China’s gun-free society is maintained through a paradox—while the state’s disciplinary apparatus unmakes any exceptions to the norm by continuously disarming the wayward, it simultaneously perpetuates exaggerated narratives of threats posed by clandestine gun makers in the ethnic frontier regions. This article investigates the state’s construction of Hualong, in Northwest China’s Qinghai, as ‘the capital of China’s ghost guns’. By debunking the quasi-historical claim that Hualong was a major firearms manufacturing hub in the early twentieth century, the article reveals how the modern Chinese state uses this narrative to reinforce an ethnopolitical reset—placing the Han in exclusive control of both firearms’ regulation and the sovereign right to punish violators. Drawing on multiple archival sources, the article argues that monoethnic control of arms was a central tenet of twentieth-century ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that early twentieth-century Qinghai was adept in taking advantage of the mobility and fluidity of arms afforded by a trans-imperial infrastructure in its state-making enterprise. That infrastructure included Western missionary networks, treaty ports and foreign concessions inherited from the late Qing, a revitalized maritime hajj route, Japanese imperialism, as well as an expansionist Chinese nationalism struggling to find a foothold in the former empire’s legacy frontiers.

Foreign national courts are categorically prohibited from prosecuting a head of state of another country. From the beginning of the twenty-first century until very recently, this view was nearly unanimous. A 2002 decision of the International Court of Justice, in the Arrest Warrant case, strongly supports it. According to the court, heads of state enjoy ‘full immunity’ from foreign criminal jurisdiction. Thus, the prohibition to prosecute foreign heads of state even extends to those who perpetrate aggression and other war-related crimes. That view is based on a twenty-first century myth. According to the myth, heads of state have long – ‘from time immemorial’ – enjoyed an absolute personal immunity from foreign jurisdiction. This article identifies the origin of the myth and parses through crucial historical facts that disprove it, particularly, the indictments against Hitler as the sitting head of state of Germany, their endorsement by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. A proper debunking of this myth is not only important as a matter of setting the historical record straight but is also relevant for present-day debates about the prosecution of heads of state (or heads of government) who – like Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Min Aung Hlaing, and Benjamin Netanyahu – might be responsible for aggression, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other crimes.

This article examines how the California Reparations Task Force (2021–23), a government advisory body, grappled with the question of which Black Americans should be eligible for reparations. Some Task Force members and activists advocated a lineage approach that restricts eligibility to people whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. Others supported a Pan-African approach that includes all Black residents. The Task Force voted narrowly for the lineage approach. Surprisingly, however, and not acknowledged by most observers, most of the Task Force’s Final Report implicitly adopted a tiered approach, which follows the lineage approach for some policies and the Pan-African approach for others. It also includes universal policies for all, as long as they include a reparatory dimension. The Final Report thus challenged the assumption that all reparations policies would follow a single standard of eligibility. The tiered approach emerged in part because it complies with United Nations guidelines on reparations. It appears more likely than the other approaches to increase public support for reparations.

This essay describes the elaborative model of knowledge production that is both the topic of Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage and its method. The annotative procedure of (as Psomiades puts it) “adding” to what has come before is dialectical insofar as it understands any concept to emerge from the historical conditions enabling it; it is collaborative insofar as it links thinking agents across bounds of difference; and it is political in that it offers to locate the preconditions for thought in time but then find supplements, blank spots—openings for change. The essay closes with a biographical example of this model in action, in a scene of feminist mentorship from the early 2000s.

We prove new weighted decoupling estimates. As an application, we give an improved sufficient condition for almost everywhere convergence of the Bochner-Riesz means of arbitrary $L^p$ functions for $1<p<2$ in dimensions 2 and 3.

The FUSION project (an acronym for FUsion StudIes of prOton boron Neutron-less reaction in laser-generated plasma) was launched in 2022 by researchers from INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) and ENEA. This project marks the first scientific initiative funded by INFN in the field of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). The main objectives of FUSION are to develop a new generation of solid targets designed to enhance the $^{11}B(p,\alpha)2\alpha$ fusion reaction rate, being this reaction a potential candidate for future ICF schemes. FUSION will also focus on designing novel diagnostic techniques for measuring reaction products and, ultimately, estimating alpha and proton cross-sections in a plasma environment.

The project will be carried out through two experimental campaigns at a laser facility equipped with a high-energy, long-pulse (picosecond) laser. In the proposed experimental setup, the $^{11}B(p,\alpha)2\alpha$ reaction will be triggered simultaneously ‘in target’ by the protons generated in the laser matter interaction and 11B present in the same expanding plasma and in the ‘pitcher-catcher’ configuration. In FUSION, a set of measurements will also be dedicated to a first estimation of the proton and alpha-stopping power in a plasma. FUSION will enable a comprehensive understanding of the reactions and will help in optimize the conditions for future applications in inertial nuclear fusion with the $^{11}B(p,\alpha)2\alpha$ reaction.

In this article, we construct explicit spanning sets for two spaces of modular forms. One is the subspace generated by integral-weight Hecke eigenforms with nonvanishing quadratic twisted central L-values. The other is a subspace generated by half-integral weight Hecke eigenforms with certain nonvanishing Fourier coefficients. Along the way, we show that these subspaces are isomorphic via the Shimura lift.

We construct a monoidal version of Lurie’s un/straightening equivalence. In more detail, for any symmetric monoidal $\infty $-category $\mathbf {C}$, we endow the $\infty $-category of coCartesian fibrations over $\mathbf {C}$ with a (naturally defined) symmetric monoidal structure, and prove that it is equivalent the Day convolution monoidal structure on the $\infty $-category of functors from $\mathbf {C}$ to $\mathbf {Cat}_\infty $. In fact, we do this over any $\infty $-operad by categorifying this statement and thereby proving a stronger statement about the functors that assign to an $\infty $-category $\mathbf {C}$ its category of coCartesian fibrations on the one hand, and its category of functors to $\mathbf {Cat}_\infty $ on the other hand.

This paper investigates the magnitude and drivers of ethnic and religious disparities in Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) in Syria. Using census data and the Gelbach decomposition method, the analysis reveals substantial FLFP gaps across groups, reaching up to 18 percentage points. To understand the factors underlying these gaps, the analysis exploits the heterogeneity in economic development, demographic profiles, educational attainment, and geography across towns and villages. The findings indicate that differences in age distribution, income levels, education, and public sector employment shares are the primary contributors to FLFP gaps. While social norms are often considered key determinants of FLFP, their role is assessed using gender parity indices for educational enrollment and attainment but shows little explanatory power for ethnic and religious disparities in FLFP. These results highlight the importance of structural economic and demographic factors over cultural constraints in shaping group differences in FLFP in Syria.

Over the past decade or so, ethical recruitment has become increasingly popular as an aspirational standard for addressing labour violations and human rights issues in the transnational recruitment of migrant workers. While multi-national corporations (MNCs) – both international buyers and their Tier 1 suppliers – have been quick to adopt and codify ethical recruitment principles in their company codes of conduct, the same cannot be said for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) further down the supply chain. Grounded in a case study of a small packaging company in Penang, Malaysia, this article explores how SMEs navigate their human resources and financial constraints in their attempt to practise ethical recruitment. We conclude with some brief reflections on the role of recruitment agents and the (in)equitable allocation of costs across global supply chains in making ethical recruitment a realistic and achievable goal for SMEs.