Drawing on the case of the US Civil War, this article redefines crises of hegemony as crises of “articulation,” in which insurgent actors disrupt support for joining up the elements of the dominant social order under existing terms. The collapse of mass white consent just prior to the war entailed partisan struggle over imagined demographic futures. Breaking with the nativists of their former party, Illinois Whigs, turned Republicans, argued that the extension of slavery into Indigenous territory and northern Mexico would permit the planter class to monopolize the land, overrun it with the enslaved, and condemn white workers, many of them immigrants, to a life of endless toil in the factory. Having thus framed slavery as a demographic threat, northern Republicans held that the territorial claims of white settlers must supersede those of planters. Alabama Democrats, now Southern Rights secessionists, retained their erstwhile party’s expansionist politics but predicted that prohibiting the transport of human chattel to new territories would dam whites up with the enslaved, who, after overtaking the white population, could overthrow slavery and the white race itself. The article illuminates the role of population politics and partisan struggle in the re-organization of white supremacy and the advent of critical historical conjunctures. That white supremacy underpins even paradigmatic transitions to liberal democracy may also inform the work of mass movements, as they diagnose and challenge the ways in which supposedly democratic institutions consolidate, rather than protect against, elite power.

How does the party-state exercise leadership over universities and manage the individuals embedded in the university system without restraining their capacity for excellence and innovation? I argue that the presidential responsibility system has resolved a fundamental agency problem in Chinese universities. The system is supported by a set of mechanisms designed to enforce loyalty to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It can easily adapt to political changes and thus maintain authoritarian rule without compromising the overarching agenda of research excellence.

When base metal coinage ceased arriving in the north-western Roman Provinces c. a.d. 400, no new currency was introduced. For their everyday exchanges, people may have turned to different practices, or materials, in cases where the still-circulating coins were perhaps not fulfilling demand. This paper examines an early fifth-century burial from the coastal fort at Oudenburg, Belgium. Among the male adornment in burial A-104, the purse assemblage filled with a number of coins and fragmented base metal items stands out. Was the scrap metal used for exchanges? The discussion of the coins and metal items, including their weights, reveals their possible economic functions, as well as the potential in further analysing late Roman and early medieval purse assemblages.

The early reservation years of the late nineteenth century comprise a period of intellectual mobility and activism for Native Americans. This article argues that the thousands of letters written by western Native Americans to non-Natives during this period were a consequential weapon against U.S. colonialism. By highlighting the history of Wolf Chief, a determined Hidatsa activist, this article reveals the many strategies of Native Americans who wrote to U.S. presidents, officials, newspapers, and others to decolonize their lives, seek justice, counteract colonial abuses, and preserve a sense of self-determination. U.S. policy makers hoped that a more literate Native population would be transformed, that educated Indians might understand the virtues of Americanization, and that literacy might quell opposition to U.S authority. Instead, Native Americans used the written word in the early reservation years to challenge a massive colonial apparatus in ways that scholars have not recognized. Wolf Chief’s advocacy from the Fort Berthold Reservation was rooted in the conviction that the Three Tribes deserved a meaningful role in shaping their own futures and protecting their autonomy. His wide-ranging correspondence emphasized the importance of including Native perspectives in the management of reservation affairs, as he believed that effective solutions required the active involvement of his people.

