In this article, I consider the potential integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into resort-to-force decision-making from a Just War perspective. I evaluate two principles from this tradition: (1) the jus ad bellum principle of “reasonable prospect of success” and (2) the more recent jus ad vim principle of “the probability of escalation.” More than any other principles of Just War, these prudential standards seem amenable to the probabilistic reasoning of AI-driven systems. I argue, however, that this optimism in the potential of AI-optimized decision-making is largely misplaced. We need to cultivate a tragic sensibility in war – a recognition of the inescapable limits of foresight, the permanence of uncertainty and the dangers of unconstrained ambition. False confidence in the efficacy of these systems will blind us to their technical limits. It will also, more seriously, obscure the deleterious impact of AI on the process of resort-to-force decision-making; its potential to suffocate the moral and political wisdom so essential to the responsible exercise of violence on the international stage.

This article investigates the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data on political and military deliberations concerning the decision to wage war. By conceptualising AI as part of a broader, interconnected technology ecosystem – encompassing data, connectivity, energy, compute capacity and workforce – the article introduces the notion of “architectures of AI” to describe the underlying infrastructure shaping contemporary security and sovereignty. It demonstrates how these architectures concentrate power within a select number of technology companies, which increasingly function as national security actors capable of influencing state decisions on the resort to force. The article identifies three critical factors that collectively alter the calculus of war: (i) the concentration of power across the architectures of AI, (ii) the diffusion of national security decision making, and (iii) the role of AI in shaping public opinion. It argues that, as technology companies amass unprecedented control over digital infrastructure and information flows, most nation states – particularly smaller or less technologically advanced ones – experience diminished autonomy in decisions to use force. The article specifically examines how technology companies can coerce, influence or incentivise the resort-to-force decision making of smaller states, thereby challenging traditional notions of state sovereignty and international security.

The use of artificial intelligence-driven decision-support systems (AI DSS) to assist human calculations on the resort to military force has raised concerns that automation bias may displace human judgments. Such fears are compounded by the complexities and pathologies of organisational decision making. Discussions of AI often revolve around better training AI models with more copious amounts of technical data, but this article poses research questions that shift the focus to a human-centric and institutional approach. How can governments better train human decision makers and restructure institutional settings within which humans operate to minimise the risks of automation bias and deskilling? This article begins by exploring how governments have invested in AI literacy education and capacity-building. Second, it demonstrates how the need to question groupthink and challenge assumptions in decision making becomes even more relevant as the use of AI DSS become more prevalent. Third, human decision makers operate within institutional structures with internal audit trails and organisational cultures, inter-agency networks and intelligence-sharing partnerships that may mitigate the risks of human deskilling. Bolstering these three inter-locking, mutually reinforcing elements of education, challenge functions and institutions offers some avenues for managing automation bias in decisions on the resort to force.

As artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasing role in operations on battlefields, we should consider how it might also be used in the strategic decisions that happen before a military operation even occurs. One such critical decision that nations must make is whether to use armed force. There is often only a small group of political and military leaders involved in this decision-making process. Top military commanders typically play an important role in these deliberations around whether to use force. These commanders are relied upon for their expertise. They provide information and guidance about the military options available and the potential outcomes of those actions. This article asks two questions: (1) how do military commanders make these judgements? and (2) how might AI be used to assist them in their critical decision-making processes? To address the first, I draw on existing literature from psychology, philosophy, and military organizations themselves. To address the second, I explore how AI might augment the judgment and reasoning of commanders deliberating over the use of force. While there is already a robust body of work exploring the risks of using AI-driven decision-support systems, this article focuses on the opportunities, while keeping those risks firmly in view.

La Viña rock shelter is a relevant archaeological site for understanding the late Middle and Upper Palaeolithic cultural development in northern Iberia as evidenced by the Mousterian, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian bone and lithic industries, parietal engravings and human subsistence remains recovered during the 1980s excavations by J. Fortea in the western and central excavation areas. This paper aims to present 16 new radiocarbon dates, which are added to the previous radiocarbon dates obtained, using different analytical methods on bone and charcoal. These are now 57 dates in total. Bayesian models have been applied to assess and discern the chronology of the archaeological sequence in each sector of the rock shelter. The results provide details on the chronostratigraphy of each excavation area, documenting the duration of the different technocultural phases and confirming in-site postdepositional events.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being incorporated into military decision making in the form of decision-support systems (DSS). Such systems may offer data-informed suggestions to those responsible for making decisions regarding the resort to force. While DSS are not new in military contexts, we argue that AI-enabled DSS are sources of additional complexity in an already complex resort-to-force decision-making process that – by its very nature – presents the dual potential for both strategic stability and harm. We present three categories of complexity relevant to AI – interactive and nonlinear complexity, software complexity, and dynamic complexity – and examine how such categories introduce or exacerbate risks in resort-to-force decision-making. We then provide policy recommendations that aim to mitigate some of these risks in practice.

