Since the adoption of the Charter, scholars have argued that Parliament defers to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) on questions of constitutional law. This is surprising given Canada’s previous history of parliamentary supremacy, Parliament’s enforcement of Court decisions and cognate findings internationally that show how elected officials can constrain high courts. Accordingly, we develop a theory of how Parliament influences the constitutional decision-making of the Supreme Court. Specifically, we argue that the Supreme Court will be less likely to grant leave to appeal in cases where it might disagree with Parliament to avoid any policy costs associated with that disagreement. Using a dataset of statutes reviewable between 1968 and 2020, we find that judicial review is less likely when the SCC faces a counterpartisan Parliament, and that judicial review increases under copartisan Parliaments when Parliament is less likely to oppose Court decisions.

This paper examines Ballard’s narrow pro-theistic argument for the claim that a world created by God would possess more bestowed worth than a world not created by God. I argue that not only could the world have just as much bestowed worth were it not created by God, but it could possibly have more.

The question of unity between Egypt and Sudan has received extensive scholarly attention, with most studies focusing on the monarchy’s efforts to preserve both polities as a single geopolitical entity. A prevailing view holds that the Free Officers abandoned this project, relinquishing Egypt’s claims to Sudan. Drawing on materials from the Egyptian National Archives and the National Archives in London, this article shows instead that unity with Sudan remained a core objective of the new military regime. I trace how an ostensibly secular regime strategically deployed religion in pursuit of this objective. I demonstrate that transnational networks of al-Azhar and Sufi orders were central to the Free Officers’ efforts to maintain Egyptian hegemony in Sudan. This analysis offers new insight into the religious diplomacy of the post-1952 regime, complicating our understanding of a key episode in Egyptian–Sudanese relations and highlighting the interplay between religion and statecraft in shaping Egyptian politics, especially under Nasser.

In recent works on the theory of machine learning, it has been observed that heavy tail properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) can be studied in the probabilistic framework of stochastic recursions. In particular, Gürbüzbalaban et al. (2021) considered a setup corresponding to linear regression for which iterations of SGD can be modelled by a multivariate affine stochastic recursion $X_n=A_nX_{n-1}+B_n$ for independent and identically distributed pairs $(A_n,B_n)$, where $A_n$ is a random symmetric matrix and $B_n$ is a random vector. However, their approach is not completely correct and, in the present paper, the problem is put into the right framework by applying the theory of irreducible-proximal matrices.

Chile has undergone two consecutive failed attempts at constitutional replacement (2021–2022 and 2023), positioning it as a globally interesting case. While existing literature identifies macropolitical and institutional factors underlying such failures, certain key causal mechanisms remain unexplored. This article addresses the central question of why majority-controlling political actors, aware of the need for broad national consensus, ultimately fail to achieve it. Framed as a two-level process—one at the elite negotiation level and the other at the electoral ratification level—this study elucidates the mechanisms operating at each stage that contributed to this dual failure. By analyzing these dynamics in detail, the article offers valuable lessons for future efforts to replace a constitution in a democratic setting.

Who is recognised within the concept of ‘European Society’, and, more importantly, who or what remains unseen? This article critically examines European Society through a decolonial lens, arguing that EU law is detached from the lived and diverse realities of European Society. Drawing on the work of sociologist Manuela Boatcă, the authors propose a decolonial approach that excavates coloniality of power, knowledge and, especially, belonging within EU law to reimagine European Society. Analysing cases in migration and the rule of law, the article reveals how EU law perpetuates hierarchical structures of inclusion and exclusion, and invisibilises the liminal—often deploying “Western” norms, values, and lifestyles as gatekeeping tools, especially in post-colonial contexts. At the heart of this argument is the necessity to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions of universality, neutrality, and totality in legal scholarship, instead embracing plurality of perspective, creolisation, and reflexivity. The authors contend that European Society should not be treated as a rigid legal construct but rather as a dynamic and inclusive one that amplifies marginalised voices, acknowledges and accounts for the liminal, and critically examines the law’s inherent limitations. Ultimately, the article calls for a radical reimagining of European Society through its decolonisation—one that confronts historical injustices, disrupts entrenched power structures, and steers EU law toward a more just, equitable, accountable and reconstructive future.

September 2024 marked the 20th anniversary of the commencement of operations of the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat. Despite the importance of this institutional milestone, it went largely unnoticed and sparked little critical reflection in Antarctic governance circles. This article seeks to fill that gap by assessing the Secretariat’s role, performance, and evolution within the Antarctic Treaty System as a whole. The article explores the Secretariat’s contributions to continuity, coordination, transparency, and institutional memory. It also examines the constraints the Secretariat faces due to its lack of international legal capacity, limited mandate and budget, and the political dynamics among the Consultative Parties. Finally, the article offers reflections on the Secretariat’s future role in a changing geopolitical and environmental landscape, arguing that strengthening its functions may be essential to ensuring the continued order and stability of the Antarctic region.