The objective of this study was to investigate the gene-breastfeeding interaction on BMI based on the Chinese National Twin Register (CNTR). The study included 4,573 pairs of same-sex twins aged 2–18 from CNTR. Data were collected using a self-reported questionnaire, and a structural equation model was used to analyze the gene-environment interaction of breastfeeding with BMI in six age groups. Our findings indicate that as age increases, the heritability of BMI shows an increasing trend, being the lowest (h2: 0.08; 95% CI [0.00, 0.19]) in the 6- to 8-year age group and the highest (h2: 0.57, 95% CI [0.44, 0.72]) in the 12- to 14-year age group. Additionally, breastfeeding significantly modified the additive genetic component of BMI in the 6- to 8-year age group and 12- to 14-year age group. In the 6- to 8-year age group, breastfeeding decreased the impact of genes on BMI, with a genetic effect modification coefficient (βa) of −0.19 (−0.25, −0.13). In the 12- to 14-year age group, breastfeeding increased the impact of genes on BMI, with a genetic effect modification coefficient (βa) of 0.08 (0.02, 0.15). In conclusion, as age increases, the genetic influence on children’s BMI becomes more pronounced. Breastfeeding may modulate genetic effects at the ages of 6–8 and 12–14. Given the metabolic diversity of obesity, our findings offer insight into how breastfeeding interacts with genetic background, helping to unravel the complex gene–environment interplay influencing obesity.

This article tests theories of verb stress in the Northwest Caucasian language Abkhaz using a new database corpus of 3,115 inflected forms of 445 verbs. I describe the creation of the corpus and show how it can be used to gain new insights into principles of Abkhaz stress assignment, which depend on complex interactions between phonology and polysynthetic verbal morphology. I implement a previous theory of Abkhaz stress assignment (Dybo 1977) in a computer program and use the corpus to assess empirically how well it accounts for stress patterns across the lexicon of eventive verbs in Abkhaz. I show how this empirical evaluation identifies both strengths and weaknesses of the theory, and use these to propose a revised theory of Abkhaz stress assignment. The revised theory ties with or outperforms the original in all verb categories, accounting for the stress alternations in 40 additional verbs, which comprise almost 10% of the corpus. This shows that corpora, combined with computational implementations of phonological theories, can be used to further our understanding of highly complex phonological data sets.

Indigenous identity politics in South America increasingly mobilize language as a resource for political visibility, cultural continuity, and resistance to homogenizing state agendas. While many Indigenous movements pursue linguistic standardization, the Murui-Muina people of the Colombian Amazon advance an inverse project: they emphasize internal differentiation, maintaining four ethnolinguistic groups (Murui, Mɨka, Mɨnɨka, Nɨpode). Drawing on long-term ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, this article examines how Murui-Muina speakers construct and sustain these distinctions through ideologically charged lexical contrasts (‘flag words’) that function as shibboleths of subgroup identity. Situated within histories of violence, Indigenous language politics, and Northwest Amazonian multilingual ecologies, the analysis shows how minimal linguistic differences become imbued with cosmological significance, social meaning, and political value. The Murui-Muina case challenges structuralist definitions of ‘language’, demonstrating that what ultimately counts as a language depends on local approaches to language itself, offering a broader insight into how linguistic diversity is lived, valued, and reproduced. (Indigenous identity, linguistic diversity, language standardization, Murui-Muina, Northwest Amazonia, Colombia)

The Middle Persian Nāmagīhā ī Manuščihr “Epistles of Manuščihr”, the Zoroastrian high priest of Pārs and Kermān, written in 881 ce, are an important testimony of an inner-Zoroastrian dispute on orthopraxy in early Islamic Iran. They reflect Manuščihr’s efforts to preserve the extensive purification ritual Baršnūm against being substituted with a simplified ritual by his brother, the teacher-priest (Hērbed) Zādspram. Manuščihr wrote three letters to make his position clear. His second letter, addressed to Zādspram, is interesting not only for its theological debate but also for the personal relationship it reveals between two priest-brothers. Manuščihr argues on an elaborate scholarly level by quoting from the religious authoritative texts, and expresses his brotherly love and responsibility for leading his younger brother back to the correct path. This article focuses on his theological argumentation but also on the debate, how the family ties may have affected it and how he used linguistic expressions and style in this context.

The Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) served as the agency’s lead responsible for implementing the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Act of 2017 and the 2023 U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security. Tazreen Hussain (TH) served as the USAID Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor from 2024 to 2025. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the women, peace, and security portfolio. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 12, 2025.

