The work of non-profit organisations (NPOs) in non-democratic country contexts tends to be judged on their contribution to the democratisation process rather than the activities they undertake.This neglects the potential impact NPOs have on societies within such contexts. In this study, we highlight that NPOs can influence public policy deployment in the Russian Federation even if they cannot affect public policy itself. By operationalising the very restrictions placed upon them, NPOs use their relationships with the state to effect change within their immediate environment and scope of their operational remit, even if they cannot hold authorities to account or influence policy development. The key to this is strong organising capabilities and engagement with the Russian public. We reflect on the implications of our findings to the understanding of civil society development and NPOs in Russia and in other similar non-democratic contexts.

This study investigates the suitability of student-driven internationalisation of the curriculum in a diverse educational setting. Despite its vast educational potential, internationalisation of the curriculum is an often-missing component of general internationalisation even in programmes and courses with a diverse student body. To remedy this shortcoming in a course of international politics, I introduced a teaching and learning innovation, which encouraged students to use examples based on personal experiences and regional background—rather than merely from the assigned literature—during their arguments in preparation for and during biweekly seminars. In addition, the assessment criteria were shifted to support the sharing of information and knowledge among peers in this course, called “Theories of Cooperation and Conflict in International Relations”. The study uses a quasi-experimental setup and offers a comprehensive mixed-methods analysis of the innovation and finds that student learning and their classroom experience was positively impacted. While students did use notably more “own experience” examples and improved in their written preparatory work for the seminars, they turned to these very cautiously in the actual classroom debates. The findings are explained by the interplay between internationalisation and decolonisation of the classroom and the increased stakes in assessment criteria.

This article presents a new strategy for reviewing large, multidisciplinary academic literatures: a multi-method comprehensive review (MCR). We present this approach and demonstrate its use by the NGO Knowledge Collective, which aims to aggregate knowledge on NGOs in international development. We explain the process by which scholars can identify, analyze, and synthesize a population of hundreds or thousands of articles. MCRs facilitate cross-disciplinary synthesis, systematically identify gaps in a literature, and can create data for further scholarly use. The main drawback is the significant resources needed to manage the volume of text to review, although such obstacles may be mitigated through advances in “big data” methodologies over time.

What motivates a political party to develop overseas development volunteering projects for members? How do such activities affect individual volunteers and the party, more broadly? To address these questions, this paper analyses the UK Conservative Party’s international development volunteering projects. Our data comprise 38 interviews with former volunteers and participant observation of one volunteering project in Rwanda in 2017 by one author. This predominantly self-reported data are supplemented with publicly available sources. We draw on employer-supported and state-supported volunteering literature to develop a framework for analysing drivers and effects of party-supported volunteering. We argue that political parties are under-researched sending communities, and that development volunteering constitutes a strategic resource that can be invoked to legitimise engagement with, and authority in, international development as part of the everyday political identity of Party members. As such, how volunteering is used to signal authority in a policy area warrants further research.

In recent years, INGO legitimacy has been subject to growing scrutiny from analysts and practitioners alike. Critics have highlighted a backlash against INGOs in the Global South, a growing mismatch between INGO capacities and contemporary global challenges, and diminishing support for norms such as democracy and human rights that underpin INGOs’ work. Although these problems have attracted significant attention within the academic literature, this article argues that existing explorations of INGO legitimacy have broadly conformed either to a top-down approach focused on global norms and institutions or a bottom-up approach focused on the local dynamics surrounding states and populations in the Global South. We suggest that this divide is unhelpful for understanding the current predicament and propose a new approach, which pays closer attention to the interaction between bottom-up and top-down dimensions, and to historical context. This new approach can provide important insights into current debates about the future roles and internal structures of INGOs.

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have transformed protein science, enabling engineering and de novo design of artificial proteins with novel structures and functions. However, experimental analysis of key design features, such as oligomerization, folding, ligand binding, and dynamic conformational changes, remains critical. Here, we outline how mass spectrometry (MS) complements protein design through its ability to corroborate a wide range of design objectives. Furthermore, engineered proteins have become valuable tools for exploring the use of MS in detecting structural features, charge effects, and weak interactions by serving as testbeds for method development. Integrating ML and native MS thus creates a feedback loop: new designs challenge analytical techniques, while improved methods provide richer data to guide and improve future predictions. This synergy is vital for expanding the capabilities of protein engineering, including toward applications in synthetic biology and artificial protocell development.

Time is among the most fundamental categories of political and, specifically, democratic life. While time in the sociopolitical world leaves traces in many (subtle) ways, we do not find it among the guiding concepts of democratic theory. This Special Issue, therefore, understands itself as part of a project that traces the centrality of time and temporality in democratic theory and practice. Our goal is to move toward an in-depth discussion of time in democratic theory by unearthing and systematizing the fragments of this emerging agenda. In this editorial, we deepen the status of time in democratic theory. We do this by discussing both the research that explicitly addresses the relationship between time and democracy and the many latent forms of how temporality shapes democratic thinking. Finally, we identify three dimensions of how time is relevant in and for democratic theory, and we locate the contributions to this Special Issue regarding these dimensions.

Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic review of 133 articles develops a better understanding of this scaling process. From the literature, we conceptualize impact as the result of two different pathways: ‘scaling out’ (extending geographical space or volume) and ‘scaling up’ (influence on public discourses, political agendas and legislation). The review identified strategy, actor characteristics and institutional environment as key factors for scaling. The literature indicates that for strategy a focus on open structures generates speed and higher impact, but we also found critical views on this. The literature shows that the actor characteristics such as the ambition to scale, equal focus on the economic and the social logic, entrepreneurial skills and leadership are positively related to the level of impact. The institutional environment influences actor characteristics and strategy choices and also has a direct effect on the level of social and sustainable impact.

This article analyzes various roles of development practitioners (called outsiders) in five different cases of community-based development (CBD) in rural Iran. It provides a review of the literature on CBD and identifies three main types of roles fulfilled by outsiders to support indigenous development processes. These include preparing the ground, activating community-based organizations as participatory institutions, and taking on the role of brokers who bridge the gap between the local community and outside institutions—especially the state and market. From the analysis of empirical qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Iran, the article concludes that while the roles played by the outsiders in CBD interventions there correspond mostly to those identified in the literature, there are differences in their strategies of intervention and activities under each role which correspond with their contextual contingencies. Recognizing this variation is needed to deepen the understanding of CBD practices and help practitioners think about alternative perspectives and approaches.

This article casts new light on the processes of collective claims and identity formation in social movements, with the help of the radical political framework of Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, Verso, London, 2001). Polish tenants, classified as “losers” of transition and marginalized in the mainstream discourse, nevertheless act collectively, mobilizing alliances with other democratic struggles and thus challenge the hegemony of neoliberal dogmas in the country. The very fact of mobilization of a socially and economically deprived group demanding the right to the city is provocative in the studied context. The empirical foundations of our study are 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Polish tenants’ activists cross-referenced with media material produced by and about the movement, and previous studies on the topic. The contribution of this article is twofold: it combines social movement theory with radical political framework and fills the empirical gap in the body of literature on social movements in post-socialist Europe.

Against the calls for the development of ‘a more than human’ gerontology, this article challenges the assumptions behind this move by positing that its dependence on post-humanist epistemologies and ontologies risks making age a matter more of the imagination than of human mattering, of assemblage more than of meaning. The ‘decentring’ involved in such approaches of what is distinctly human about ageing has led to an imaginary ontology of flattened ‘assemblages’ of age. While these post-humanist developments might seem to offer an imaginative leap into a ‘more than human’ world, the radicalism implied can equally be understood as being largely rhetorical, designed to impress rather than inform our thinking. If the distinctly human experience of age and finitude is absented from our thinking, the mattering of ageing risks being reduced to no more than the universal flux of an impersonal vitalism. We would conclude that it is still critically important for gerontology to maintain its privileging of the human and more generally of humanism in thinking about and researching the tasks it sets itself.

In civic education and political science classes, simulation games are increasingly recognised as a teaching tool to promote active learning, expecting them to enhance participants’ motivations and to convey transferable knowledge and skills. Furthermore, they have been described as a promising teaching approach with regard to the complex multi-level system of the European Union (EU). Empirical studies have underlined positive effects of simulation games; however, they usually either use purely qualitative or very small-N quantitative approaches. More systematic studies conducted recently didn’t focus on causes of the measured effects and have lacked depth due to a closed items design. The study presented here uses a mixed-method approach, analysing the effects of simulations of European Parliamentarian decision-making conducted with secondary school classes in Germany on students' political knowledge, motivations and attitudes. In addition to a standardised questionnaire with pre- and post-tests (N = 308), qualitative interviews were conducted (n = 12). The paper focuses on the relation between participants' conceptual changes and changes in perceived responsiveness of the EU. The results highlight relevant learning effects students experience in EU simulation games that are not yet captured appropriately by questionnaire studies and can stimulate the development of measurement tools for assessing process-oriented learning outcomes more adequately.

The paper aims to develop a better understanding of the evolution and structuration of contemporary civil society fields. It applies analytical elements from field theories and closely related network governance literature within a qualitative research design to explore collective action around community-led housing (CLH) in England, a label assigned to a range of alternative housing models. We argue that collective action needs to be understood as a loose coupling of earlier and younger social movements, based on their shared awareness of and willingness to address macro-level societal problems. We further identify a gradual evolution of field governance from loose covenanting between sub-fields, development of a common project, to network activation to manage significant external funding. This process has not yet led to a unified field with stable internal governance and wide external legitimacy on the national level. However, an embryonic field structure and permeable boundaries provide CLH actors multiple hybrid identities and strategic positioning opportunities in adjacent fields. We believe that our strategic field perspective can shed light on the nature of collective action in other parts of the civil society.

