Les pays ayant une structure politique fédérale sont souvent confrontés aux revendications de leurs États membres pour obtenir plus d'autonomie politique. Pour répondre à ces revendications, les théoriciens du fédéralisme multinational ont proposé de reconnaître un droit à l'autodétermination interne qu'ils ont pris soin d'encadrer de diverses manières. Bien qu'intéressante, cette proposition pourrait toutefois s'avérer insuffisante pour répondre aux inégalités entre les peuples au sein d'une même fédération. C'est la thèse que nous défendrons dans le présent article. Nous montrerons que le concept d'autodétermination interne défendu par Kymlicka reste indéterminé et ouvre la porte à des interprétations plus exigeantes.

This article explores the responses of the South African competition authorities to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the socio-economic rights of consumers in relation to the price gouging of essential and medical supplies. After discussing the constitutional and legislative context of socio-economic rights and excessive pricing, it examines the first case in which the competition authorities were called upon to decide on the excessive pricing of medical supplies during COVID-19. The article finds that, while the competition authorities were swift to interpret the Competition Act widely and act against suppliers charging excessive prices, there remains a gap in South Africa's legislative framework as there is no specific legislation regulating price gouging during states of pandemic or disaster. The article identifies the need for legislative development and concludes by offering recommendations for addressing future incidents of price gouging.

Goodman defends that most maligned aspect of the rhetorical tradition: eloquence. Surely, one would think that eloquence, by its very nature, speaks for itself and quite effectively so, with all the pleasing and persuasive effects of a grand style. Perhaps popular audiences are easily carried along by decorous speech, but Goodman addresses his defense to theorists of politics who tend to greet obvious rhetorical flourish with a deep suspicion of manipulation and deception, or at least of frivolity. On this view, the best thing that can be said about eloquence in its classical form is that it poses no serious threat since the modern advent of mass society and large-scale democracy marks its demise. Goodman forces readers to reconsider the story of the rhetorical tradition's elitist, manipulative, and obsolete character through an engaging, nuanced, and unexpected retelling of Ciceronean eloquence as a tradition that spans the ancient and modern world, one that survives and responds to the challenges of democratic judgment in large polities. Goodman's compelling and insightful book poses an important challenge to theorists of democracy, both contemporary and historical, to take eloquence seriously as an invitation to democratic judgment.

Given a graph G, the minimum Connected-k-Subgraph Cover problem (MinCkSC) is to find a minimum vertex subset C of G such that every connected subgraph of G on k vertices has at least one vertex in C. If furthermore the subgraph of G induced by C is connected, then the problem is denoted as MinCkSC$_{con}$. In this paper, we first present a PTAS for MinCkSC on an H-minor-free graph, where H is a graph with a constant number of vertices. Then, we design an $O((\omega+1)(2(k-1)(\omega+2))^{3\omega+3})|V|$-time FPT algorithm for MinCkSC$_{con}$ on a graph with treewidth $\omega$, based on which we further design an $O(2^{O(\sqrt{t}\log t)}|V|^{O(1)})$ time subexponential FPT algorithm for MinCkSC$_{con}$ on an H-minor-free graph, where t is an upper bound of solution size.

Past studies have demonstrated that Ruppia cirrhosa (Ruppia), which typically grows in brackish water, is far too unreliable to serve as the chronological basis for radiocarbon dating because of the hard water effect (HWE). Despite this unreliability, Ruppia seeds have been used to date footprints along the margins of paleo-Lake Otero in southern New Mexico to around 23,000–21,000 cal yr BP. In this study, we employ a modern analog approach using δ13C values and radiocarbon dates from modern Ruppia plants growing in Salt Creek to calculate a maximum limiting age range for the footprints. Those plant samples with higher δ13C values produced greater age discrepancies. This simple relationship can be used to correct for the HWE and demonstrates that the human footprints purported to have been made during the local last glacial maximum could be at least ~7500 yr younger.

On November 15, 2019, following almost a month of massive daily demonstrations across Chile, most political parties agreed to initiate an unprecedented constituent process. This process introduced institutional innovations for the Constitutional Convention elections, including gender parity, reserving 17 seats for indigenous individuals, and allowing nonparty candidates to run as independent candidates (Heiss 2021; Suárez-Cao 2021).

