until 1916, Mehmed Ziya had to make renewed efforts to continue receiving his pension until he died in 1936. His troubles were largely due to the need to reconfigure enduring links to the Ottoman state amidst state succession after the First World War. I focus mainly on the diplomatic and administrative correspondence generated by Ziya's initiatives to examine how he sought to address a pressing, quotidian problem. I stress that nationality, as a pivotal category in the reconfiguration of state–subject relations in former imperial domains, played a key role in shaping how Ziya outlived his empire.