During the course of our exploration of the history and architecture of central India, Mukhtar Ahmad Khān, a school teacher and local historian, directed our attention towards a collection of unpublished legal documents pertaining to the shrine of Shaykh Kamāl al-Dīn Chishtī in Dhār, Madhya Pradesh.1 As a corpus, these documents are concerned with grants of land, revenue, and legal issues regarding the management of the shrine, but they give, nonetheless, incidental information about the Chishtīs and the religious activities for which they were responsible. The shrine at Dhār—more correctly a dargāh—has enjoyed a continuous history from the fourteenth century to the present and is preeminent among the many Sufi places of pilgrimage in central India. Despite its manifest importance, the institutional, religious, and social histories of this dargāh await scholarly attention. The present article takes a first step in this direction by focusing on one crucial document that dates to the late seventeenth century.

In the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, international lawyers and policy advisors are considering the tools that are available to third States that wish to respond to the serious breach of international law and support Ukraine. Within this context, the question of third-party countermeasures is once again highly relevant. Though the topic was contentious during the drafting of the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), doctrine on third-party countermeasures often argues that they are permissible under customary international law, even while acknowledging that opinio juris is lacking. Whereas it has been argued that this subjective requirement can be inferred, this article maintains that, given the ambiguity surrounding unilateral sanctions practice, it is necessary to demonstrate that States believe that they are legally permitted to adopt wrongful sanctions in response to a prior breach of an obligation erga omnes (partes). It is argued that the International Law Commission was right to not include third-party countermeasures in the final ARSIWA and that, while sanctions practice has seemingly flourished over the years, there has been little progress in conclusively establishing that third-party countermeasures are accepted as custom, as illustrated by the discussion on the confiscation of Russian State assets.

This article is concerned with the spreading speed and traveling waves of a lattice prey–predator system with non-local diffusion in a periodic habitat. With the help of an associated scalar lattice equation, we derive the invasion speed for the predator. More specifically, when the dispersal kernel of the predator is exponentially bounded, the invasion speed is finite and can be characterized in terms of principal eigenvalues; while the dispersal kernel is algebraically decaying, the invasion speed is infinite and the accelerated spreading rate is obtained. Furthermore, the existence and non-existence of traveling waves connecting the semi-equilibrium point to a uniformly persistent state are established.

Due to the provisions of the Svalbard Treaty, Russia has kept a presence on this Norwegian archipelago – primarily based on coal mining – and has regularly made it clear that ensuring the continuation of this presence is a political goal. Since the late 2000s, Russia has attempted to revitalise its presence, stressing the need for economic efficiency and diversification away from coal. This includes tourism, fish processing and research activities. In recent years, Russia’s official rhetoric on Svalbard has sharpened, i.a. accusing Norway of breaching the treaty’s provisions on military use of the islands. The article contrasts the statements with the concrete actions undertaken by Russia to preserve and develop its presence. Russia’s policy of presence on Svalbard is not particularly well-coordinated or strategic – beyond an increasing openness to exploring new ways to sustain a sufficient presence. Financial limitations have constrained initiatives. The search for new activities and solutions is driven primarily by the need for cost-cutting and consolidating a limited presence deemed necessary for Russian security interest, not as strategies aimed at increasing Russian influence over the archipelago.

This paper examines why, some 25 years beyond the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland (NI) remains a highly polarised society despite the return of devolution (in February 2024) after a 2-year hiatus. Using the theoretical lens of social capital, it draws on the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey and the World Values survey (the latter conducted for the first time in NI) to examine levels of trust as a pre-requisite to reconciliation between the two main communities. The research finds a high degree of trust towards people of another religion and limited affective polarisation across the main political parties. Yet government community relations policies appear to have had limited impact over time and may contribute to ‘bad social capital’ through bonding within communities at the expense of ‘the other’. The paper considers tackling social and economic inequalities, common to both communities, as a means of bridging social capital.

As interstate cyberconflict intensifies, the intersection of national security, cybersecurity, and International Relations (IR) theory has emerged as a critical venue for scholarly inquiry. Yet due mainly to epistemological problems, IR theory has been limited in examining how it informs the maximization of strategic cyberpower and in testing key realist concepts and assumptions against cyberactualities, risking theoretical stagnation and conceptual infertility in the study of statecraft and cybersecurity. I seek to bridge these theory-testing and conceptual gaps by assessing offensive realism’s assumption about the scope of hegemonic expansion in cyberspace using the crucial case of the United States. I argue that offensive realism has meaningful explanatory and predictive power in cyberspace but sometimes lacks this power under conditions assumed by the theory, emphasizing the need to modify offensive realism’s understanding and scope conditions of hegemony. The US pursues global, not regional, cyberhegemony using offensive strategies to maximize its cyberpower for cybersecurity. Therefore, I critically examine defensive realism and cyber persistence theory as alternative structural perspectives on the pursuit of security in cyberspace and introduce a modified conceptual framework for hegemony to adapt offensive realism to cyber-realities. This conceptual innovation can potentially contribute to policy making and help to build a cyber-specific version of offensive realism.

This article explores the relationship between musical aesthetics and evolving submarine imaginaries in an age of unprecedented threats to the ocean. The discussion is structured around two case studies: Björk's performance of the song ‘Oceania’ at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics, and John Luther Adams's 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean for orchestra. In these examples, culturally and historically situated visions of the ocean are modulated by compositional and sonic devices that ground oceanic imaginaries in bodily sensation. Björk and Adams cultivate an oceanic aesthetics: musical sensations that align with the phenomenology of submersion or that address the materiality and ecology of the undersea. Throughout the article the author asks what music and musicology can offer to the interdisciplinary endeavours dubbed the ‘blue humanities’. A turn to music foregrounds listening as a mode of perception and scholarly enquiry less defined by terrestrial categories. Music and sound-based art can be an intellectual resource in cases where visual terms and frameworks have a tough time accounting for the specificity of the oceanic environment.

