Research on the relationship between inequality and political engagement has yielded varying conclusions. Some studies suggest that inequality fosters political action, while others indicate the opposite, and some find no significant connections. This study demonstrates that individuals’ reactions to inequality are influenced by their attribution of the causes of low income. Based on a survey of over 3,700 residents in Hong Kong, a region known for its high levels of inequality, this research finds that blame attribution significantly affects intentions to participate in collective action. Individuals often attribute income inequality to three types of factors: structural, fatalistic, and individualistic. Those who attribute inequality to structural factors are more likely to engage in collective and disruptive actions, whereas those who attribute it to personal factors are less likely to participate. Consequently, reducing inequality can contribute to social stability by decreasing the potential for collective action.

This study provides an account of the puzzling difference in case marking of the object of two-argument verbs like aider (accusative) and obéir (dative) in French. Cross-linguistically, these two verb types usually mark their object identically (e.g., accusative in English, dative in German), but French historically shows divergent trajectories. Employing logistic regression modelling and clustering techniques, this corpus-based study examines 77 verbs over 1000 years of textual record to show that aider-type verbs and obéir-type verbs systematically diverge in their case selection by the 16th century and that they have been stable ever since. We argue that their trajectories reflect the narrowing of an oblique linking rule, defined in terms of Talmy’s theory of force dynamics, which targets the difference between helping and hindering verbs on the one hand and verbs of reacting and resisting on the other. The analysis dispels long-held views that the diachronic changes were random or based strictly on analogy, and methodologically, it provides an empirical basis for connecting historical change to developmental approaches to grammar.

Political apologies have become an important tool for addressing historical injustices, yet their effectiveness—especially in international contexts—remains debated. Prior scholarship has highlighted the limitations of simple verbal apologies and emphasized the importance of tangible and observable measures. What remains unclear, however, is why such measures enhance sincerity. I argue that their effectiveness hinges on the extent to which they are perceived as requiring effort in crafting and delivering apologies. This study examines whether—and if so, how—perceived effort shapes evaluations of sincerity, drawing on two pre-registered survey experiments in South Korea that used the same survey instrument and vignette treatments, in which respondents evaluated apologies issued by Japan for its colonial rule. The results demonstrate that apologies accompanied by concrete reparative measures are perceived as involving greater effort, which in turn elevates both credibility and sincerity. These findings underscore the importance of designing political apologies that are both symbolically meaningful and visibly effortful in international historical disputes.

Housing policy has been a busy area of activity for the Labour government in its first year. In this paper we critically assess the tensions and contradictions within these housing policy changes, examining whether they add up to a coherent, programmatic response to the ‘housing crisis’ which can deliver for individuals and households struggling to access and sustain adequate housing after fourteen years of austerity and neglect. In particular, we question the underlying driver of the housebuilding target and ask whether the Labour government’s apparent desperation for economic growth is subsuming concerns for social justice, despite the increase in support for social housing – a debate with wide international resonance in the current economic context. Finally, we scrutinise whether the rapid start out of the blocks on housing policy can be maintained for the inevitable marathon that is necessary to make significant changes to the UK housing system.

This paper presents the latest results from a geoarchaeological coring survey of Rome’s central river valley: new evidence demonstrates that the Tiber Island did not exist during the early centuries of human habitation at the site of Rome. Instead, the area was characterised by a low, seasonal bar formation on the riverbed, which would conceivably have aided prehistoric fording activity. The Tiber Island first emerged as a permanent land mass as a result of rapid sedimentation in the late sixth century b.c.e. We discuss the potential causes of this major topographic change and argue that intensive deforestation to support building activities in the region was a major factor. Overall, this research sheds light on the dynamic landscape of early Rome as well as new details on the consequences of environmental exploitation that occurred alongside archaic urbanisation in Tyrrhenian central Italy.

Remapping Sovereignty examines how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty over the course of the twentieth century. While political theorists have criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority, alternatives to sovereignty remain elusive. Recasting these debates, Temin argues that activists-intellectuals in the long Red Power movement of the twentieth century engaged in complex acts of contesting and remapping the logic of sovereignty. If logics of Westphalian sovereignty revolve around “the normative centrality and perceived necessity of the claim to final and ultimate authority over a bounded space” (6) then central to its institutional practice is a refusal of the webs of relationality and interdependence on the land and human and non-human others. Rather than upholding these sovereign logics, Indigenous claims to self-determination, Temin shows, are premised not the assertion of territorial control but on the cultivation of reciprocal relations of care for the earth. Creating alternatives to both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from the constitutive disavowal of these relationalities embedded in both the concept and practice of state sovereignty.

In this paper, I investigate four sites connected to animist narratives in Northern Norway. The unrest associated with these sites is seen as being caused by human activity but carried out by disruptive forces. Sometimes the causes are known; sometimes they are unknown, but still connected to active agencies in these landscapes. The narratives relate to two types of forces that can make a place uneasy: chthonic forces and harmful deeds of humans against nature or other people. Implicit within these narrations and interpretations is an animistic worldview: places can and do remember. The places presented here are situated close to current or past Sámi settlements, suggesting that they are the result of animist and possibly shamanic practices and cosmologies. This reveals an ongoing concern with disruption of human/nature relations and attributed continued meaning through the Sámi narrative tradition. Sámi language originally had no word for nature. Luondo, the name used today, originally meant personality of humans, animals, or places, and illustrates my entry point into these phenomena.

