The urban authorities of early modern Dutch cities employed a broad variety of public servants to manage the urban administration and provide public services relating to health, security, education, and entertainment. Neither part of the governing elite nor members of the guilds, these urban officials are of interest to historians of both work and governance. This article demonstrates that studying these public servants might yield valuable insights into premodern attitudes to work, especially public work. Using applications for employment in public office as well as petitions for improved remuneration, we analyse the value public servants of early modern Dutch cities attached to their professional activities. The town of Zwolle (c.1550–1700) serves as a case study, shedding light on the conditions under which people decided to work in urban public services. In their competition for the town’s salaried offices, candidates demonstrated considerable individual initiative, ranging from unsolicited applications to proposals concerning their personal value for the civic community. Similarly, officeholders demanded proper remuneration befitting the value of their work and their services for the town’s common good.

Investment facilitation is an increasingly important policy tool to promote foreign investment. However, we know very little about its prevalence. This paper introduces a new dataset for measuring the adoption of investment facilitation measures at country level. The Investment Facilitation Index (IFI) covers 101 measures, grouped into six policy areas, and maps adoption across 142 economies. The paper outlines the conceptual and methodological framework of the IFI, analyses the current levels of adoption, and demonstrates the index’s robustness. The data show that economies with lower adoption rates typically belong to the low-income or lower-middle-income groups, often located in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. This dataset serves as a benchmark for assessing the design and impact of international agreements, such as the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement (IFDA). It can also support the IFDA implementation by guiding domestic assessments of technical assistance needs and capacity development.

School refusal among neurodivergent students underscores systemic failures in traditional educational systems. This qualitative study, informed by the neurodiversity paradigm, examines how Flexible Learning Options (FLOs) in South Australia address drivers of disengagement, such as sensory overload, punitive discipline, and identity erasure, while fostering reengagement through autonomy, relational safety, and identity empowerment. Drawing on interviews conducted with a subsample of 18 students aged 13–19, reflexive thematic analysis resulted in the development of three themes: (1) autonomy and its limits, (2) relational safety as harm reduction, and (3) identity empowerment through neuroaffirmation. The findings reported in this paper advocate for educational models that transform flexibility from a temporary solution into a blueprint for equity, ensuring schools become spaces of support rather than harm for neurodivergent learners.

This article deals with the domestic politics of Estonia and Latvia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It studies the cases of the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) and Latvia’s National Alliance (NA). This piece concentrates on the cases of EKRE and NA with an interest in these parties’ formation processes, outlooks on identity politics, their stances vis-à-vis the EU and developments in international politics, and their relations with other political actors in Estonia and Latvia.

EKRE and NA anchor their ideological prerogatives in the longer trajectories of ethno-nationalism in Estonia and Latvia. However, whereas NA transformed into a party of the national conservative right, open to cooperation with centrist and centre-right partners, EKRE has remained a party of the radical right with a staunchly anti-systemic rhetoric and agenda. This particularity is largely to account for NA’s convergence with Latvia’s major parties on the increased securitisation of relations with Russia and EKRE’s divergence towards a rhetoric that urges a prioritisation of the national interest and a “pro-peace” stance vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.

Healthcare personnel (HCP) are at risk for occupational exposure to tuberculosis. Current guidelines for managing exposed HCP are broad and resource intensive. Based on review of our internal data, we propose a risk-based stratification approach to streamline exposure follow-up testing and optimize resource utilization.

This study examined the impact of video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SvCMC) on engagement in collaborative pre-task planning and L2 content used in task performance. One hundred twenty-eight Hong Kong learners of English were assigned to either a face-to-face (FTF) group (n = 64) or an SvCMC group (n = 64), where they completed planning for a monologic task. Based on Philp and Duchesne’s multidimensional model, planning was analyzed for cognitive (negotiation of meaning, semantically engaged talk), social (affiliative responses) and emotional engagement (enjoyment, anxiety), and task performance was coded for L2 content. Results showed that FTF mode led to significantly lower anxiety, more semantically engaged talk, and more affiliative responses, as well as conceptually richer task performances. Use of planned content was predicted by L2 proficiency and semantically engaged talk and negatively predicted by anxiety. Our findings contribute to an understanding of engagement in SvCMC and FTF modes and their impact on L2 learning.

This article offers an in-depth analysis of a little-known work, George Wallace’s A system of the principles of the law of Scotland (1760), which contains the first text in Britain that explicitly advocated total and immediate abolition of both slavery and the slave trade. Wallace’s demand was that the Scottish court immediately recognize the inalienable natural liberty of any person arriving from the American colonies, and he thus anticipated by over a decade the first court cases in Britain which did precisely that. But Wallace went even further, drawing on a wide range of ideas and theories to reject any possible justification for slavery in any form. This article discusses the ways in which he constructed his novel philosophical, political, and legal arguments, the intellectual context of his uncompromising antislavery position, and the surprisingly wide reception of his now-forgotten work. It focuses on Wallace’s nuanced engagements with his multiple sources, including his debts to Montesquieu and to his father, Robert Wallace, a freethinking Church of Scotland minister. Close attention is given to George Wallace’s radical appropriation of Roman law, as well as the laws of nature and nations – traditions that had previously been used to justify, rather than challenge, slavery.

Historian Alfred Crosby developed the concept of “portmanteau biota”—the organisms that accompany a human migration—to analyse European expansion in the Atlantic World. This concept has not been used to understand enslaved African migrations. I identify elements of the portmanteau biota of people whom slavers called “Congoes.” At least five other organisms accompanied these people from Central Africa: Cannabis, manioc, cattle, the tsetse fly, and the trypanosome that causes African sleeping sickness. Based on how these organisms affected social-ecological resilience for the “Congo” migration, I describe four ways to characterize elements of portmanteau biotas. Some organisms negatively impact social-ecological systems in which they were previously unknown; I call these “novel antagonists.” In contrast, “familiar antagonists” negatively impact social-ecological systems in which they were previously known. Other organisms, which I call “mutualists,” enhance social-ecological resilience, differing by whether they were familiar or novel in those systems. The role of any organism is context-dependant, and not categorical. Cannabis, for example, had mutualistic characteristics as it enhanced resilience for African social-ecological systems, and antagonistic characteristics as it enhanced the capacity of overseers to extract labour within plantation capitalism. Applied in this way, the portmanteau biota concept underscores the ecological complexity of human migrations.

Do politicians consider the gender of party leaders when selecting coalition partners? Little is known about whether gender shapes how political elites evaluate potential coalition allies. I theorize that politicians prefer women as coalition partners for their perceived qualities, such as consensus building, trustworthiness, and governance abilities, making them a less threatening option for politicians’ aspirations. Conducting an original conjoint experiment with 979 Spanish mayors, I find that mayors, especially those on the center and left, prefer to form coalition governments with parties led by women. The analysis of the mechanisms suggests that women leaders are perceived as easier to communicate and more competent to govern. These findings suggest that gendered perceptions and stereotypes may play a role in elite decision-making and shaping coalition preferences.