The scholarly and popular commonsense about corruption in the Philippines is that the country has always been corrupt. Seventy-eight years of corruption as an independent state (1946–2024) may as well have been a thousand. Lay and scholarly accounts explain this continuity with respect to traditional values and premature democratization. In both accounts, corruption is all but genetic to Philippine culture or politics. To be sure, continuity is self-evident if we are looking only at corruption scandals—but scandals have been accompanied by anti-corruption movements, broadly speaking. The two have gone hand-in-hand historically, suggesting that we need to understand them together. Taking them together, that is, focusing on their dialectic, produces, as I will show, a history of change. Specifically, how Filipinos relate to corruption has changed. They have become less tolerant of it in general and learned to embrace an anti-corruption model of politics. How scholars and policymakers conceive of corruption has changed. They have come to adopt a view of corruption as a generic social problem, effectively disembedding it from society. These developments have enabled a more intolerant approach such that, today, the greater danger lies in an anti-corruption “fundamentalism” leading to the rejection of politics altogether. Viewed as a whole, the history of corruption/anti-corruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like, and thus we might read their dialectic as driving the progress of political modernization from below.

This article analyses the development of Arthur C. Clarke’s (1918–2008) persona as the ‘prophet of the Space Age’, focusing on its relation with his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. Unlike many space personas, Clarke was not an astronaut or a political leader, but a writer and advocate for space technology who developed a global reputation as an authority on the future. In 1956, Clarke relocated from his native England to the former British colony of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This article examines how both Clarke himself and a wide range of organizations, nations and individuals, including many from Sri Lanka, contributed to the creation of a global ‘prophet’ persona. This includes Clarke’s public life in Sri Lanka, which came to embody the earthbound, satellite-focused space future he promoted. This persona was in turn used to project commercial and moral justifications for space technologies, especially through Western lenses and for Western audiences, but in numerous ways gave Sri Lanka an active role in the global Space Age.

This articles reimagines Anselm’s claim that God is ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’ [Hereafter: ‘THAT’]. The article first explores a variety of Anselm-inspired of what THAT is like, and how THAT relates to whatever (if anything) is not-THAT (hereafter: ‘THIS’). THAT could be Anselm’s creator God, a polytheist pantheon, or a single undifferentiated One/Absolute/Brahman. THIS could be a single possible world or a pluriverse containing many different real possible worlds. The article defends a principle of cosmic humility. It argues that, to counter our natural tendency to over-estimate our own importance, we should pay particular attention to non-human-centred, non-anthropomorphic interpretations of THAT. Humility favours plenitude about worlds and plenitude about creatures. God (or THAT) will create many worlds that (together) contain all valuable creatures. Humility also suggests that, within this optimal pluriverse, we should not expect to find ourselves inhabiting either a world that is cosmically special or a world where we are special. The final part of the article argues that, within contemporary philosophy of mind, this commitment to cosmic humility supports panpsychism over its rivals – especially dualism and materialism. If THAT did create THIS, then we are (probably) insignificant creatures living in a panpsychist world. The article concludes with some speculations on how thinking about THAT and THIS might also influence the content of panpsychism as well as the case for panpsychism.

US politics is living a tense period of transformation. Approaching the presidential elections of 2024, many commentators question the fate of the US representative democracy and its political system. Political scientists have largely contributed to the critical analysis of the US case. A special mention goes to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The two scholars have marked the last two decades of US political science with a brilliant reconstruction of the American crisis and some of its key trends: the progressive increase of inequality; the mounting role of business lobbies; the decline of the US political economy and the erosion of the federal institutions. The present research note reviews three key books that shed light on contemporary US political economy through a typical political science approach. The value of these books goes well beyond the originality of the analysis of US politics. The books remind us the importance of three theoretical domains that marked political science and that merit to be further developed: interest group theory, neo-institutionalism and historical theories of democratization. Then, they shed light on the current dramatic tensions over representative democracies, well beyond the US exceptionalism. Hacker and Pierson provide an illuminating analysis of democratic tensions and give insights for the future research agenda of scholars of western political economies (including Italy and Europe). The books eventually outline some interesting methodological lines of future research.

