This article focuses on unilateral sovereignty referendums pursued by territorial autonomies. Due to their unilateral character, such referendums are unlikely to gain external recognition and, as a result, fail to effect or prevent any de jure change in sovereignty. However, they are still pursued despite these constraints, suggesting that they serve purposes other than formal changes in sovereignty. To explain this phenomenon, the article proposes a framework of seven potential motivations. The framework is examined through the case of Gagauzia’s 2014 referendums, which addressed two key issues: Moldova’s foreign alignment and Gagauzia’s deferred independence. The analysis follows three referendum stages — proposal, initiation, and implementation — focusing on the dual leadership of the executive and legislative branches. Drawing primarily on newspapers affiliated with these branches, the study finds empirical support for three key motivations: advancing the individual and collective political interests of autonomy leadership, strengthening Gagauzia’s ties with its patron (Russia), and empowering the territorial autonomy vis-à-vis the parent state (Moldova). This article contributes a framework of motivations for unilateral sovereignty referendums tailored specifically to territorial autonomies, going beyond existing explanations developed for all polities. It also provides a detailed account of one of the most significant political events in Gagauzia’s history.

For much of imperial Chinese history, chroniclers and explorers understood a maritime land called Liuqiu to be the Ryūkyūs. In the early twentieth century, however, a new dynastic history claimed that Liuqiu was in fact Taiwan. This article explores how and why an uncontested and unambiguous understanding of Chinese maritime history was suddenly rewritten in the modern world, becoming the accepted interpretation and shaping twenty-first century geopolitics. While scholars have weighed the veracity of Liuqiu as either Taiwan or Ryūkyū, this article focuses on how the Liuqiu–Taiwan thesis was produced and transmitted, showing how scientific methodology, imperialism, and nationalism worked to reshape geographical history. The article further contributes to an understanding of the shaping of the borders and claims of the modern Chinese nation: whereas scholars have investigated late Qing and early Republican debates over the western frontier and ethnicities, this article shows that questions over Taiwan were just as important.

The European praying mantis, Mantis religiosa (Linnaeus, 1758) (Mantodea: Mantidae), is an introduced predatory insect established in southwestern and southeastern Canada and much of the United States of America. Despite over a century of records, the geographic origins of North American populations have remained unclear. We analysed 807-bp fragments of the mitochondrial CO1 gene from 17 sequences from southern Quebec and Ontario, Canada, comparing them to 175 sequences from western, eastern, and southern Europe. Population genetics analyses revealed that Canadian samples carry haplotypes from two divergent lineages that co-occur in a localised region of western France. These haplotypes showed the closest affinities to others also found in France, strongly supporting a French origin. Historical records from Rochester, New York, United States of America, where M. religiosa was first documented in 1899, suggest introduction via the 19th-century horticultural trade. The low haplotype diversity in Canada may reflect founder effects or environmental filtering, though additional, undetected introductions remain possible. This study clarifies the likely French source of M. religiosa in southeastern Canada and underscores the value of combining molecular data and historical accounts to track invasion pathways.

Let $f \in \mathbb{Q}[x]$ be a square-free polynomial of degree at least $3$, $m_i$, $i=1,2,3$, odd positive integers, and $a_i$, $i=1,2,3$, non-zero rational numbers. We show the existence of a rational function $D\in \mathbb{Q}(v_1,v_2,v_3,v_4)$ such that the Jacobian of the quadratic twist of $y^2=f(x)$ and the Jacobian of the $m_i$-twist, respectively, $2m_i$-twist, of $y^2=x^{m_i}+a_i^2$, $i=1,2,3$, by $D$ are all of positive Mordell–Weil ranks. As an application, we present families of hyperelliptic curves with large Mordell–Weil rank.

In a game with costly information acquisition, the ability of one player to acquire information directly affects her opponent’s incentives for gathering information. Rational inattention theory then posits the opponent’s information-acquisition strategy is a direct function of these incentives. This paper argues that people are cognitively limited in predicting their opponent’s level of information, and hence lack the strategic sophistication that the theory requires. In an experiment involving a real-effort attention task and a simple two-player trading game, I study the ability of subjects to (1) anticipate the information acquisition of opponents in this strategic game, and (2) best respond to this information acquisition when acquiring their own costly information. I study this by exogenously manipulating the difficulty of the attention task for both the player and their opponent. Predictions of behavior are generated by a novel theoretical model in which Level-K agents can acquire information à la rational inattention. I find an out-sized lack of strategic sophistication, driven largely by the cognitive difficulties of predicting opponent information. These results suggest a necessary integration of the theories of rational inattention and costly sophistication in strategic settings.