There are increasing signs that the space for civil society actions is slowly opening up in Vietnam. The existing studies have linked the changes in civil society action to the changing dynamics of state–society relations in one-party-ruled Vietnam. Yet, the majority of this literature has focused on the activities of NGOs. This article fills this gap by highlighting a high-profile case of civil society activism that is not centred on NGO actions. The Trees Movement is a broad-based citizen-led movement established to protest against Hanoi government’s arbitrary decision to cut down thousands of large old trees lining the city’s streets. I use this case study to argue that citizen-led activism, an emerging form of civic engagement, is likely to play a critical role in effecting change and (re)shaping state-society relations in Vietnam. This form of activism, if sustained, will encourage a move toward more deliberative and accountable politics in the same country in the long run. I also argue that environmental activism has opened up a new arena of contestation for civil society activism in Vietnam.

The maiden speech – the first speech given by a newly elected member of parliament (MP) – is a tradition in many parliaments, a personalized rite of passage to political power. As ethnic minority MPs remain relative newcomers, the maiden speech is, for them, even more politically charged. How do ethnic minority MPs represent their identities in this transformative moment? Our data set includes 93 ethnic minority MPs who have held a seat in the Dutch parliament, covering 88 maiden speeches, spanning 11 cycles (1986–2023). The diachronic and intersectional analysis shows that the relation between descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation for historically marginalized groups fluctuates and is influenced by the political environment. The ‘firsts’ of a particular gender/ethnicity intersectional group are less likely to narrate a minority identity than non‐firsts. Progressive party ideology influences the extent to which ethnic minority MPs emphasize an (intersectional) minoritized identity. Personal stories and family histories are often used to counter stereotypes, unmute silenced cultures and share values. The focus on the maiden speech as a political narrative sheds light on the blurry lines between substantive, symbolic and descriptive representation. The political narrative is a strategic tool for MPs from historically disadvantaged groups to represent collective identities.

The accountability of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) has come under closer public and academic scrutiny. Critics call for a more comprehensive approach to accountability—one that addresses a wider set of stakeholders, and beneficiaries in particular. There is an increase in empirical evidence suggesting that comprehensive accountability has positive implications for the organizational performance. This article develops a framework for comprehensive INGO accountability and tests its implications on program effectiveness. The framework describes three accountability meta-logics: the resource logic, outcome assessment logic, and discursive logic. Applying partial least squares structural equation modeling, the impact of these meta-logics on perceived program effectiveness as well as their drivers is tested. The analysis is based on a unique data set from an international survey among 201 INGO leaders from 21 countries. The findings suggest that comprehensive accountability indeed strengthens the perceived program effectiveness. The study emphasizes the managerial argument that implementing comprehensive accountability, not only is the “right thing” to do, but also has the strategic advantage of strengthening perceived mission achievement.

The article analyses 360° video production in international humanitarian aid nonprofit organizations from 2015 to 2019 as 360° video storytelling is one of the latest innovations in organizational digital communication. Through a content analysis and interviews, a specific use of the 360° video format for particular issues or campaigns in order to bring a distant reality to the organization’s audience has been detected. Thus, putting the users in the shoes of “the other” seems to be the objective pursued. NGOs may soon begin to understand long-term interactivity and engagement not just as action and reaction between organization and receiver (almost non-existent to date), but above all as the receiver’s behaviour, which they may strive to orient towards one of the organization’s end goals, depending on the communication strategy set by the organization’s director. With this objective, common to entities from other sectors, they could be moving towards an innovative conceptualization of engagement.

Prior research has suggested three explanations why levels of voluntary engagement rise and fall over time within societies. A social structural explanation considers individual resources crucial for engagement and argues that a redistribution of those resources may bring about changes in engagement. A cohort-based explanation considers socialisation and experiences in formative years as crucial for the uptake of engagement. Finally, a period-based explanation considers extraordinary events, external shocks, and crises to be crucial for engagement. So far, these explanations have mainly been tested separately and little is known about the relative strength of each of the proposed factors. Using data from a large German household panel survey that assessed engagement almost annually across four decades, we found that most social structural factors (e.g., education, employment, income) maintained their predictive effects for engagement, irrespective of cohort or period. The only notable exception was that the gender gap observed has narrowed substantially across periods and cohorts. Moreover, cohort effects were rendered almost negligible once we factored in periods. Taken together, our results suggest that individual characteristics and extraordinary events are the main factors influencing voluntary engagement rather than shared societal experiences of cohorts.