I begin where Temin’s book does, with the #NODAPL movement. The movement emerged in 2016 as Standing Rock Sioux citizens organized to stop the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across their ancestral lands. As Sioux scholar-activist Nick Estes argues, the #NODAPL movement is part of a longer history of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in the US.1 It is also part of a history of 500 years of Indigenous resistance in the Americas/Abya Yala, one that has intensified with the contemporary expansion of extractive industries. Indigenous resistance in extractive hot zones such as the Amazon has in recent years included pipeline takeovers, blockades, and legal activism to halt land concessions to companies by the state. The response to this activism has been increased violence against protesters and their criminalization.2

Understanding how invertebrates respond to disturbance is essential for anticipating the effects of anthropogenic developments. In western Canada’s boreal forests, linear corridor disturbances constructed for oil and gas exploration, called seismic lines, are pervasive. Previous research indicates that butterfly abundance and species richness increase along conventional seismic lines (6–12 m wide) in peatland boreal forest and that at least one butterfly species preferentially uses these seismic lines as travel corridors. Here, we investigated how a butterfly assemblage’s abundance, species richness, and movement responded to seismic lines in the dry, sandy Richardson area of Alberta, Canada’s boreal forest. We used Malaise traps at five sites to compare butterfly abundance, species richness, and movement direction on conventional seismic lines to 50 m into the adjacent interior forest. Butterfly abundance and richness were 7.8 times and 1.5 times higher, respectively, on conventional seismic lines than in the forest interior. Butterflies were also 6.5 times as abundant flying across seismic lines than flying along them. These results demonstrate that conventional seismic lines are locally increasing butterfly abundance and diversity in boreal forests, while also further affecting butterfly movement behaviour compared to undisturbed boreal forest habitat.

Given a Fourier transformable measure in two dimensions, we find a formula for the intensity of its Fourier transform along circles. In particular, we obtain a formula for the diffraction measure along a circle in terms of the autocorrelation measure. We then look at some applications of this formula.

The article analyses the role of victim organisations in shaping memory laws in the Czech Republic and Germany after 1989. The study focuses on four key actors: the Confederation of Political Prisoners (Konfederace politických vězňů; KPV) in the Czech Republic and, in Germany, the Association of Victims of Stalinism (Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus; VOS), the Association of Victims of Stalinist Persecution (Bund der Stalinistisch Verfolgten; BSV) and the Union of Victims’ Associations of Communist Tyranny (Union der Opferverbände Kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft; UOKG). The present study examines the interests, strategies and interactions of the subjects with political elites and among themselves. This article employs the conceptual frameworks of transitional justice and the politics of victimhood. The analysis is structured around case studies of selected memory laws that illustrate key moments of interaction between political leaders and victim organisations. These include the judicial rehabilitation laws adopted in the early 1990s in both countries; the 2007 German law introducing the so-called Opferrente (pension supplement for victims of the SED dictatorship); and the 2011 Czech Act on Participants in the Resistance and Opposition against Communism. The findings demonstrate that the unified and influential KPV in the Czech Republic achieved considerable legislative success, while in Germany, fragmentation and rivalry among victim organisations served to limit their impact. The comparative perspective underscores that success is contingent on not only the suffering endured but also the capacity to construct a shared narrative, mobilise resources and capitalise on propitious political contexts.

This article revisits the often contradictory experience of Allied rule in Italy, challenging the narrative of liberation and proposing instead to embrace more emphatically the lens of ‘occupation’. Building on the author’s own contribution to the field and reviewing the evolution of the literature over the past decades, it explores five central themes that help redefine our understanding of this era: the temporal and spatial backdrop against which Allied rule unfolded, shaped by the notion of ‘co-belligerency’; the impact of total war on Italian society; the role of British and American military and political leadership in shaping occupation policy; the cultural and symbolic influence of American forces; and the impact of war and occupation on women. It argues that the occupation regime profoundly shaped Italy’s experience during the mid-twentieth century as well as its postwar identity, contributing to a persistent national pacifism and ambivalence towards the new superpowers.

We consider the asymptotic behaviour of the expectation of the perimeter deviation of a uniform random spherical disc–polygon in a spherical spindle convex disc with smooth boundary. We also introduce the notion of duality on the sphere, define a model of random circumscribed disc–polygons, and determine some asymptotic results about them.

All animals, through their behaviours, modify their habitats. However, except for ecosystem engineers, for most species we know little about these modifications and their ecological consequences. Here, we assessed whether mantled howler monkeys in Mexico, through group defecations under sleeping trees, create microhabitats in the understory through increased dung beetle and rodent activity. In defecation and control sites, we sampled dung beetles with pitfall traps and rodents with camera traps. We also used experimental stations to measure dung removal and secondary seed dispersal by dung beetles and seed predation/removal by rodents. Supporting our hypothesis, we found that defecation sites had higher abundance of beetles and prolonged rodent visitation after one day and higher seed predation/removal after seven days. However, we found no differences in dung removal or secondary seed dispersal by dung beetles between defecation and control sites. Finally, contrary to our prediction, defecation sites had fewer photo records of rodents than control sites. Overall, our study shows that monkey group defecations under sleeping trees can create short-term microhabitat heterogeneity, although not necessarily in the expected direction. The next step will be to determine whether such effects can have longer-term consequences for forest ecology, such as promoting plant species coexistence.