A particular fashion and lifestyle aesthetic called kankokuppo (Koreaish) has gained popularity among young Japanese women in the early 2020s, who increasingly admire what they perceive to embody the “atmosphere (fun’iki)” of South Korea. This article examines the semiotic rendering of a sensuous perception of Korea identified as “Koreaish” through aesthetically embodied practices and mediatized discourses. The analysis reveals the centrality of what I call a “soft unity”: softness that arises from ambiguated boundaries, taken up across discrete objects, practices, and social value regimes. Alongside growing calls to change Japanese society from a divisive to a borderless one, this softness is valorized as the quality of idealized sociality despite its association with highly normative femininity. The emergent “Koreaish” is emblematic of the postfeminist reformulation of the feminine ideal in neoliberal Japan, which manifests as a nexus of the demanifestation of differences and the reversion to conservative feminine values.

The focus of existing research on perceived organizational support (POS) has largely been concentrated at the individual-level, leaving an understudied gap at a higher unit-level of analysis. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the multilevel relationship between employee POS and job satisfaction, emphasizing the moderating role of unit-level POS. We hypothesize, based on POS theory and social comparison theory, that unit-level POS serves as a contextual moderator for the relationship between individual-level POS and job satisfaction. Additionally, at the unit-level, we identify clan culture values and unit-satisfaction as correlates of unit-POS. We test our hypotheses using a Bayesian Multilevel Structural Modeling approach on 45 work units and 317 employees. The results show that at low levels of unit-level POS, individual-level POS is more important for employees’ job satisfaction. We furthermore found support for a positive association between unit-level POS, unit-clan culture, and unit satisfaction. Our results, and their notable theoretical and practical implications, are discussed.

Linear stability studies are presented for a quasi-axisymmetric stellarator equilibrium which is unstable with respect to external kink and peeling-ballooning modes. Using the three-dimensional linear stability CASTOR3D code, the effects of parallel viscosity, gyro-viscosity, ion diamagnetic drift velocity, ExB velocity and an externally driven flow in direction of the quasi-symmetry are investigated with respect to their influence on growth rate, oscillation frequency and mode structure.

This article traces the origins and evolution of the Shanghai Bund within a comparative framework of transimperial urban forms. Existing scholarship has offered divergent interpretations – imperial metropolitan precedents, cross-colonial transfers and local antecedents – which this article argues are complementary rather than contradictory. It further moves beyond broad regional claims through specifying concrete cases supported by new archival evidence. Drawing on records mainly from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, The National Archives in the UK and contemporary newspapers, the article shows how Singapore’s Boat Quay, Calcutta’s Strand Road and London’s Thames Embankment were selectively appropriated to meet shifting sanitary, political and economic needs. Localized over successive decades, these borrowings crystallized into a Bund form – landscaped, monumental, with a financial core and technologically modern – that became a model for other treaty ports and was reproduced across the imperial world and beyond. The Bund’s history is thus a microcosm of the circulation and remaking of ideas within the wider networks of the British Empire.

The concepts of ‘dangerous’, ‘celebratory’, and ‘hegemonic’ multilingualism provide a valuable heuristic to explore language ideologies within supranational organizations like the United Nations. Adopting a critical stance in relation to the functions and values assigned to multilingualism and applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examines three ideological manifestations: verbalizations, metapragmatic acts, and linguistic practices in United Nations debates on the 1995 multilingualism resolution. The study analyses how member state representatives index their ideological stance: metadiscursively via verbalizations within the context of language policy debates, via acts of voting, and via their use of multilingualism as positioning devices within these debates. Unlike previous investigations of language ideology which have predominantly and exclusively focussed on discursive analyses of texts, this article forwards a tripartite analytic framework. We argue that this model serves to afford a holistic examination of practised and stated attitudes towards multilingualism, which in turn have consequences for language policy outcomes. (Language ideology, language policy, multilingualism, United Nations)