What are the philosophical and normative orientations of British international law scholarship during the Victorian era? This article explores and answers this question in three complementary steps. It begins with an analysis of the ‘public’ international law textbooks after 1830 to show that, instead of a single legal tradition, there coexisted three competing traditions during this period: a ‘naturalist’, an ‘historicist’ and a ‘voluntarist’ tradition. These three Victorian traditions will, in a second step, be studied in the context of ‘private’ international law—a discipline that developed and received its name during this period. A third section finally offers a detailed examination of the transformative work of Lassa Oppenheim, which straddled the Victorian nineteenth century and the ‘modern’ twentieth century. In revisiting the normative project(s) of Victorian international law, the article hopes to critique three prominent views in the contemporary academic literature. The first view holds that voluntarist State positivism exercised a dominant influence on British international law scholarship after 1830; a second view has claimed, relatedly, that during this period an idiosyncratic ‘English’ approach to international law emerged; and a third view has famously suggested that there was a ‘radical’ break in the discipline of international law around 1870.

This article argues that the rule of contra proferentem is not applicable to international sales contracts governed by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). It further argues that the common recognition of the rule of contra proferentem under the CISG is an instance of a broader phenomenon which it calls ‘internationality overreach’. ‘Internationality overreach’ is the tendency to project onto the provisions of a uniform private law instrument doctrines and concepts which are inaccurately presumed to constitute universally recognised principles of private law or the ‘common core’ of various legal systems. This article demonstrates that internationality overreach disrupts the goals underpinning the harmonisation of commercial law in two ways: first, it undermines uniformity in the application of international conventions; and, second, it leads to outcomes that fall short of the agreement reached by the Contracting States during the drafting process. While this article focuses on the CISG, the argument developed in this article is of equal relevance to other uniform private law conventions which follow the principle of autonomous interpretation.

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.

The insular Indian oceanic space is distinguished by a long history of migrations, encounters, conflicts, exchanges, interbreeding, and interculturality. Violence and negotiation lie at the heart of their historical, anthropological, and linguistic processes. The literatures of the Indian Ocean islands, in particular, articulate their representations, their fictional universes and speeches, as well as their modes of writing, with a perpetual interrogation about travels, meetings, frontiers, which constitute the ways of living in places and telling about them. Composed on the basis of dialogue and intertextuality in order to account for complex worlds, they also house ghosts which make them labyrinthine. Experiences peculiar to each society also connect them with the global history of colonial predation and disobedience, migrations, and exchanges, as well as intercultural relationships. From this point of view, such literatures allow one to read the labyrinthine and spectral insertion of the colonial world into European literatures. This paper is based on a French-language Indian oceanic corpus and aims to put forward a political reading (in the sense of Jacques Rancière) of the aesthetics of intercultural meetings and of its unplanned effects.

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.

Prosody and gesture are two known cues for expressing information structure by emphasising new or important elements in spoken discourse while attenuating given information. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning mapping to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. This study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to differentiate levels of givenness.

Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 native French speakers were video-recorded during a short spontaneous narrative task. Participants’ oral productions were annotated for information status, perceived prominence, pitch accents, and head gesture types. Results show that given information in French is multimodally less marked than new-er information and is accordingly perceived as less prominent. Our findings indicate that Catalan learners of French mark given information more frequently than native speakers and may transfer their use of low pitch accents to their second language (L2). The data also show that the use of head gestures depends on the presence of prosodic marking, calling into question the assumption that prosody and gesture have balanced functional roles. Finally, the type of head gesture does not appear to play a significant role in marking information status.

During the First World War, British military bands went on tours to Paris (1917) and Italy (1918) to generate support for the Allied war effort. These ‘propaganda tours’ marked the culmination of a trend that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when military musicians assumed the role of cultural envoys of the state. With retreat from ‘splendid isolation’ at the turn of the century, the nascent entente cordiale witnessed a burgeoning relationship between British and French military bands. While the impetus for these tours came from outside government, the Foreign Office’s cancellation of a tour to Germany in 1907 against King Edward VII’s wishes shows that these activities were considered more than benign gestures of international musical co-operation. After over two years of war, professional propagandists harnessed the mass appeal of military music by organizing concerts designed to reverse dwindling morale and present a unified Allied war effort. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, contemporary accounts and similar missions in the interwar period suggest that they met their objectives. By consulting a wide range of materials, from concert reviews to diplomatic correspondence, this article aims to bridge the gaps between political, military, and cultural history by showing the relevance of military music to all three sub-fields.