In sociology, aesthetics have become an important lens for exploring the sensory dimensions of political and economic processes, with research on urban aesthetics contributing significantly to this field. However, much of this work focuses on how aesthetic forms serve the interests of political and economic elites, portraying aesthetic value as a direct product of political ideologies. While these approaches have shown that urban aesthetics are shaped by power struggles, they pay limited theoretical attention to less straightforward aspects of aesthetic politics—such as cases where clashing values, imperatives, and commitments meet. This gap is particularly pronounced in places shaped by violent histories, where the value of urban beauty might be inevitably entangled with loss, ambivalence, and co-existence with unwanted materialities. This article proposes an approach that foregrounds the dilemmas and compromises inherent in urban aesthetic politics, focusing on the varied practices through which people negotiate how to care for urban aesthetic value over time. I develop this approach through a case study of Klaipėda, Lithuania—a city shaped by layered aesthetic transformations, from state annexation to socialist modernisation to post-Soviet nation-building and Europeanisation. Using mixed-methods research, the article highlights differences in how people articulate what counts as good and bad aesthetics and which forms of material care—or neglect—are “appropriate” to sustain the city’s desirable aesthetic appeal. In doing so, the article reveals complex gradations of value underlying seemingly coherent aesthetic ideals of Europeanness.

In a resort-to-force setting, what standard of care must a state follow when using AI to avoid international responsibility for a wrongful act? This article develops three scenarios based around a state-owned autonomous system that erroneously resorts to force (the Flawed AI System, the Poisoned AI System, and the Competitive AI System). It reveals that although we know what the substantive jus ad bellum and international humanitarian law rules are, international law says very little about the standards of care to which a state must adhere to meet its substantive obligations under those bodies of law. The article argues that the baseline standard of care under the jus ad bellum today requires a state to act in good faith and in an objectively reasonable way, and it describes measures states should consider taking to meet that standard when deploying AI or autonomy in their resort-to-force systems. It concludes by explaining how clarifying this standard of care will benefit states by reducing the chance of unintended conflicts.

In Western democracies the decision to go to war is made in ways that ensure decision-makers can be held accountable. In particular, bureaucracies rely on the production of a range of documents such as records of meetings to ensure accountability. Inserting AI into the decision-making process means finding ways to make sure that AI can also be held accountable for decisions to resort to force. But problems of accountability arise in this context because AI does not produce the type of documents associated with bureaucratic accountability: it is this gap in documentary capacity which is at the core of the troubling search for accountable AI in the context of the decision to go to war. This paper argues that the search for accountable AI is essentially an attempt to solve problems of epistemic uncertainty via documentation. The paper argues that accountability can be achieved in other ways. It adopts the example of new forms of evidence in the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) to show that epistemic uncertainty can be resolved and accountability apportioned without absolute epistemic certainty and without documentation in the sense commonly associated with accountability in a bureaucratic context.

In this article, we maintain that the anticipated integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled systems into state-level decision making over whether and when to wage war will be accompanied by a hitherto neglected risk. Namely, the incorporation of such systems will engender subtle but significant changes to the state’s deliberative and organisational structures, its culture, and its capacities – and in ways that could undermine its adherence to international norms of restraint. In offering this provocation, we argue that the gradual proliferation and embeddedness of AI-enabled decision-support systems within the state – what we call the ‘phenomenon of “Borgs in the org”’ – will lead to four significant changes that, together, threaten to diminish the state’s crucial capacity for ‘institutional learning’. Specifically, the state’s reliance on AI-enabled decision-support systems in deliberations over war initiation will invite: (i) disrupted deliberative structures and chains of command; (ii) the occlusion of crucial steps in decision-making processes; (iii) institutionalised deference to computer-generated outputs; and (iv) future plans and trajectories that are overdetermined by past policies and actions. The resulting ‘institutional atrophy’ could, in turn, weaken the state’s responsiveness to external social cues and censure, thereby making the state less likely to engage with, internalise, and adhere to evolving international norms of restraint. As a collateral effect, this weakening could contribute to the decay of these norms themselves if such institutional atrophy were to become widespread within the society of states.

Gender, as a sociostructural factor, may shape child development through social norms that influence family dynamics. We examined whether more egalitarian parental relationships are associated with better developmental outcomes. Using data from the Pelotas 1993 birth cohort (Brazil), we adapted a population-level gender inequality metric to characterise parental relationships. The Couple’s Gender Inequality Index (CGII) was derived from maternal health, parental education and income. Associations between CGII and educational attainment, quality of life, and depression at age 18 were assessed using linear regression models adjusted for family income, gestational age, birth weight, parental cohabitation and race. The sample comprised 2,852 participants (1,446 women). Higher CGII scores, indicating greater equality within couples, were associated with significantly higher educational attainment in both females and males. Higher quality of life at age 18 was observed in the second and fourth CGII quartiles compared with the most unequal. Greater equality was associated with lower risk of depression at age 18, although this association was not robust to adjustment. Among girls, a similar pattern was observed for emotional symptoms at age 15. Overall, greater couple-level gender inequality was associated with poorer developmental outcomes in offspring.