Norway is celebrated for its successful management of petroleum resources. This success is often attributed to Norway's institutions and to key Norwegian policymaking figures. However, the roles of foreign experts in shaping early Norwegian oil policy have been overlooked. This article explores the roles of two Iraqi oil experts, Farouk Al-Kasim and Hasan Zakariya, and finds that they contributed to shaping the Norwegian petroleum management system at a crucial stage in its development. The article reveals the interconnectedness of global oil policies and challenges conventional North-South diffusion narratives, broadening our understanding of the impact of decolonisation on contemporary Europe.

This review on English language teaching (ELT) in Singapore examines 159 empirical research studies published between 2017 and 2023 in both internationally recognised peer-reviewed journals and less well-known regional journals. With this comprehensive review, we aim to raise awareness of ELT research in Singapore for international, regional, and local readership. This will also serve as a starting point for educators, scholars, and researchers to investigate ELT in Singapore. The review yielded five themes: teaching the language skills; multiliteracies and technology; bi/multilingualism/bidialectalism and English; English as an academic language; and teacher education for ELT. While there is continuity from the last two reviews of research from Singapore in 2009 and 2021, reflected in the single theme of teaching language skills, the other themes represent new directions.

The article concentrates on the massive project of popularizing the court system and penal practice in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1960s. From then on, the GDR transferred a considerable amount of jurisdiction to collectives, which were further assigned the task of adjudicating “close to the people” within and alongside the existing legal system. We will analyze how the government, with this project, managed to translate the ideological task of sanctioning the inner-state enemy into existing legal concepts and how it used law as a means to advance its political aims. By focusing on the judicialization of politics in the GDR, the article examines the legal history of the GDR as an important example in the broader and pressing phenomenon of the relationship between law and authoritarian politics.

Childhood bereavement is a public health issue with significant mental health implications, including depression, intrusive grief, and suicidality. Theories suggest that children’s malleable processes, like coping and subjective views of themselves and their environment, influence adaptation to bereavement. Protective processes may mitigate mental health risks, while risk processes may exacerbate them. Using a sample of support-seeking, parentally-bereaved children (8–16 years; M = 11.39, SD = 2.43; 53% male; 67% White), this study employs latent profile analysis to identify baseline patterns of coping and subjective views; and examines how profile membership predicts depression symptoms, intrusive grief, and suicidality at 14-month and six-year assessments. Three profiles were identified: Low Protective-High Risk (34%), High Protective-Low Risk (23%), and High Protective-High Risk (43%). Profile membership predicted depression symptoms. Children in the Low Protective-High Risk profile showed higher depression symptoms than those in the other profiles 14-months later, while children in the High Protective-Low Risk profile unexpectedly showed higher depression symptoms six-years later compared to those in the Low Protective-High Risk profile. Profile membership did not predict intrusive grief or suicidality. Findings underscore the importance of person-centered approaches in understanding adaptation following parental death and raise questions about the association between baseline childhood protective processes and long-term depression symptoms.

After the Second World War, lawmakers in the re-established democracies of Western and Central Europe set in place various judicial, administrative and political review processes. These were highly controversial as they had to manage two conflicting demands: the desire to purge former Nazis, fascists and collaborators as a means of re-democratisation, and to keep them away from power through a series of democratic restrictions such as temporary disenfranchisement. In this article, I investigate how postwar elites in France, Austria and West Germany dealt with this democratic conundrum and how their opponents used the concept of democracy in order to discredit postwar purges and achieve their revision through amnesty laws. I put forward the notion of democratic revisionism and I try to define its role within the wider framework of postwar transition and democracy.

This paper presents an improved signal-processing method based on the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT), which is applied to the fault feature extraction of the aerospace generator rotating rectifier (AGRR). Initially, the excitation current of the alternating-current (AC) exciter is utilised as measurable information for data collection. Subsequently, the HHT is processed with variational mode decomposition (VMD), followed by the improvement of the variational Hilbert-Huang transform (VHHT) using particle swarm optimisation (PSO) to determine the modal decomposition number and the secondary penalty factor. Finally, the proposed PSO-VHHT method is compared with several other signal processing-based feature extraction methods through both simulated and practical experiment data, and an analysis of the diagnostic performance of these methods is also conducted.