Over the past two decades, English has become a key medium of instruction in higher education in non-native English contexts, especially Asian countries. Extant research highlights the rapid expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI) and challenges in policy implementation, revealing tensions between different language policy levels (i.e., macro, meso and micro). Thus, a multilevel analysis is needed to understand these tensions. This review examines factors influencing EMI adoption in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Nepal, focusing on policy implementation by educators and students. Findings show that EMI adoption is driven by English's role as a global lingua franca and the permeation of neoliberal ideologies at the macro policymaking level. Such a macro-level endorsement of monolingual EMI has resulted in micro-level inequalities for students, with resistance manifested through multilingual practices, such as translanguaging, in the classroom. The discrepancies between language policies and practices highlight the necessity of reassessing the adequacy of monolingual EMI policies and the importance of adopting a multilingual policy framework. The article concludes with a critical discussion of the trends observed in these contexts and recommends several policy directions for the future.

The scandal of the Cuban Missile Crisis lies in the fact that it brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war for actions associated with relatively minor strategic and political gains. In this article I will treat this crisis as a diagnostic event to identify two significant interinstitutional dynamics that drove Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy to this rationality-defying precipice. The first of these dynamics explores the consequences of transitioning military units from peacetime routines to crisis-level field deployment, which quickly created considerable command-and-control problems for both political leaders. Yet each believed that the other side remained in control of its forces, erroneously understanding local action by the other side as strategic moves ordered by central command. This created the potential for uncontrollable escalation. The second dynamic resulted from the interaction of two institutional arrangements in the United States. American presidents are simultaneously the country’s highest decision makers in foreign affairs and political campaigners interested in their own reelection. Foreign policy decisions thus become potential campaign moves. After World War II, a campaigning tradition emerged in which both parties felt compelled to outdo each other with anticommunist rhetoric and policies. This strategy built on deeply instituted anticommunism in the electorate, which politicians felt compelled to further cultivate. This dynamic significantly limited Kennedy’s response options, making it more likely than not that he would have called for an invasion of Cuba if Khrushchev had not backed down. The consequences would have been disastrous. The article concludes with tentative lessons to learn from these two dynamics.

This paper explores the implementation and enduring significance of the German language program in Milwaukee Public Schools between 1867 and 1918. Despite the German language program facing challenges, notably the Bennett Law of 1889—which sought to restrict foreign language instruction statewide—the program persisted, highlighting the tension between local identity and state mandates. This study argues that the creation of the German course initiated a process of consolidation and standardization in Milwaukee Public Schools, shifting decision-making to school administrators who sought to accommodate the largest cultural group in Milwaukee. This case study of the Milwaukee Public Schools’ German Language Program reveals how school policies prioritized a multilingual approach to Americanization. The paper is structured in three sections, examining the evolution of language policy, the political implications of the Bennett Law, and the post-Bennett landscape of language education, ultimately demonstrating the interplay between consolidation and cultural inclusivity.

Since the 1960s, the concept of civil religion has informed a great number of scholarly works exploring the relationship between religion and nationalism in the west — and beyond. It is therefore not surprising that the concept also informed seminal works on Buddhism and politics in Thailand. In recent years, however, the concept appears to have fallen out of fashion within Thai Studies and perhaps Southeast Asian Studies more broadly. This article surveys and critically discusses the widely diverging and confusing ways in which the concept of civil religion has been used in the study of Thai history and politics. It then seeks to demonstrate the continued relevance and analytical utility of civil religion, understood as a particular kind of nationalism, according to which the state should accommodate or actively encourage and support religious pluralism by developing ideological and institutional links with multiple religious communities. In Thailand, the dominant form of civil-religious nationalism is ‘cosmopolitan royalism’, which positions the king as the leading patron and protector of religions (plural). The final section of the article illustrates how this conception of civil religion might inform both the study of Thai intellectual history and the study of contemporary political contestation.

The making of the Passeio Público, Lisbon’s first public garden, is filled with contradictions, advances and setbacks. By looking at the long-term history of this green infrastructure, from its inception in 1764 until the inauguration of the boulevard built on its footprint in 1886, and considering the various technical-scientific, artistic, economic, social and political factors, this article demonstrates that the so-called public garden of the ancién régime was in fact made by the Liberals. Political issues and the Liberals’ narration of events were primarily responsible for the disappearance of the Passeio Público.

A new form of human–machine collaborative capabilities has been called to complement traditional capabilities to ensure higher but more responsible performance. We reviewed the extant literature on leadership in the artificial intelligence context to identify the leaders’ essential artificial intelligence-driven capabilities and synthesize the systematic review findings into an integrated conceptual framework to highlight how artificial intelligence-driven organizations could lead more responsibly. We conducted the systematic review and thematic analysis based on 37 papers identified from Emerald Insight, EBSCOhost Business Source Complete, and ScienceDirect databases. We found organizational leaders require technical, adaptive, and transformational capabilities to lead in an artificial intelligence-driven disruptive organizational environment. Our findings contribute to dynamic managerial capability and responsible leadership for performance theories by showing how these three uncovered capabilities enable organizational leaders to deploy dynamic managerial capabilities – sensing, seizing and reconfiguring more responsibly.

