The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Business and Nature Platform and the Network for Greening the Financial System – attempt to address the uncomfortable reality of biodiversity governance failures and the risks of their own future failures by creating a series of diversions to deflect attention and by displacing the focus of biodiversity governance from core issues to their own efforts to develop metrics. These dynamics render these institutions both ‘failure-proof’ and inherently ‘failure-prone’, ultimately reinforcing rather than resolving the problems they aim to address.

Although not explicitly a socialist, in his political philosophy Kant provides arguments that can be deployed by socialists to argue for radically different forms of social and economic organisation. In this article I contrast Karl Marx’s criticism of capitalist property relations with the general theory of property which Kant outlines in his Doctrine of Right. I demonstrate that Kant’s concept of property provides a sounder ethical basis for the regulating and reform of capitalist economic organisations than Marx’s historical materialist view of economic and social development. Kant’s theory of property relations may fall short of Marx’s in terms of the sociological and historical insights it affords but Kant’s theory more than makes up for this is with its greater moral and political astuteness.

Excommunication – being summarily cut off from the sacraments of the Catholic Church – was the logical, if extreme, expression of Ultramontanism, and of the paternal metaphor enshrined at its heart. It was the ultimate weapon in the Church’s battle with critics who sought to undercut or challenge its chosen role as privileged mediator between the state apparatus and the people, whether this came in the form of open rebellion against said state, or in the demand for individual intellectual freedom, or both. Studying the infamous cases of nineteenth-century excommunicates, Joseph Guibord and Louis Riel (together with their predecessors, the ill–fated Patriotes) yields important insights into the nature of excommunication, both when it “worked” (from the perspective of those who imposed it) and, just as crucially, when it did not.

An examination of the history of menageries in Ireland from 1790 to 1840 offers insights into how people related to and understood the animal world through exhibitions of exotic creatures. Menageries, featuring diverse collections of wild animals displayed in cages, were part of the broader entertainment scene at fairs and large social events in the early nineteenth century. Journeying across Ireland and Britain in horse-drawn caravans, these exhibitions evolved from modest attractions to significant commercial enterprises by the mid nineteenth century. While British menageries of the period have received considerable scholarly attention, Irish menageries have been largely overlooked. This article seeks to address that gap by exploring how the Irish public encountered exotic and rare animals in menageries during this period. Newspapers, advertisements for travelling menageries and contemporary accounts reveal that menageries played a meaningful role in bringing the wonders of the animal kingdom to the Irish populace, offering a glimpse into the exotic and the unknown.

Multiple terrorist attacks on cultural heritage since 2001 have drawn heritage into international security politics, reframing it from a Law of Armed Conflict issue to one of hybrid warfare. This exploratory study uses semi-structured interviews with 51 practitioners from two community groups to examine perspectives on terrorism and heritage, testing assumptions in the literature against protection practices. Findings reveal that credible, dynamic threat data is scarce, leading to reliance on historic event data to extrapolate future risks. The article proposes a new multi-layered cultural intelligence framework for more critical threat assessments and argues that concerns over religiously motivated terrorist attacks may be overstated, suggesting a shift toward considering political and ideological drivers within unconventional warfare.

Deliberative democracy is used increasingly around the world and experiences relevant public support across several countries. However, political parties remain generally reluctant to engage in deliberation. This symposium explains why some parties engage with deliberative practices whereas others disregard them in several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. The symposium contributes theoretically to the literature by proposing analytical frameworks that explain parties’ approaches toward deliberative practices. The symposium’s empirical contribution lies in the identification of several variables that have been understudied so far in the research about parties and deliberation, including competition gains, organizational conflicts, and information deficit.

Is national policy more responsive to the preferences of white Americans than to those of people of color? To answer this fundamental question, we examine how well federal lawmaking reflects the preferences of 520,000 Black, Latino, Asian American, and white citizens from 2006 to 2022. Average racial gaps in responsiveness are small regardless of issue area. However, white voters are significantly advantaged when Republicans control the government. Respondents’ class, age, and ideology cannot explain this disparity. Respondents’ partisanship explains some, but not all, of it. To further investigate, we analyze roll call votes in Congress, focusing on the Senate—the pivotal lawmaking institution. Similar patterns emerge: Republican Senators better represent white (versus Black or Latino) constituents. Moreover, Black-white disparities are larger in states where Black Americans comprise more of the population. This suggests a role for white racial attitudes, and, indeed, we find that state-level white racial resentment predicts Black-white representational disparities.

Orenburg, a Russian border fortress on the Kazakh steppe founded in 1743, was the first city of the Tsarist Empire that was provided with a full set of official street names. While toponymic designations in empires have often been investigated in the context of the struggle of competing national groups for visibility, the case of Orenburg provides an example of how toponymic designations served to claim a newly conquered region as an integral part of the empire. As Orenburg’s street names were rarely in use in everyday life, this article argues moreover that both their orientation and representation functions were of little importance, and that their main purpose was to demonstrate the progressive governing techniques the administration had at its disposal.