While political opposition to economic globalisation has increased, several governments have adopted stricter unilateral interventions in global supply chains in the name of sustainability, despite their potentially significant economic costs. We argue that these policy choices are partly driven by politicians’ incentives to align with domestic public opinion. In particular, new information disclosure rules enable governments to implement market access restrictions compliant with binding trade liberalisation commitments while (a priori) obscuring their costs to voters. We assess the latter argument with original survey data and experiments with representative samples from the twelve major OECD importing economies (N = 24,000). Indeed, citizens expect substantive benefits while discounting costs from these new regulations, resulting in majority support for rather stringent standards. We further observe that these relationships are muted in countries with high trade exposure. These findings suggest that governments may strategically implement unilateral policies with high-cost obfuscation to garner domestic voter support, driving regulatory proliferation in international economic relations.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear (from 1739 to 1748), more accurately known in Spanish as the “Guerra del Asiento,” marked the end of the Spanish Crown’s authorization of the British monopoly of the South Sea Company to deliver captive Africans to the Spanish Americas. The end of the British Asiento led to four decades of experimentation by various actors within the Spanish Empire trying to reestablish and expand the slave trade, which many Spanish political economy leaders increasingly saw as vital to the future of both the metropolis and the colonies. This article examines certain currents, undercurrents, and countercurrents of the deregulation of the slave trade, linking these debates to the evolving policies on colonial commerce within the Spanish Empire, as authorities in Iberia and the Americas recognized the interconnectedness of these issues and their relationship to the actual slave trading in the colonies. Besides focusing on colonial elites and reforms in colonial governance, this article demonstrates that the timelines of reforms in overall trade policy and measures regarding the slave trade were closely connected.

An open question about cartography is whether one and the same functional head may iterate on the functional hierarchy. We demonstrate that the stackability of certain modals from the same semantic class in Mandarin offers clear evidence for such a possibility.

A newly identified musical source (Columbus, Ohio, Private collection, JP.MS.220, here Ohio 220) was publicised on social media in 2019. Recognising the value of the fragment, our research prioritised establishing its contents and provenance. The single parchment folio contains four polyphonic songs for two and three voices that once sat within a larger collection. Although aspects of the notation and repertoire within Ohio 220 resemble Ars Antiqua or early Ars Nova motets from northern Europe – with which one lyric shares a poetic concordance – our examination of the source’s artistic, textual and musical features supports a provenance within central European devotional culture approximately a century later. The polyphonic songs – not motets, but in the tradition of cantiones – draw on material and notational strategies with a long, pan-European heritage. We present an edition of all four pieces, outlining, in broad terms, the original provenance for the fragment and its music.

This essay argues that the women, life, freedom movement should be understood as crucial site for the study of revolutionary praxis and feminist theory from which scholars and activists around the world can learn. While much attention has been given to efforts to co-opt the movement by monarchist and other “regime change” factions in diaspora, a lesser-known diasporic consequence has been the creation of Iranian feminist collectives oriented around intersectional and anti-colonial forms of transnational solidarity. By analyzing three such collectives that aimed to uplift critical feminist orientations emerging from the uprising in Iran, I chart shifts in ideas about organization, the meaning of revolution, and the contours of a “decolonial” feminist analysis in the Iranian context. I argue that these Iranian feminist collectives have built on the transnational feminist practice of making connections across differences, placing their critique of the Iranian state in relation to other iterations of patriarchal and militarized authoritarianism globally, including in the west.

This paper examines how the distance between a country’s official language and the languages spoken by its citizens influences accountability. Two arguments support this relationship: first, the role of language as a tool for communication between elites and citizens; and second, its role in shaping cultural patterns that underpin social interactions. Using a dataset of 147 countries, we reveal a consistent negative correlation between linguistic distance and levels of accountability across all measures. Higher educational attainment can mitigate the negative impact of a foreign official language on accountability.

New technologies don’t just change how we act – they can also reshape our moral beliefs, practices, norms and values. Technological innovations like the mechanical ventilator, autonomous weapons and gene editing challenge existing concepts, such as death, responsibility and health, and create situations our conceptual frameworks can no longer fully explain. As these technologies disrupt familiar ideas and beliefs, they push us to rethink our ethical norms and values. Understanding how technology drives these shifts is necessary if we want to respond thoughtfully to the moral challenges of the future.