Mental health legislation across Africa has evolved significantly from colonial-era frameworks. An adapted version of the FOSTREN* (Fostering and Strengthening Approaches to Reducing Coercion in European Mental Health Services) instrument, which is a comprehensive assessment tool based on the World Health Organisation Mental Health Legislation Checklist and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, was used to analyse mental health laws from Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Cabo Verde and Kenya. The comparative analysis showed varying alignment with international human rights standards, reflecting complex interactions between global frameworks and local realities. All the mental health laws analysed show movement towards rights-based approaches, although implementation challenges related to resource constraints, service delivery capacity and cultural integration remain significant barriers. Ghana’s formal integration of complementary and alternative medicine into its mental health framework, which requires cooperation between the Mental Health Authority and Traditional and Alternative Medicine Council, and the inclusion of people with lived experience of mental health conditions in review panels are examples of innovative approaches that show promise for regional adoption. While some form of supported decision-making is available, none of the countries offer advanced care directives. The study highlights that legislative reform alone is insufficient without addressing contextual factors like poverty, healthcare financing and integration of traditional healing practices in developing rights-based mental health care systems.

L’année 2024 est marquée à la fois par la passivité de la pratique conventionnelle du Canada et l’hyperactivité de sa pratique contentieuse. L’apurement de l’arriéré des réclamations fondées sur le régime de règlement des différends entre investisseurs et États (RDIE) de l’Accord de libre-échange nord-américain entre le gouvernement du Canada, le gouvernement des États-Unis et le gouvernement du Mexique (ALÉNA) se poursuit.1 De nombreuses sentences sont aussi rendues dans des affaires portées par des investisseurs canadiens à l’étranger, des sociétés minières pour l’essentiel. Ces affaires permettent de tester les innovations juridiques visant à renforcer le droit de légiférer de l’État dans les traités plus récents du Canada. Une première sentence très attendue sur la question hautement controversée de la portée temporelle du régime transitoire de RDIE de l’Accord entre le Canada, les États-Unis et le Mexique (ACÉUM)2 est rendue dans l’affaire TC Energy et TransCanada c États-Unis (II)3 et se solde en faveur de l’État. La controverse sur la portée temporelle de ce régime transitoire fait l’objet d’une analyse détaillée dans la chronique cette année. Un tour d’horizon des principaux autres faits marquants de 2024 est d’abord effectué en ce qui concerne la pratique conventionnelle et la pratique contentieuse du Canada.

Academic research institutions using REDCap often face challenges aligning with U.S. FDA requirements for electronic records and signatures under 21 CFR Part 11 (Part 11). A National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences(NCATS) working group developed an implementation guide for Part 11 compliance in REDCap. Within six months after release, 259 individuals representing 164 institutions accessed the guide. Individuals who downloaded the guide reported reduced vendor reliance, improved documentation, and establishment Part 11-ready REDCap instances. This working group demonstrated how collaboration between technical and regulatory experts at many peer institutions is effective in improving regulatory compliance across the research enterprise.

Recent palaeobiological studies have emphasized the need for interpretations of the fossil record to consider spatial changes in environmental conditions (e.g. topography, climate). Establishing the role the environment plays in determining the distributions of extinct and existing organisms is complicated by biological evolution. Using available observations to ‘see through’ the randomness of biological evolution to determine contributions from environmental change is not trivial because of the sparsity of the fossil record, lack of precise information about rates of evolution, and because we obviously cannot physically re-run the evolutionary history that resulted in modern biodiversity or the fossil record. To address these issues, we establish scales and scenarios in which spatial environmental change is manifested in records of the number of species in a given area (richness) generated by eco-evolutionary simulation. Evolutionary processes that are likely to be random on the timescales of environmental change are included. Signals of environmental change that are likely to be hidden by the effects of ‘noisy’ evolutionary processes and those likely to emerge are identified. The ‘experiment of life’ is simulated many times, producing statistical insights. Results show that the spatial rate of environmental change is strongly correlated with species richness when the ability of organisms to disperse is high. Interaction between scale, dispersal and environmental structure is shown to determine both statistical and spatial distributions of richness. As a proof-of-concept, we compare predictions to bird species richness. The results emphasize the need to consider the randomness of evolution when interpreting the observations of extinct or present life on Earth.

Despite the critical role academic medical institutions play in promoting equity and inclusion, these efforts are often undermined by fragmented and siloed evaluation approaches, a lack of theory-driven models, and inadequate data-driven methodologies. This commentary critically examines the factors contributing to the persistent challenges in implementing and advancing equity and inclusion initiatives in the United States (U.S.), focusing on academic medical institutions in particular. It underscores the need for theory-guided frameworks to better structure and evaluate such initiatives and highlights existing gaps in accountability and data-driven decision-making. Moreover, it argues for an integrated approach that combines multidisciplinary strategies, promoting collaboration across different sectors to develop more comprehensive and sustainable solutions. Ultimately, effective evaluation – grounded in data, theory, and diverse perspectives – is essential for promoting equity and inclusion and addressing disparities in U.S. academic medical institutions. By addressing these structural and evaluative shortcomings, institutions can move towards more impactful and equitable outcomes for underrepresented groups in STEM fields and the biomedical workforce more broadly.