International organisations (IOs) hold important governance functions and power. Yet, they are several steps detached from the constituencies that have entrusted them with functions and resources to carry them out, even as accountability expectations remain significant for their legitimacy. This article presents a broadly generalisable theoretical framework for understanding the variable accountability of IOs, seeking to advance the understanding of international accountability in three new ways. First, it elaborates on the concept of the scope of IO accountability, which can vary across organisations, over time, and across contexts. The idea of a scope of accountability moves beyond the dichotomy of accountable versus non-accountable power holders and advances an understanding of accountability as a multi-layered phenomenon, whereby both the expectations and practices of accountability can evolve over time and with respect to different audiences. Second, the article identifies three political factors – namely the formal and informal excercise of power, institutional structure, and public salience – that can shape, in important ways, the variable scope of IO accountability. Finally, it critically explores the tensions and contradictions between these political dynamics, and the implications for access to and the efficacy of accountability systems.

In the introduction to this roundtable, we argue that global governance currently faces hard times because it is affected by a set of significant developments revolving around the changing distribution of state power, the rise of nationalist populism, and the frequent occurrence of transnational crises, while seeking to facilitate collective action on complex cooperation problems. Against this backdrop, the essay identifies two major institutional dynamics of global governance in hard times: first, the drift of formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) that is caused by them being gridlocked in a period of significant changes in their social, (geo)political, economic, and technological environment. Second, the proliferation of various types of low-cost institutions. To help us think systematically about how these two interrelated institutional dynamics affect global governance, the essay develops the innovation thesis and the decline thesis. The “innovation thesis” suggests that by transitioning from a rather exclusive and hierarchical system revolving around FIGOs into a more inclusive and heterarchical system revolving around institutional diversity, global governance is currently being adapted to its new environment. The “decline thesis,” by contrast, argues that the two institutional dynamics undermine rules-based multilateralism and may lead to a shift back toward traditional (great) power politics that does not respect institutional constraints.

The rise of visually driven platforms like Instagram has reshaped how information is shared and understood. This study examines the role of social, cultural, and political (SCP) symbols in Instagram posts during Taiwan’s 2024 election, focusing on their influence in anti-misinformation efforts. Using large language models (LLMs)—GPT-4 Omni and Gemini Pro Vision—we analyzed thousands of posts to extract and classify symbolic elements, comparing model performance in consistency and interpretive depth. We evaluated how SCP symbols affect user engagement, perceptions of fairness, and content spread. Engagement was measured by likes, while diffusion patterns followed the SEIZ epidemiological model. Findings show that posts featuring SCP symbols consistently received more interaction, even when follower counts were equal. Although political content creators often had larger audiences, posts with cultural symbols drove the highest engagement, were perceived as more fair and trustworthy, and spread more rapidly across networks. Our results suggest that symbolic richness influences online interactions more than audience size. By integrating semiotic analysis, LLM-based interpretation, and diffusion modeling, this study offers a novel framework for understanding how symbolic communication shapes engagement on visual platforms. These insights can guide designers, policymakers, and strategists in developing culturally resonant, symbol-aware messaging to combat misinformation and promote credible narratives.

This article examines the process of drafting the authoritarian Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which took place during the military regime. The aim is to identify the powers involved, their objectives and the strategies they developed, and to find insights that shed light on the adoption of constitutions by authoritarianisms. The results suggest that conflict between political forces is endemic to the constitutional process, and that those who hegemonise support and aim to demilitarise the system are able to impose the new constitution even without guaranteeing the existence of democratic political parties. There is also a promising point of analysis: the emergence of an authoritarian constitution is based on path dependence, ie, it has many links with the material constitutionalism that precedes it, where there are already normalised authoritarian elements.