Rising inequalities have been described as fertile ground for populist parties across the world. In this article, we investigate the role that inequality perception plays in strengthening populist attitudes and increasing support for populist parties. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, we find that those who perceive greater inequality in society are more likely to support populist parties. To explore the causal relationship, we also conduct a survey experiment in Denmark, Germany, and Italy, randomly exposing participants to factual information about the wealth distribution. The results show that the perception of inequality can increase populist attitudes, but does not immediately affect the likelihood of voting for populist parties in this context. The findings speak to current debates on how inequalities and their perception became a pre-condition for the rise of populist parties all over Europe.

We consider the number of edge crossings in a random graph drawing generated by projecting a random geometric graph on some compact convex set $W\subset \mathbb{R}^d$, $d\geq 3$, onto a plane. The positions of these crossings form the support of a point process. We show that if the expected number of crossings converges to a positive but finite value, this point process converges to a Poisson point process in the Kantorovich–Rubinstein distance. We further show a multivariate central limit theorem between the number of crossings and a second variable called the stress that holds when the expected vertex degree in the random geometric graph converges to a positive finite value.

We take the opportunity in this editorial that marks the end of our tenure, to offer some reflections on our experiences. It is an occasion for looking back, for reflection on the scholarship and practice of business ethics, and for celebrating some of the outstanding work that is being done in and for the journal.

In this article, we consider how zones of slow death can emerge from epistemic marginalization—specifically, the kind that occurs when a social group lacks shared interpretive models due to processes of “social descent.” Drawing on an ethnographic study of waste collectors who moved from skilled to low-skilled or unskilled labor, we explore how this epistemic marginalization is reinforced by the temporal framing of certain lives in the “past tense.” In this way, epistemic marginalization and temporal disqualification are intertwined: denying a group’s interpretive authority simultaneously enables the erasure of their claims to justice as outdated and obsolete.

Provisional measures have increasingly played a key role in protecting individual and collective rights in the African human rights system. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Court) have exhibited a proactive stance in indicating provisional measures in cases relating to the protection of the right to life, social and economic rights, and political rights, including electoral participation. The far-reaching measures of the Court, however, along with the general proactivity of the Court in finding human rights violations, have sparked a backlash, leading Rwanda, Tanzania (where the seat of the Court is located), Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and, more recently, Tunisia to withdraw their declarations allowing individuals and non-governmental organisations to petition the Court directly.

This article analyses the role of provisional measures in the African human rights system and explores the implications of this proactive approach in the context of the ongoing crisis within the African Union. It argues that the Court should show resilience vis-à-vis State reactions, asserting its role as a human rights guarantor in the region. Providing more clarity and guidance to applicants requesting emergency protection, as well as making the measures as specific as possible, could be beneficial in this respect. This would allow petitioners to gain more confidence in their pursuit of the protection of this mechanism.

This review examines the critical role of meteorological data in optimising flight trajectories and enhancing operational efficiency in aviation. Weather conditions directly influence fuel consumption, delays and safety, making their integration into flight planning increasingly vital. Understanding these dynamics becomes essential for risk mitigation as climate change drives more frequent and severe weather events. Synthesising insights from 57 studies published between 2001 and 2024, this article highlights key variables – such as wind, temperature and convective weather – significantly impacting flight operations. A framework is proposed to improve air traffic management’s safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The findings emphasise the need for systematically incorporating meteorological inputs into trajectory optimisation models, such as wind shear, convective storms and temperature gradients. This integration improves operational predictability and safety while advancing sustainability goals by reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions – an increasingly important priority amid rising climate variability and global air traffic demand.

This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. Training for the diplomats of soon to be independent states was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challenging the very foundations of imperialism by empowering the diplomats of soon to be independent African states. Drawing on archives in France, the UK, and the US, as well as a newly recorded oral history interview with one of the first cohort of Ghanaian trainees, we focus on the development of diplomatic training from ad hoc responses to requests to a more formalised programmes provided by imperial powers and the United States, and tensions and competition between providers and over the content of the courses. We focus primarily on the Gold Coast/Ghana, contextualised within wider experiences of African colonies in both the British and French empires. We demonstrate that training for diplomats provides novel insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and agency that characterised the late colonial state.

We improve, by a factor of 2, known homology stability ranges for the integral homology of symplectic groups over commutative local rings with infinite residue field and show that the obstruction to further stability is bounded below by Milnor–Witt K-theory. In particular, our stability range is optimal in many cases.