In his encyclopedic masterwork Li livres dou Tresor (The Books of Treasure), the mid-thirteenth-century Florentine civil servant and rhetorician Brunetto Latini proclaimed “the very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero” to be “the finest orator in the world and the master of rhetoric.”1 How might this remark by a medieval professional civic administrator (even one with pronounced Ciceronian proclivities) pertain to Goodman's book? I take as my inspiration for the ensuing comments Latini's phrase in Tresor—“The very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero”—in relation to the final word of Goodman's subtitle: “Conditions.” As I began to peruse Words on Fire, I expected to encounter discussion of “wisdom” and of related ideas such as “reason,” “natural law,” and “justice” rather often. After all, these factors constitute indispensable features of Cicero's political theory. I was thus greatly surprised to discover that Goodman mentions them only belatedly and briefly (65–66).

In recent years, many emerging actors (e.g., new social movements and parties) associate democratic problems with representative institutions. Accordingly, as a solution, they propose to introduce direct citizen participation in constitution and law making. However, three fallacies undermine the potential benefits of citizen participation: (1) attributing a moral and/or epistemic superiority to “the people”; (2) assuming that superiority, expecting to replace representation with direct participation; and (3) supposing that the legitimacy deficit will be resolved automatically by introducing inclusive direct participation. This article argues against these three ideas by providing a framework to understand participatory constitution making and briefly examining the cases of Chile and Iceland.

Many analysts have tried to discern the reasons behind the Chilean Constitutional Convention’s draft failure in the 2022 plebiscite. A significant explanation is the draft’s inclusion of indigenous rights and its plurinationality principle (Bargsted and González 2022). Despite Chile being unique in Latin America in its lack of constitutional recognition for its indigenous population (Acevedo 2021), most voters in indigenous areas appeared to have opposed the draft (Pairican 2022).1

Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution (Fishkin 2011). Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change.

A distinctive feature of 21st-century constitution making is the role assigned to citizens through various forms of direct participation, as well as special efforts to include groups underrepresented and marginalized in ordinary politics. The legitimacy of these processes increasingly requires a role for actors and groups previously excluded from crucial institutional decisions (Elster 1998; Fishkin 2011; Reuchamps and Welp 2023; Rubio-Marín 2020; Welp and Soto 2020). However, vested interests have proven challenging to overcome amid a global crisis of representation. The failed Chilean process of 2021–2022 provides valuable lessons about the triumphs and pitfalls of embracing an open approach to constitution making.

Style is easy to dismiss but crucial to understand, and Goodman's explanation of why style matters politically is one of the reasons that I, as a specialist in Roman rhetoric and political thought, appreciate his book. The absence I see in Goodman's book haunts my own work too; I have only just begun seriously applying myself to the task of rethinking and redress.

Research on public health, crime, and policing regularly discusses sex workers in Southeast Asia but rarely recognises them as agents of social and political activism. This paper shows that sex workers and their allies in Singapore and the Philippines have long and rich histories of challenging their criminalisation and stigmatisation through cultural activism, political advocacy, consciousness-raising, and the provision of direct services to fellow sex workers. Using feminist ethnography, including interviews and participant observation with Project X in Singapore and the Philippine Sex Workers Collective, this paper explores how sex work activists have strategically adapted to their political environments. In Singapore, they maintain resistance through ‘shape-shifting,’ working within state-sanctioned mechanisms, positioning themselves as public health service providers, and creating spaces for radical political advocacy. In the Philippines, where an anti-sex work position is more deeply entrenched within dominant social blocs, sex work activists aggressively criticise state policies on social media and in carefully vetted forums but remain strategically invisible to avoid exposure, harassment, misrepresentation, and prosecution. This paper looks at how sex work activists engage in claims-making — underscoring the differences in the political resonance of human rights in both countries — and interrogates how sex work activism challenges social hierarchies, especially concerning migrants and trans individuals. Overall, it contributes to a richer understanding of non-traditional forms of political activism in Southeast Asia and makes visible sex workers’ contributions to feminism and labour movements in the global south and non-Western contexts.

In the sixth chapter of his Tianzhu shiyi (天主實義, “The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven”), Matteo Ricci offers a critique of the anti-intentionalistic thread that he detects in the Chinese philosophical tradition. In this brief essay, I offer an analysis of a noteworthy archery analogy that Ricci employs to describe the nature of ethical action as an intentional process with a conscious aim. I trace how Ricci skilfully combines Western and Chinese images and categories to craft this simile. Before that, I set the stage by offering some preliminary comments that contextualize Ricci's interest in the question of intentional vs. non-intentional conduct.