The decline of native plant species associated with alien plant invasion is often assumed to be driven by competitive exclusion. However, invasive alien plant species could also directly or indirectly impact native plants by limiting reproductive success. Here, we tested whether invasive alien plants influence seed production, viability and germination using the Benjoin, Terminalia bentzoe (L.) L.f. subsp. bentzoe, a critically endangered tree endemic to the Mascarene Islands (South-West Indian Ocean), as a model species. Seed production was estimated from seed densities under the canopy of adult individuals from one of the largest remaining subpopulations of the species (in Cirque de Mafate, Reunion Island). Seed viability was determined using a tetrazolium test on the different sets of seeds collected in the field. Densities of seeds and viable seeds were then tested for correlation with the percentage cover of invasive alien plant species in the liana, tree, shrub and herbaceous forest layers. Seed germination was studied by sowing seeds in soils where three alien invasive plants, three endemics and T. bentzoe subsp. bentzoe had previously been grown. Seed production and viability decreased with increasing abundance in invasive alien plants in the liana and tree strata but not in the lower vegetation strata. Mechanisms specific to tall-statured invasive alien plants could include competition for resources, interference with pollinator behavior and mechanical constraints. Seed germination was inhibited by the invasive alien succulent Mauritius hemp, Furcraea foetida (L.) Haw. and T. bentzoe subsp. bentzoe itself but enhanced by the endemic tree species Poupartia borbonica J.F.Gmel. These species may differ in their resource use intensity, associated microbial communities and allelopathic effects. Our findings therefore suggest that plant invasions can significantly contribute to the decline of native plants through reduced reproductive ability and induce an extinction debt due to a lack of regeneration.

This paper explores the enduring tension between rational technique (technē) and creative intuition in art, tracing its origins from Plato’s Ion through Kant’s notion of genius as nature’s unteachable rule-giving via the productive imagination. It then examines Jacques Maritain’s and Étienne Gilson’s complementary Thomistic aesthetics as a unified resolution. Maritain locates creative intuition in the soul’s spiritual unconscious, a pre-conceptual grasp of Being (esse) uniting intellect, imagination, and senses in a metaphysical act mirroring divine creation, where poetry reveals beauty as transcendent radiance. Gilson, conversely, emphasizes art as cognitio factiva: the craftsman’s imposition of intelligible form on matter, producing an ontological entity that manifests Being’s splendor objectively, independent of subjectivity. Addressing modern unbelief, the analysis affirms that beauty depends on Being, not belief; even non-theistic artists intuitively participate in esse through form, yielding works that testify to divine reality despite denial.

While climate adaptation has been widely viewed as a local problem, more national government strategies are also needed to achieve more favorable policies. We seek to direct attention to the impacts of national government adaptation policies on attitudes of vulnerable citizens. Specifically, we argue that responses to different forms of climate disaster, such as flooding (as opposed to drought), can more readily reduce citizens’ trust in government. Examining extreme weather victim views in Guatemala, one of the world’s most vulnerable nations, we consider differences in the impacts of flood-related extreme weather and drought-related extreme weather. Using a 2023 national survey with flood and drought over-samples, we show that flood zone respondents, especially those reporting firsthand climate impacts, have a more negative view of government adaptation performance than those suffering “slow harms” droughts which respondents did not as readily attribute to climate change.

This work explores the travels of Ugandan Enoch Olinga, as an example of a person who enjoyed connections with global minorities across national boundaries and as a unique lens into the Black international experience in the mid-twentieth century. I examine his internationalist experiences through the lens of emotions to emphasize different dynamics of global racial identities and transnational diasporic connections during the 1950s–1970s, an era of decolonization and civil rights movements. I argue that Olinga, a prominent Baha’i who traveled worldwide during this era, advocated for unification among global minorities by emphasizing common racial and cultural heritages and expansive concepts of a politicized kinship. Through the Baha’i Cause, he articulated his own ideas about striving for global harmony and racial unity, with a connection to Africa serving as the linchpin. Emotional analysis provides insights into how Olinga invoked diverse notions of family and kin to arouse particular emotions amongst people of color both within and beyond the unity offered by the Baha’i Faith.