This article examines how subnational fiscal competition over foreign direct investment affects both the siting of new projects and the ability of local governments to raise tax revenue for social spending. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment, an unexpected declaration by the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2017 that reduced states’ ability to offer investors differentiated tax subsidies. Our results show that disadvantaged regions did not see a major shift in investment patterns after the change in investment law. We do not find a consistent relationship between the incentive law change and state revenue generation, but we do find that incentives are associated with less revenue. The results are consistent with arguments that investment incentives exacerbate inequality by reducing states’ capacity to collect revenue while doing little to affect investment location. Our results illustrate that economic agglomeration is difficult to reverse through tax policy and that fiscal federalism often cannot provide strong enough inducements to drive investment into less advantaged regions.

This study introduces a custom implementation of the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) for calibrating a three-dimensional glacier evolution model. The EnKF can assimilate observations as they become available and provides uncertainty measures for the initial state after calibration. We calibrate an elevation-dependent surface mass balance (SMB) model using elevation change observations and test the EnKF’s performance in a Twin Experiment by varying internal and external hyperparameters. The best-performing configuration is applied to the Rhône Glacier in a Real-World Experiment. Using satellite-based elevation change fields for calibration, the EnKF estimates an average equilibrium line altitude of $2920 \pm 37$ m for the period 2000–19. A comparison of the results with glaciological measurements demonstrates the capabilities of the EnKF to simultaneously calibrate multiple SMB parameters. With this proof of concept, we expect that our methodology is readily extendable to other map or point observations and their combination, as well as to other calibration parameters.

In Wisconsin, herbicide resistance in waterhemp [Amaranthus tuberculatus (Moq.) Sauer] has been confirmed to five herbicide sites of action, including protoporphyrinogen oxidase (PPO) inhibitors. Following a report of a suspected PPO inhibitor–resistant A. tuberculatus population (A92 accession), our objective was to characterize resistance to PPO inhibitors applied preemergence or postemergence to this accession, along with two PPO inhibitor–susceptible control accessions (A66 and A82). We hypothesized that PPO-inhibitor resistance in A92 was driven by target site–resistance mechanisms. According to our results, the A92 accession is resistant to sulfentrazone (3.1-fold; P-value = 0.0278) and fomesafen (3.1-fold; P-value = 0.0745) preemergence and to lactofen (18.6-fold; P-value = 0.0003) and fomesafen (5.9-fold; P-value <0.0001) postemergence. Resistance to PPO inhibitors was not explained by the presence of any known target-site mutations in PPX1 or PPX2 genes. Our study represents the first confirmed case of an A. tuberculatus accession resistant to PPO inhibitors applied preemergence in Wisconsin. Consistent with previous research, our results demonstrate that the A92 accession, compared with control accessions, is less sensitive to fomesafen regardless of the application timing. Further research is necessary to identify other potential PPO-inhibitor resistance mechanisms in the A92 accession, including potential non–target site resistance mechanisms associated with cytochrome P450 monooxygenases or glutathione S-transferases.

We investigate a system of modal semantics in which $\Box \phi $ is true if and only if $\phi $ is entailed by a designated set of formulas by a designated logics. We prove some strong completeness results as well as a natural connection to normal modal logics via an application of some lattice-theoretic fixpoint theorems. We raise a difficult problem that arises naturally in this setting about logics which are identical with their own ‘meta-logic’, and draw a surprising connection to recent work by Andrew Bacon and Kit Fine on McKinsey’s substitutional modal semantics.

Coastal nature-based solution (NBS) projects have been on the rise over the past few years. In France, the expression is being increasingly used at a local level, and new projects are developing on the coast. However, they face various limitations, involving both technical challenges and social acceptability issues. Based on data from the perception survey conducted by the DIGUES research programme in the Authie Bay in 2021 and a numerical model used to assess the efficiency of flood protection measures developed as part of a flood action and prevention programme, this study aimed to highlight the gap between perceptions and misconceptions surrounding NBS-like scenarios and more objective modelling data. It offers a cross-comparison of these two datasets. For this purpose, the scenarios used to assess public perception in the DIGUES survey were translated in the numerical model to study the difference between perceived protection and actual protection in the Authie Bay, the opportunity for dyke relocation in an NBS scenario, and the effectiveness of the NBSs according to their scale. Overall, these results demonstrated a real benefit for implementing dyke relocation through breaches, compared to other scenarios for the Authie Bay.