In a recent article, Michael Rea has argued that hope for universalism to be true is incompatible with a lack of belief in its truth, so that hopeful universalists should become believing universalists. His reasoning, in short, is that hope for universalism involves belief that universalism is good, and such belief conflicts with a recognition of what might be God’s perfect will – that universalism is false. In response, I defend hopeful universalism by arguing that at least in some cases, we should align our hopes (or what Eleonore Stump terms our ‘desires of the heart’) with what we take to be not God’s consequent will, but only God’s antecedent will – and it may be only God’s antecedent will, and not God’s consequent will, that universalism be true.

This article reconsiders late Qing state building through the underexamined lens of ecological governance, moving beyond teleological narratives of imperial decline to reassess the regime’s resilience and institutional adaptability under conditions of mounting environmental, fiscal, and geopolitical strain. Drawing on a transregional synthesis of ecological, social, political, and economic historiography, it argues that the crises confronting the Qing in the nineteenth century stemmed less from institutional stagnation or state decay than from a profound mismatch between inherited governing capacities and intensifying socio-ecological pressures generated by population growth, commercialization, and environmental degradation. Employing R. Bin Wong’s analytical framework of Challenges, Capacities, Commitments, and Claims, the article traces how the Qing state recalibrated its governing priorities in response to these challenges and constraints. Through six case studies spanning agrarian cores and imperial borderlands, it shows how ecological governance took multiple, regionally differentiated forms. Across these settings, the state selectively retreated from labour-intensive, resource-consuming paternalistic commitments while expanding extractive, coercive, and territorial strategies aimed at dynastic survival. Rather than signalling simple state decline, these uneven and survival-oriented adaptations constituted a process of governing recalibration shaped by negotiation among state authorities, local actors, and non-human forces such as water, soil, and forests. By foregrounding the agency of ecological dynamics, this article situates the late Qing within broader debates on empire, sustainability, and state capacity, offering a comparative framework for understanding how premodern and modern states confronted environmental limits in moments of systemic crisis.

This article explores the Chicago School Board’s 1915 union-busting effort against the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, a union of women teachers co-founded by two Catholics. This article argues that newspaper coverage reveals that the gender identities and religious affiliations of the CTF members made them doubly intolerable. Not only did their very presence in public schools threaten to introduce Catholicism into a space that Protestants viewed as their domain, but these women also had the temerity to expect just compensation for their work. The Catholicism of the CTF’s leaders attracted nativist prejudice, and the press’s fixation on religious difference reframed the Loeb Affair from a conflict over salaries, pensions, and union membership into an endeavor to wrest the schools from Catholic control. Whatever the initial motivation of the Loeb Rule, anti-Catholicism became a weapon to defeat the economic and equality claims of women who demanded to be treated as professionals rather than as proxy mothers. From this viewpoint, the Loeb Affair figures not only as a loss for organized labor and teacher organizing, but it also illustrates Progressive Era beliefs about competing ways of performing womanhood, the role of religion in public schools, and the fear of Catholic power.

This article introduces the heuristic of epistemic inertia to complicate narratives of radical rupture in global sites of expertise. In 2006, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), widely celebrated as a radical break from the medical model, which had long framed disability as an individual impairment to be treated by medical doctors. Through the heuristic of epistemic inertia, we examine how, despite adopting a more pluralised expert repertoire, the CRPD Committee retains some deep-seated (neo)liberal assumptions of the medical model. Through an analysis of General Comment No. 8, we identify three main manifestations of this persistence across both models: first, an understanding of dignity as tied to productivity and autonomy; second, the idea that individuals must ‘adapt’ to existing societal arrangements through merit; and third, the portrayal of market participation as the privileged moral horizon. What falls out of view are alternative imaginaries grounded in interdependence or collective forms of care, which exist outside prevailing economic logics. In this configuration, the figure of the rights-bearer is not a radical alternative to the medical patient, insofar as rights are still articulated through expectations of optimisation and self-reliance within prevailing market logics.