There has been growing public interest in traditional cheese production and consumption over the past decade, in contrast to the 1990s and 2000s, when food safety regulations excluded traditional cheesemakers from Turkey’s dairy commodity chains. This article focuses on two cheeses, Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri, designated in 2015 with national Geographical Indication and international Slow Food Presidium labels. Drawing on archival and long-term ethnographic research, we trace the historical trajectory of commercial dairying in Kars and its articulation and disarticulation within national and international commodity chains. Against the backdrop of twentieth-century transformations, we investigate how place-based labels have contested neoliberal agricultural policies that imposed industrialization and standardization on the dairy sector. We argue that the re-articulation of Kars in the 2010s relied on community development and collective action, and practices negotiating between tradition and standardization to establish new conventions of quality. This article conceptualizes re-articulation as a transformative socio-ecological process rather than a simple reversal of disarticulation. It demonstrates how peripheral regions re-enter markets through locally negotiated strategies balancing standardization, authenticity, and solidarity. It also foregrounds material and ecological relations, recognizing the agency of non-human elements – such as pastures and artisanal tools – in shaping value and quality.

This article examines the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (Directive) and its proposed amendment, especially from a Third World view. It establishes that, practically, the Directive has a limited value for Africans because it cannot stop corporate human rights abuses and economic exploitation in Africa. In contrast, the Directive entrenches neocolonial norms in the Business and Human Rights (BHR) field. This article also argues that it is futile for Third World Peoples to look to international law, given its capitalist history and the growing EU dominance in the BHR treaty discussions. Instead of looking to Europe or international law to save Africans from corporate abuses and economic exploitation, African states must look inward to create subsidiary norms that challenge and resist neocolonialism in the BHR field. To achieve this, it discusses the normative agency of the African Union in leading an Africanization agenda.

In the third chapter of his book, Reciprocal Freedom, Ernest Weinrib lucidly lays out a Kantian conception of ownership, and deftly lays to rest a series of questions to which that conception might be thought to give rise. Here I explore two issues lying at the root of the Kantian account of ownership as elaborated by Weinrib: The first is how it is that acquired rights to external things are possible in the first place; the second is why, once the possibility of acquired rights is established, the form that they take should be that of a traditional right of ownership, rather than, for instance, a more limited right to use. Ultimately, Weinrib’s discussion leaves me more favorably disposed toward the Kantian view of the possibility of acquired rights, but it seems to leave some important questions about the form of those rights unanswered.

Can we rationally double-check something we already know? Those who say “no” endorse the Ignorance Norm, which states that we should not ask a question whose answer we already know, thereby classifying double-checking as improper. Those who say “yes” reject the Ignorance Norm, instead proposing a broader norm that accommodates double-checking. I argue that both positions are unsatisfactory. Instead, I propose a novel solution that offers two key advantages over existing accounts. First, it preserves the Ignorance Norm. Second, it treats double-checking as a proper form of asking questions. The proposed solution draws on insights from speech act theory, arguing for a distinction between the default way of asking questions – governed by the Ignorance Norm – and the practice of double-checking which is subject to a stronger norm. While in default contexts we ask questions to acquire knowledge, in cases of double-checking we seek further epistemic goods, such as certainty or second-order knowledge.

This editorial considers how scholars interested in issues of global constitutionalism should approach the questions that have concerned those interested in enlightenment. Reflecting on the relocation of the journal’s editorial offices to Edinburgh, we foreground discussions from the historiography of the long eighteenth century that should be of interest to scholars of international relations, international law and political theory. Two main contributions are emphasized. First, a contextualist and political approach to enlightenment invites us to see global constitutionalism as a strategic response to crisis, aiming to combat fanaticism. Second, a global approach to enlightenment invites us to continue enlarging the world of global constitutionalism. Taken together, the contributions support the journal’s ongoing efforts to decolonize global constitutionalism by enjoining readers and contributors to attend to neglected sides and sites of global constitutional processes.