Conditional risk measures and their associated risk contribution measures are commonly employed in finance and actuarial science for evaluating systemic risk and quantifying the effects of risk interactions. This paper introduces various types of contribution ratio measures based on the multivariate conditional value-at-risk (MCoVaR), multivariate conditional expected shortfall (MCoES), and multivariate marginal mean excess (MMME) studied in [34] (Ortega-Jiménez, P., Sordo, M., & Suárez-Llorens, A. (2021). Stochastic orders and multivariate measures of risk contagion. Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, vol. 96, 199–207) and [11] (Das, B., & Fasen-Hartmann, V. (2018). Risk contagion under regular variation and asymptotic tail independence. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 165(1), 194–215) to assess the relative effects of a single risk when other risks in a group are in distress. The properties of these contribution risk measures are examined, and sufficient conditions for comparing these measures between two sets of random vectors are established using univariate and multivariate stochastic orders and statistically dependent notions. Numerical examples are presented to validate these conditions. Finally, a real dataset from the cryptocurrency market is used to analyze the spillover effects through our proposed contribution measures.

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.

Residual herbicides are primarily degraded in the soil through microbial breakdown. Any practices that result in increased soil biological activity, such as cover cropping (between cash crop seasons), could lead to a reduced persistence of herbicides in the soil. Furthermore, cover crops can also interfere with herbicide fate by interception. Field trials were conducted between 2020 and 2023 in a corn (Zea mays L.)–soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] rotation to investigate the influence of cover crop (cereal rye [Secale cereale L.] and crimson clover [Trifolium incarnatum L.]) use on soil enzyme activities (β-glucosidase [BG] and dehydrogenase [DHA]), its effect on the concentration of residual herbicides (sulfentrazone, S-metolachlor, cloransulam-methyl, atrazine, and mesotrione) in the soil, and the interception of herbicides by cover crop residue. The use of cover crops occasionally resulted in increased BG and DHA activities relative to the fallow treatment. However, even when there was an increase in the activity of these two enzymes, increased degradation of the residual herbicides was not observed. The initial concentrations of all residual herbicides in the soil were significantly reduced due to interception by cereal rye biomass. Nevertheless, significant reductions in early-season weed biomass were observed when residual herbicides were included in the tank mixture applied at cover crop termination relative to the application of glyphosate plus glufosinate. Results from this research suggest that the use of cereal rye or crimson clover as cover crops (between cash crop seasons) do not impact the persistence of residual herbicides in the soil or reduce their efficacy in controlling weeds early in the growing season.

This article presents a sociolegal study of decisions by a Canadian immigration tribunal on appeals for “humanitarian and compassionate” relief from criminal deportation. Drawing on the work of Émile Durkheim, we argue that the appeal decisions serve two legitimating functions. On the one hand, they seek to demonstrate the state’s capacity to ensure that the large-scale admission of mostly economic immigrants does not threaten the solidarity of Canadian society. On the other, the decisions address concerns about the justifiability of deportation by making vivid the moral incompetence of unsuccessful appellants, hence their unsuitability for membership.

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.

The search for missing persons requires the implementation of national plans that integrate a combined judicial and humanitarian approach. This article examines how national search plans in Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru have incorporated international standards on the search, exhumation, recovery, protection, identification, and restitution of human remains of missing persons and victims of enforced disappearance. Through a comparative analysis between the search plans and international humanitarian and human rights law instruments, common elements in the regulation of these matters are identified. The research reveals that the national normative frameworks of the search plans incorporate international standards in a detailed and precise manner, but the effective implementation of these standards in practice is problematic. The study concludes that, despite normative advances, significant challenges remain in the search for and recovery of victims of enforced disappearance, requiring a renewed commitment by States to comply with their international obligations. By addressing these critical issues, the article not only contributes to the academic debate, but also invites attention to the need to imagine new interdisciplinary strategies aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of efforts to search for victims of enforced disappearance in diverse transitional contexts.

Jerry Ellig was a unique character and a great economist. He believed in one thing, using economic analysis to help solve problems. He became an expert at Regulatory Impact Analyses and how they helped governments to choose the best option to do just that, all the while recognizing the problems that government has with necessarily much less information than markets. He believed in holding governments to account for achieving results including periodic lookbacks to see what they were doing. What was great about Jerry is that he had fun doing all of this both on the job and at his beloved Tiki bars.