What would it mean to put the ethics of war in dialogue with the experience of war? The special section that follows explores this question. Featuring contributions from scholars across a range of disciplinary and academic backgrounds, it asks what we, as scholars of ethics and international affairs, stand to learn about the ethics of war by engaging with the experience of war. What can those who have direct personal experience of armed conflict—combatants and noncombatants alike—teach ethics of war scholars about the moral issues raised by war that we might otherwise miss or fail to appreciate? And to what degree does what they have to teach us comport with, depart from, or perhaps even challenge the standard just war framework scholars employ to talk about the ethics of war? This short introductory essay frames this special section by introducing the questions it tackles and the essays that comprise it.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used to accelerate radio frequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) studies and performance assessments of mobile networks, particularly in locations that are difficult or hazardous to access. However, a conductive carbon-fiber airframe located in the reactive near-field of a receive antenna may detune the antenna and distort local field conditions, potentially compromising far-field assumptions. This study quantitatively investigates UAV-induced measurement errors in cellular frequency bands and their dependence on antenna–frame separation. A controlled laboratory procedure compares reference measurements with UAV-mounted configurations while varying the receive antenna distance from the airframe over the 700–3500 MHz range. Results indicate that, for the examined UAV platform and antenna placements, the measured differences relative to the reference are mostly below 3 dB across the investigated frequency range. Increasing the antenna–frame separation reduces these differences by approximately 1–1.5 dB for positions beyond $4\cdot(\lambda/8)$ compared with closer positions. These findings suggest that, under controlled conditions, UAV-mounted configurations can provide sufficiently accurate results for RF-EMF and performance assessment applications. However, the results are specific to the investigated UAV platform, antenna configuration, and laboratory conditions, and cannot be directly generalized without further validation.

In this editorial, I examine the parallels between conventional and assisted suicide. Psychedelic therapy has been shown to alleviate end-of-life distress and reduce suicidality. I advocate for rescheduling psychedelics to enable research into their effectiveness as an adjunct to palliative care, prior to institutionalising assisted suicide in the UK.

We use the relation obtained by Guillarmou and Guillopé [‘The determinant of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for surfaces with boundary’, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN 2007(22) (2007), Article no. rnm099] and Chang and González [‘Fractional Laplacian in conformal geometry’, Adv. Math. 226(2) (2011), 1410–1432], between the generalised eigenvalue problem for asymptotically hyperbolic (AH) manifolds and the conformal Laplacian, to obtain a new inverse scattering result: on an AH manifold of dimension $n+1$ with constant scalar curvature $-n(n+1)$, the scattering matrix at energy $(n+1)/2$ determines the jet of the metric on the boundary, up to a diffeomorphism and conformal factor.

This article investigates how Kurdish identity is performed, contested, and negotiated within Turkey’s stand-up comedy scene, a space increasingly marked by ethnic visibility and political ambivalence. Based on 15 in-depth interviews with professional Kurdish and Turkish comedians, the study explores how humor functions as both a site of cultural representation and a mechanism of racialized hierarchy. The recurring stage phrase “Hello, I am Kurdish” is examined not merely as comic material but as a loaded utterance that reflects deep-seated societal prejudices and the historical suppression of Kurdish identity. While humor enables a partial reappropriation of stigma and offers potential for subversion, it also risks reinforcing entrenched stereotypes through self-deprecation and audience validation. This article highlights the ambivalent role of ethnic humor: it can simultaneously serve as a language of resistance and as a tool of conformity. The findings suggest that the transformative potential of stand-up comedy is constrained by classed and racialized dynamics within Turkey’s public sphere. Ultimately, the study contributes to critical debates on race, ethnicity, and cultural performance by demonstrating how ethnic humor reflects broader power structures and offers insight into minority subjectivities under authoritarian conditions.

This paper puts family policy under the spotlight. It develops a theoretical framework that treats family policy as concerned with three sets of relationships: between the family and the state, between the family and the economy, and between the family and society. It then applies this framework to the UK. The analyses of the policies of the New Labour and Conservative governments confirm how profoundly the family has figured in UK social policy over the last 30 years. The respective approaches were quite different, though: New Labour favoured a universalist approach and used family policy for economic redistributive as well as social purposes, whereas the Conservatives generally eschewed significant redistribution and made ‘problem families’ the focus of (intensive and generally negative) policy intervention while aiming for relative autonomy for families more broadly. In thinking about why the current Labour government has struggled to make any real momentum in family policy, the framework directs attention to their moral ambiguity on what individuals and families deserve in support from the state, together with their ambivalence on redistribution. As a result, the Conservatives’ version of family policy remains largely in place.

This article examines the proliferation of decolonial rhetoric in the digital sphere in the articulation of ethnic minority rights in Russia following the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Based on an analysis of diaspora discourses, it identifies three clusters: ethno-political self-determination, which reframes Soviet-era minority nationalism in the language of decolonization; indigeneity-centered cultural discourse, which foregrounds ecological, epistemic, and linguistic struggles; and Islamic epistemic discourse, which advances religiously grounded alternatives to liberal-secular modernity. Although these clusters diverge in their political imaginaries and epistemic orientations, all engage – albeit in different ways – with the legacies of imperial and Soviet systems of minority governance, while operating within transnational networks shaped by exile and mediated through digital environments. By situating these discourses within a semi-peripheral positionality – as activist discourses navigate both Russian and Western imperial legacies – the article argues that contemporary decolonial rhetoric is neither monolithic nor inherently emancipatory. Rather, it can be used to challenge certain inherited hierarchies while leaving others intact or creating new ones.

Regulatory and contractual constraints on individual exposures are standard in insurance and reinsurance markets, but a poorly designed constraint can distort the economic incentives of risk-averse agents. In the unconstrained problem, the classical comonotonic improvement theorem guarantees Pareto-optimal allocations that are nondecreasing in the aggregate loss. A constraint that is not stable under risk reduction can destroy this property. We show by example that Value-at-Risk caps lead to optimal allocations that are non-comonotonic in the aggregate loss. We identify componentwise convex-order solidity as a sufficient condition on the feasible set that restores the comonotonic improvement under constraints. If replacing any agent’s allocation by a less risky one preserves feasibility, then every feasible allocation admits a feasible comonotonic improvement for all convex-order-consistent preferences. This criterion covers many constraints typical in risk management but excludes Value-at-Risk caps and idiosyncratic deductibles. We illustrate the implications of our main result in a mean-variance risk-sharing application.

This article advances a functionalist account of practice-dependent principles of justice. It argues that existing practice-dependent approaches fail to explain how practices can enter into the justification of principles of justice. By understanding principles of justice as social rules that respond to the structural needs of social cooperation, the article shows how those needs constrain which higher-order moral principles can appropriately justify such principles. Justice is thus understood as internal to social practice rather than an external moral ideal. This functionalist approach supports the priority of politics over morality and provides a more realistic foundation for theorizing justice.