The current study probes Mandarin-learning toddlers’ sensitivity to two grammatical noun phrase orders differing in typological markedness. With three visual fixation experiments, we find that by age 2;6, children distinguish the cross-linguistically common order – but not the typologically rare one – from an ungrammatical order; however, their sensitivity to the two grammatical orders does not differ significantly. Further, we conduct a corpus analysis and demonstrate that for early acquisition, both grammatical orders are neither sufficiently nor consistently supported in the linguistic input. The sensitivity patterns and input profile outlined in our study constitute the first step of testing, in a natural language setting, a bias for typologically common ordering discussed in the artificial language learning literature. Although the findings remain inconclusive, they underscore the potential for future investigations in this direction.

In this paper, we consider an approach introduced in term rewriting for the automatic detection of non-looping non-termination from patterns of rules. We adapt it to logic programing by defining a new unfolding technique that produces patterns describing possibly infinite sets of finite rewrite sequences. We present an experimental evaluation of our contributions that we implemented in our tool NTI (Non-Termination Inference).

This study examines the interplay between psychological contract fulfillment, distributive justice, and leader–member exchange (LMX) in shaping affective organizational commitment among university academics. Drawing on social exchange theory, and using simple random sampling, we propose a moderated mediation model to explore how these variables interact. To test the hypotheses, we used the linear moderated mediation test, applying PROCESS for SPSS. Specifically, on a sample of 465 academics, the study tests the hypothesis that distributive justice mediates the relationship between psychological contract fulfillment and affective commitment, with LMX acting as a moderator. Findings reveal that distributive justice is not always necessary for fostering affective commitment when psychological contracts are fulfilled, unless the quality of LMX is low. In low-quality leader–member relationships, perceptions of distributive justice become crucial when it comes to translating contract fulfillment into affective commitment. These results highlight the importance of relational dynamics in academic settings, especially when resources are limited. The study concludes with a discussion of its theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations and avenues for future research.

This article contributes to the literature on religious soft power by considering how non-Muslim-majority great powers – China, Russia, and the US – use Islam as a foreign policy resource in their soft power strategies. We argue that these states have deployed Islam to present positive self-images on the international stage, at the same time as using negative-other strategies via soft disempowerment to construct competitor states as unfriendly and/or dangerous to Muslims. We conclude by arguing that the use of Islam by non-Muslim great powers is a potentially dangerous game. While instrumentalising Islam may provide immediate benefits, it also opens the possibility for critique, particularly around perceived inconsistencies between domestic religious practices of a state and its internationally promoted narratives. These tensions can invite accusations of illegitimacy and hypocrisy, especially when leveraged by competitors or transnational religious actors.

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced to the point where entire textbooks can be queried using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enabling AI to integrate external, up-to-date information into its responses. This study evaluates the ability of two OpenAI models, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 Turbo, to create and answer exam questions based on an undergraduate textbook. 14 exams were created with four true-false, four multiple-choice, and two short-answer questions derived from an open-source Pacific Studies textbook. Model performance was evaluated with and without access to the source material using text-similarity metrics such as ROUGE-1, cosine similarity, and word embeddings. Fifty-six exam scores were analyzed, revealing that RAG-assisted models significantly outperformed those relying solely on pre-trained knowledge. GPT-4 Turbo also consistently outperformed GPT-3.5 Turbo in accuracy and coherence, especially in short-answer responses. These findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs in automating exam generation while maintaining assessment quality. However, they also underscore the need for policy frameworks that promote fairness, transparency, and accessibility. Given regulatory considerations outlined in the European Union AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, institutions using AI in education must establish governance protocols, bias mitigation strategies, and human oversight measures. The results of this study contribute to ongoing discussions on responsibly integrating AI in education, advocating for institutional policies that support AI-assisted assessment while preserving academic integrity. The empirical results suggest not only performance benefits but also actionable governance mechanisms, such as verifiable retrieval pipelines and oversight protocols, that can guide institutional policies.