This paper studies the relationship between military conflicts and state-building in pre-imperial China. I develop an incomplete contract model to examine rulers’ and local administrators’ incentives in conflict. Defensive wars drive decentralization: landowning local administrators have more to gain from a successful defense and are therefore more committed to it. Offensive wars drive centralization: the landowning ruler has personnel control over the non-land-owning local administrator and can therefore force the latter to participate in less lucrative attacks. Model predictions are corroborated with empirical evidence and historical case studies, and offer broader implications for the political divergence between China and Europe.

This essay explores evangelical Christians and the public debate over gun rights in the recent past, when white evangelical activism on behalf of the Republican Party and conservative politics converged with the development of a gun culture that emphasized an individual right to bear arms. It argues that political partisanship, attitudes toward gun rights, and the embrace of gun culture have influenced white evangelical identity, revealing internal divisions and raising questions about the nature of their relationship with the secular world. It also examines white evangelicals’ distinctions between “good guys” and “bad guys,” an exercise that requires coming to terms with human sinfulness and evil. The white evangelicals analyzed here see themselves in a conflict that requires both guns and political power to defeat the evil that other people represent. Good guys include both people who protect (“sheepdogs”) and those who need protecting (“sheep”). This worldview envisions little distinction between true Christian identity and American national interests, and it views racial attacks in a colorblind vacuum that reinforces conclusions about the need for guns to defend themselves and their churches. Dissenters within the church criticize the emphasis on individual gun rights and the gun rights subculture many evangelicals inhabit and defend.

Legal Information Management Co-Editor and experienced professional journalist and author Mike Breslin offers up some personal tips on writing an article, including how to plan, how to work through it in stages and how to write copy specifically for LIM.

The Lomas Entierros archaeological site provides a case study of domestic activities in two socioeconomic sectors. Located in Central Pacific Costa Rica, it was a primary center and important node for the exchange of goods throughout the region. In this article, we characterize and compare the domestic and socioeconomic activities at two structures from different sectors of the site through the analysis of micro-remains, chemical residues (phosphates, carbonates, pH, carbohydrates, protein residues, and fatty acids), and starch grains. Our findings show that differences between the two structures were determined both by their function and the socioeconomic status of their occupants. Structure 13, in the elite sector, presents a richer dataset that suggests the cooking of plants and mollusks in the interior of the dwelling. Structure 44, in the intermediate-status sector, has a lower diversity and density of remains, suggesting very low use that may result from its role as a storage space. This article provides a nuanced methodology for the study of domestic spaces in tropical areas.

As increasing proportions of our global population age, transgender people are experiencing higher rates of dementia, and many are afraid to enter long-term care. Structural interventions such as advance directives may help mitigate fears around entering long-term care by managing specific anxieties that transgender people may have about dementia, loss of decision-making capacity, and discrimination in long-term care settings.

In the summer of 1944, Black modern dancer Pearl Primus searched for authenticity. Over the past year, she had achieved critical success for her modern dance choreography that protested racial injustice in the South, informed by a leftist political mission. However, she thought something was missing. She explained to Dance Magazine, “I had done dances about sharecroppers and lynchings without ever having been close to such things.” In search of that missing component, Primus traveled from New York City, her home since she was a toddler, to the US South. A budding anthropologist, she went to live among Southern communities as a way to retool her protest choreography and make it more authentic. Unbeknownst to them, Southern community members would be recruited by her to provide inspiration for her performances and the leftist political stance that fueled those works. In identifying authentic expressive practices of the South through her anthropological practice, transferring what she found to her choreography, and then performing that repertoire on New York stages, she would further develop her ability to instill in Northern audiences the necessity of leftist activism.

The resurgence of industrial policy is reshaping the global political economy and creating emergent formations that could help create green states. Such green states can seed a world after growth. Growth is often taken for granted as a natural purpose of states and an appropriate basis of public policy. However, it has a recent political-economic and cosmological history. This suggests that an age after growth is not only possible but likely. In the current conjuncture of crises and challenges, industrial strategies that bring together environmental, social justice, and pro-growth coalitions offer the best chance to meet climate goals and improve the prospects for inclusive prosperity globally. In addition, there is evidence that industrial policy is providing a platform to build active states, rebalance state–business relations, forge new systems of calculation, and gather cosmological resources for new action.

This article examines eleven communities of non-cloistered religious women in fifteenth-century Rome. These women, known as bizzoche, created a shared identity through their choice of clothing, which did not conform with their elite status, and their acts of piety, such as Eucharistic adoration and service to the poor. Such practices share similarities with the beguines in northern Europe, beatas in Spain and the Americas, and others, pointing to a broader women’s religious movement that transcended geographic space. However, scholarship often examines such communities of non-cloistered religious women in isolation, obscuring such connections. This article seeks to illuminate some of these commonalities and argues that late medieval, non-cloistered religious women across Europe used habit and pious practices to form a shared identity and navigate the gender- and class-based restrictions on publicly practicing their religion.