Some of the most fundamental questions in linguistic theory concern grammatical architecture. Focusing on morphosyntax specifically, how many components are ‘morphosyntactic’ phenomena distributed over, and how do they divide up their labor? Answers differ: some versions of Distributed Morphology posit a rich postsyntactic morphological component, whereas Morphology-as-Syntax approaches sharply reduce its role. Against that backdrop, this article investigates theme vowels, which are often analyzed as purely morphological (nonsyntactic). A diagnostic is introduced for their derivational origin, based on the narrow-syntactic phenomenon of lexical selection (L-selection): if a theme vowel is L-selected (to the exclusion of others) by a higher head, it must be in the narrow syntax; otherwise, the test is inconclusive. The former situation obtains in Latin: in synthetic causatives, fac- ‘make’ can be immediately preceded by -ē/-e but no other theme vowel. An analysis is developed on which theme vowels are syntactic and hence L-selectable. Alternative analyses on which theme vowels realize dissociated nodes added postsyntactically fail empirically or become notational variants of the syntactic analysis, since they must give theme vowels narrow-syntactic featural ‘precursors’. Theme vowels, then, are syntactic, introduced by (External) Merge. Insofar as dissociated-node insertion can be replaced with Merge, suspicious theoretical duplications are avoided, in line with minimalist goals.

This article examines how China’s central political inspections indirectly enhance municipal provision of invisible public goods. Such goods (e.g., underground pipelines, drainage systems) eludes reliable public assessment through daily observation. Drawing on Mani and Mukand, we emphasize their two defining attributes: (1) conditional evaluation (public judgment requires specific triggers like extreme weather), and (2) temporal accountability lag (delayed quality assessment). Unlike technical business inspections, political inspections prioritize provincial leaders’ political loyalty, generating cascading deterrent effects on municipal officials. Confronting heightened career risks, rational local officials strategically reallocate resources to rectify undersupplied invisible goods. Empirical analysis leveraging the first wave of nationwide inspection data confirms this causal mechanism.

Are parties responsive to public opinion and, if so, to whom exactly? These key questions continue to be major topics of debate among party and representation scholars. This research note extends recent contributions to the literature in three distinct ways. Unlike most extant studies, I do not limit my analysis to Western European countries and the left-right dimension but examine party responsiveness across the entire EU with a focus on six key issues. Conceptually, I draw on two responsiveness frameworks that are concerned with distinct ways through which parties can change their position to align with the general electorate or their partisan supporters. The standard framework tests whether parties shift in the same direction as the public, whereas the congruent responsiveness framework focuses on whether parties reduce past incongruencies with the public. Using updated expert and voter survey time-series data for the period between 1999 and 2024, I show that parties are primarily responsive to their supporters. The uncovered patterns of responsiveness are consistent across responsiveness frameworks, issues, European regions, and time. Both mainstream and niche parties primarily respond to their supporters. The findings carry important implications for our understanding of representation in contemporary European politics.

Cold stress is a significant welfare concern for piglets, particularly in outdoor housing systems where the ambient climate cannot be controlled. To deal with cold stress, piglets engage in heat-inducing behaviours, such as maintaining proximity to the sow, however this is a major risk factor for overlays. This research examined the effect of outdoor farrowing hut temperature on piglet survival and behaviour and found that lowered hut temperatures led to increased pre-weaning mortality. Two hundred sows and their litters were studied over six time replicates during winter in Australia at a commercial outdoor piggery. As daily minimum hut temperature decreased, piglet mortality increased on the first day of life, and across days one to four of life, but not from five days onwards. As hut temperature decreased, piglets were more likely to be shivering, huddling in one group, and resting in physical contact with the sow. However, contrary to expectations, there was no evidence of a relationship between piglet-sow proximity and piglet deaths, suggesting that being in close proximity to the sow did not increase the risk of dying. It may be that cold exposure reduces piglet mobility and thus the chance for piglets to avoid being crushed, but this requires further examination. Overall, cold stress is clearly a significant piglet welfare and productivity concern leading to increased mortality even when considering more moderate Australian climates.