Cody Marrs's concept of “transbellum literature” has urged critics to reconsider the position of the Civil War that neatly divides literary history into “antebellum” and “postbellum.” Marrs's idea encourages us to see both continuity and discontinuity between the postbellum and antebellum periods. Taking as a main subject of inquiry Herman Melville's “Lee in the Capitol” in Battle-Pieces, one of the poems written from the perspective of the South, I would like to inquire into what the South as a geographical and political entity meant to Melville after the Civil War. In this poem, Melville gets inside Robert E. Lee's inner psyche, ventriloquizing his suppressed emotions. By ventriloquizing Lee, Melville can be seen as doing violence to the alterity of the South in ways that conflict with his representation of others in his antebellum fiction. This essay interrogates how the Civil War changed Melville's approach to representing alterity by focussing on the presence of the South as a geographical other in Battle-Pieces. At the heart of this perceived change lies his concern with representing community rather than individuals. However, Melville ultimately finds himself othered from the southern individuals, thereby demonstrating less discontinuity than continuity in terms of his ethics of alterity.

This paper examines the impact of financially constrained intermediate inputs on within-industry total factor productivity loss. Utilizing exogenous tax reforms in China as a natural experiment, our difference-in-difference analysis reveals that reduced tax burdens lead to increased firm-level intermediate inputs, particularly among financially constrained firms. We incorporate financially constrained intermediate inputs into a partial equilibrium model of firm dynamics. Our calibration suggests that financially constrained intermediate inputs play a quantitatively more important role in accounting for misallocation than financially constrained capital. The presence of financially constrained intermediate inputs introduces a downward bias in the measurement of value-added productivity, especially for firms in the top decile of gross-output productivity. As a result, the average “efficient” levels of capital and labor for the top decile firms in the standard Hsieh and Klenow (2009) exercise are lower than what is truly efficient.

In her influential 1988 essay “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance,” American performance theorist Peggy Phelan documented her “most disturbingly interesting” exposure to what she calls “Eastern dance forms” at an international gathering of scholars, performers, and the like.1 The conference is said not only to have fostered strenuous discussions of the female role in such traditions as Balinese dance-drama, Indian kathakali, Japanese kabuki, and “Chinese opera,” but also to have featured the performance of a youthful male performer of female roles in the Indian odissi tradition. Astonished, if not disappointed, by the conference’s disengagement with the politics of representing female roles, Phelan asserts that “[s]uch classical female roles played by men or women do not, by definition and design, penetrate the ‘identity’ of any female; they are surface representations whose appeal exists precisely as surface.”2 And this “surface femininity” is said to hinge upon “immediate recognition of the comic artifice and reverent idealization of the form,” which “reminds the spectator of the absence of the female (the lack) rather than of her presence.”3

A growing body of literature proposes a climate-oriented monetary and financial policy for Central Banks (CBs). However, other literature defends a market-neutral monetary policy to keep CB independence and avoid addressing other than conventional objectives. However, if the CBs’ market-neutral policy is only targeting inflation rates and employment, it could amplify the macro impacts of negative economic externalities, while also neglecting positive externalities in the long-run. Even if climate-related policy goals appear advisable, the actions of CBs reveal significant delayed impacts on macro and climate-risk variables. We propose a non-linear dynamic macro model of finite horizon with multiple targets, including macro imbalances and climate risks arising from a trend in carbon emissions. This non-stationary emission dynamic has feedback effects on stationary and non-stationary macro variables and the multiple (possibly conflicting) objectives of the CBs. In this context, we first explore to what extent CBs can impact emission trends with and without delays. Second, given the mix of stationary and non-stationary dynamic variables, we explore the responses to policy and economic and financial shocks using a mixed Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) with stationary and non-stationary variables. Third, in the face of multiple objectives—and macroeconomic concerns that CBs face—we are motivated by Kaya and Maurer (2023) to construct a Pareto front that introduces weights for the multiple objectives and permits target prioritization.

Different participatory mechanisms for the representation of Indigenous peoples have been proposed across states. Since their creation in 1867, the Māori electorates in the national Parliament have led to dedicated representation for Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand). However, only half of Māori choose to vote on the Māori roll, the remainder choosing to vote on the General roll, illustrating that roll choice is not based simply on group representation. This survey aimed to ask Māori (N = 1,958) in their own words why they made their roll choice. Through a deductive codebook thematic analysis, a range of codes were constructed around the reasoning behind roll choice. Māori on the Māori roll made their choice because they valued Māori representation; as an expression of their identity; to support the electorates; as a strategic choice; or they had been influenced by others or through education. Those on the General roll felt their roll was the default or a more familiar option; the Māori roll had less of an impact; it was a strategic choice, or they appreciated greater candidate variety; or they valued the smaller geographic electorate size. Some felt Māori no longer needed separate representation or felt less connected to their identity as Māori. The results have implications for both Māori and Indigenous representation through dedicated representational mechanisms.

In this paper, we prove a new uncertainty principle for functions with radial symmetry by differentiating a radial version of the Stein–Weiss inequality. The difficulty is to prove the differentiability in the limit of the best constant that unlike the general case it is not known. We provide also an integral alternative formula for the logarithmic weight $(\log|\xi|)$ in Fourier domain.