This article examines the legal framework for offshore CO2 sequestration in South Korea, paying particular attention to how to ensure the protection of the marine environment from CO2 sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations. It analyses the relevant international regulatory framework, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 1972 London Convention and the 1996 London Protocol. It then examines the Korean national legal framework relating to offshore CO2 sequestration. In the absence of detailed regulations on the process of CO2 sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations in South Korea, the article suggests detailed regulations regarding site selection, assessment of potential risks, monitoring and long-term liability to ensure environmental safety and security from offshore CO2 sequestration, which should comply with the 1996 Protocol and relevant guidelines. The development of detailed Korean national regulations ensuring compliance with international rules and standards could serve as best practices driving offshore CCS in the Asia-Pacific region.

This article examines the everyday experiences of the Egyptian minority in Milan, Italy, focusing on challenges arising from the lack of formal recognition for their religious affiliations—Islam and Coptic Orthodoxy—which are central to their ethnic identity. Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of recognition, Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ coloniality framework, it critiques how European policies conflate secularization with security, marginalizing non-European communities. Italy’s legal system highlights this tension: while de jure constitutional protections guarantee religious freedom, de facto bureaucratic and political barriers exclude minority faiths from equal standing. Egyptian migrants must navigate this imbalance, where theoretical rights rarely translate into practical access, forcing them to continually adapt their religious and ethnic identities in a marginalizing society. The article shows how religious invisibility sustains marginalization, contrasting Europe’s multicultural ideals with exclusionary practices. It reveals how colonial legacies shape migrant experiences and restrict rights.

This study explored mental workload recognition methods for carrier-based aircraft pilots utilising multiple sensor physiological signal fusion and portable devices. A simulation carrier-based aircraft flight experiment was designed, and subjective mental workload scores and electroencephalogram (EEG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals from six pilot cadets were collected using NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) and portable devices. The subjective scores of the pilots in three flight phases were used to label the data into three mental workload levels. Features from the physiological signals were extracted, and the interrelations between mental workload and physiological indicators were evaluated. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms were used to classify the pilots’ mental workload. The performances of the single-modal method and multimodal fusion methods were investigated. The results showed that the multimodal fusion methods outperformed the single-modal methods, achieving higher accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score. Among all the classifiers, the random forest classifier with feature-level fusion obtained the best results, with an accuracy of 97.69%, precision of 98.08%, recall of 96.98% and F1 score of 97.44%. The findings of this study demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method, offering insights into mental workload management and the enhancement of flight safety for carrier-based aircraft pilots.

Distinguishing early domesticates from their wild progenitors presents a significant obstacle for understanding human-mediated effects in the past. The origin of dogs is particularly controversial because potential early dog remains often lack corroborating evidence that can provide secure links between proposed dog remains and human activity. The Tumat Puppies, two permafrost-preserved Late Pleistocene canids, have been hypothesized to have been littermates and early domesticates due to a physical association with putatively butchered mammoth bones. Through a combination of osteometry, stable isotope analysis, plant macrofossil analysis, and genomic and metagenomic analyses, this study exploits the unique properties of the naturally mummified Tumat Puppies to examine their familial relationship and to determine whether dietary information links them to human activities. The multifaceted analysis reveals that the 14,965–14,046 cal yr BP Tumat Puppies were littermates who inhabited a dry and relatively mild environment with heterogeneous vegetation and consumed a diverse diet, including woolly rhinoceros in their final days. However, because there is no evidence of mammoth consumption, these data do not establish a link between the canids and ancient humans.

Do populist governments bend their economic policies to the preferences of bondholders? Populist governments should be a “least likely” case for the market discipline hypothesis. Populist parties typically run on platforms that scapegoat wealthy elites as “enemies of the people” and hence should be more resistant to changing policy positions in the face of market pressure, given their reluctance to alienate their base. Employing most-different case studies of the Five Star Movement/Lega coalition in Italy and Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, we find that populists do bend to market pressure but that this “disciplining effect” does not stem primarily from foreign investors. Rather, it was the inaction of domestic investors in bond auctions that caused these governments to reverse course on headline economic policies. Because domestic investors served as both governments’ “buyers of last resort,” they needed to maintain their favor amidst foreign capital flight.

Housing scarcity is a widespread social and economic problem. Prior studies have attributed this scarcity to local control over land use, which has been seen as making policy makers more responsive to small electorates. Challenging this argument, we suggest that smaller jurisdictions have stronger incentives and greater capacity to raise tax revenue by building housing. Therefore, expanding the electorate that policy makers are responsive to could lead to a more restrictive housing policy. To explore this question empirically, we study a reform that consolidated some Danish municipalities, increasing the size of their jurisdiction. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that consolidated municipalities issue fewer permits and complete less housing than smaller jurisdictions. Our study thus shows that politicians permitted more housing when they were accountable to a smaller electorate. This upends conventional wisdom and suggests that local control need not be at odds with more liberal land use policy.