This article re-examines the relationship between two key historiographical traditions seeking an epistemological sovereignty at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the 1960s. The first, sometimes dubbed the “Dar school of historiography” and associated with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s recruitment of Terence Ranger to build a new History department at the University, centred “African initiative” as the sine qua non of any approach to the continent that was serious about breaking with Eurocentric epistemologies and approaching African histories on their own terms. The second was “dependency theory” or “world systems theory,” for which UDSM became a centre as Dar es Salaam’s fame in global leftwing circles attracted Marxist academics like Walter Rodney, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi. In contrast to the “Dar School,” these scholars worked at a distinctly global scale and future-oriented timeline. Comparing the epistemological approaches of these schools as different attempts at a meaningful decolonisation of knowledge, the article also re-embeds them in the material politics of the University at the time. For underneath UDSM’s two expatriate-driven “schools” was a gradual but significant decolonisation of the professoriat happening just below their scholarly radars – one in which Walter Rodney, not coincidentally, would play a major role.

This article reinterprets John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Milton offers a novel free-will defence, similar to Alvin Plantinga’s, grounded in original philosophical accounts of God, creation, freedom, and meta-ethics. Milton’s monist God creates worlds and creatures ex deo out of God-self. God – and everything else – is animated matter: one substance both material and spiritual. Milton rejects materialism, dualism, and idealism. Only animist monism delivers the libertarian freedom that Milton’s free-will defence demands. God has agent-causal libertarian freedom. God’s reasons don’t necessitate God’s choices. God freely chooses which worlds to create, which commands to issue, which hierarchies to institute. God radically transcends creatures – especially in relation to God’s meta-ethical power. Milton’s implicit meta-ethic, rejecting both voluntarism and intellectualism, resembles Robert Adams’s theist meta-ethic, where God’s nature determines excellence and God’s actual commands determine obligation. God also plays another meta-ethical role – instituting hierarchies where some creatures command others. Satan’s fall is epistemic and meta-ethical. He refuses to recognise God’s meta-ethical transcendence – to believe that God is God. Belief in God always requires a leap of faith beyond evidence and argument – because even perfect creatures cannot comprehend God’s transcendence. Creaturely epistemic freedom means there is no explanation why some angels fall while others stand.

Few songs of the British nineteenth century have had the staying power of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. With music by Henry Bishop and words by John Howard Payne, it first appeared in Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (1823) at London’s Covent Garden. The song remained in the repertory well into the twentieth century and is still a point of reference in the twenty-first. In the initial dramatic context, it was a solo vehicle for the titular heroine, a means of expressing Clari’s longing to return to her ‘humble’ home. Once the number became a breakout hit, the opera’s narrative details ceded significance to a vaguer international vogue for nostalgic sentiment. Like the much-discussed Swiss maladie du pays or the contemporary craze for the ranz des vaches, Bishop and Payne’s creation piqued the public interest in imagining a home out of reach. As the decades wore on, however, the song’s invocation of home acquired a distinctive national accent. By the mid-Victorian period ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had come to anchor an ideology of English exceptionalism. To perform or attend to this song in 1871 was to partake in a quasi-ritualistic affirmation of the doctrine of the hearth. This was partly bound up with the specious claim that other languages lacked an adequate word for home, but it was also connected to a shift in the geography of belonging. In lieu of the Romantic yearning for a distant homeland, this new Victorian nostalgia fixated on the heteronormative family home with its promise of shelter from the trials of urban modernity and the vices of foreign politics. Drawing on a range of musical, visual, and literary sources this article explores a key passage in the history of British ambivalence to city living via a song that emerged as a powerful amplifier of anti-urban desire.

This article introduces the concept of the weaponisation of emotion to analyse how emotional responses are strategically cultivated during instances of international political captivity. Using the case of Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus’s 2022 detention in Iran, it explores how states manipulate collective emotions – such as fear, outrage, and pride – to pursue political, ideological, or diplomatic objectives. Drawing on intergroup emotions theory (IET), it is argued that emotions are not mere by-products of crisis but deliberate tools of emotional statecraft, shaping public reactions, pressuring foreign governments, and reinforcing domestic legitimacy. Political captivity thus becomes more than coercion or negotiation. It transforms into a symbolic arena where emotional narratives escalate tensions, mobilise identity politics, and generate international support or condemnation. By linking emotion research with security and IR scholarship, this study offers a novel framework for understanding the socio-psychological dimensions of state power and highlights the volatility and strategic potential of collective emotions in global politics.

Among Jewish Washingtonians, restrictive covenants that discriminated against Black and Jewish home seekers in equal measure are a recurring theme in memories about mid-twentieth-century DC, and they remain a part of that Jewish community’s collective identity. This linking of Black and Jewish experiences with discrimination is uniquely meaningful to many American Jews, and it is difficult to extricate one story from the other. This article argues that such extrication, separating Black and Jewish encounters with racial restrictive covenants, helps to reveal the specific forms and experiences of antisemitism Jewish Washingtonians encountered, as well as how and why a shared narrative about restrictive covenants does not always reflect the region’s history of racial discrimination. This article plumbs property, community, and personal records to tell a fuller story.