Our special issue examines the regulation and practice of constitutional risk management in the V(isegrád)-4 countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). Unfortunately, the treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic made this enterprise relevant, as all four countries had to face a similar health emergency. This article presents the most important experiences and trends in the constitutional crisis management of the four countries, identifying the challenges that the constitutional emergency regulatory regimes have encountered so far. Our paper argues that despite the basically similar constitutional frameworks, these countries typically handled the crisis in a different way, and in the process many constitutional problems arose for which there was no clear or uniform solution. Since the purpose of the international comparative research that is the basis of our special issue was to examine the emergency constitution of these four countries in general (since it will have to be applied to possible later, other types of emergencies), in the last chapter of the article we examine the possibilities of a proposition that represents a novelty in the constitutional discourse on emergency situations: this is an option for the convergence of emergency constitutions.

The announcements by President Trump in April 2025, of unilateral hikes of 10–50 percentage points on U.S. import tariffs on all countries’ goods, are under threat of coming into force on July 9, 2025. This article estimates their likely effects on trade in alcoholic beverages, using a global model of national beverage markets. Various scenarios are compared. They suggest that if the tariff hike was restricted to just 20% on goods from the European Union, the value of global trade in each of the three beverages would shrink by one-tenth. But the U.S. tariff hikes are to apply to all countries’ goods, which are estimated to shrink global exports by 13% for wine, 22% for spirits and 33% for beer. In that broader scenario, most countries’ wine exports would shrink, but exports of beer and spirits would expand for some countries thanks to the trade divergence generated by the varying tariff hikes. If the increasing uncertainty associated with these developments led to a cumulated 2% drop in consumer spending, virtually all wine-exporting countries would sell less wine to both the U.S. and the rest of the world. That is, wine trade destruction would outweigh trade diversion.

Since 1994, the Andalusian Institute of Geophysics of the University of Granada group has been monitoring the seismic activity of Deception Island volcano (South Shetland Islands, Antarctica) during summer surveys. In this review, we analyse long-period and volcanic-tectonic events, including tremor episodes, recorded from 2011–2012 to 2021–2022 surveys with a local network and a seismic array. The seismo-volcanic activity on Deception Island occurs very locally, mainly as a result of tectonic destabilization induced by volcanic activity along with regional stresses, as a consequence of rifting and subduction processes spanning the South Shetland Islands, Bransfield Strait and Antarctica Peninsula. During this period, two changes to the volcanic alert level due to different volcanic parameters can be highlighted. The first of them was caused by the 2014–2015 seismic swarm as a consequence of a great regional perturbation located to the north-east of Deception Island, which spread around to the entire volcano. The second one, in the 2019–2020 survey, was established as a result of a significant increase in deformation parameters as a prelude of the August 2020 massive earthquake swarm that occurred in the Bransfield Strait, near the Orca submarine volcano. Furthermore, in the previous 2018–2019 survey, a peak of seismic activity was also recorded.

According to accounts like Alexander Bird’s Minimal Functional Account of social knowledge, various groups like those within the sciences can socially know that <p>, even if no particular individual within that group knows that <p>. Bird’s primary example of a group that has such knowledge is the community of semiconductor physicists – which, as he contends, is sufficiently functionally integrated to satisfy accounts like his own. But, what about specialist communities within philosophy? Do they satisfy accounts like Bird’s own? Should they? As I will suggest in this article, some of them should, but do not appear to do so – at least, as of yet.

I offer an interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of cognitive spontaneity that explains how the understanding can function outside of the efficient-causal structure of nature, without being part of what McDowell calls ‘the domain of responsible freedom’. Contemporary literature is dominated by the ‘cognitive agency’ approach, which identifies cognitive spontaneity with a kind of freedom. Against this view, the ‘cognitive processing view’ banishes agential notions from its account but also reduces the understanding to mere mechanism. I argue that neither of these interpretations is obligatory, motivating a teleological but non-agential account that resists assimilation into either of the current approaches.

Despite being outlawed, attacks on cultural heritage remain a pervasive feature in atrocity contexts, the effects of which are compounded by a relative deficit of accountability at the international level. To remedy this gap, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued Policy on Cultural Heritage. However, crimes against cultural heritage are not fully articulated in the Court’s governing instruments. To leverage the protective scope of the Court, the Policy adopts a human rights understanding of cultural heritage which I frame in terms of distinctive relationships between heritage and atrocity crimes. The Policy fertilises a second argument shorthanded as world-building. Against world-destruction, the Policy erects an accountability architecture. Conceptually, it foregrounds an understanding of the world as a cultural construct around which social relations are organised. Crimes against heritage undercut the very notion of what it means to be human; disrupt cultural identification, transmission, and development processes; and deny present and future generations the ability to be specific kinds of cultural human beings. In those regards, this article adds to the world society research agenda of English School theory by examining how the Policy more fully develops the Court’s role as an agent for humanity.