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.

Under Title II of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, firms can sell private placement securities to the public via general solicitation (GS) or privately (non-GS). We find that equity offerings under GS tend to be riskier than under non-GS. After accounting for selection, GS issuers are less likely to succeed in i) raising capital, ii) getting venture capital (VC) funding, and iii) exiting via IPO or mergers and acquisitions, and incur substantial brokerage costs for advertising and verifying investor accreditation. However, GS appears to help new entrants and offerings that use registered brokers. The success of Form D financing improves future VC financing and exit outcomes.

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.