The complexities and contradictions of ‘green’ finance demand multidimensional perspectives in critical socioeconomic research. Current studies often remain fragmented, focusing either on global financial structures or micro-level practices without fully integrating both. This essay advocates for a more integrated analytical approach, employing three components: constructions, cleavages, and complementarities. At the micro-level, green finance is constructed by diverse actors, influencing macro-level financial governance and capital flows. Conversely, macro-structural shifts, driven by geopolitical and institutional dynamics, shape micro-level activities forging new alliances and oppositions – cleavages. Since the responses of actors and their institutional context to green finance are diverse, new institutional and agentic complementarities emerge. How green finance alters the relationship between financial markets and political-economic institutions, and how this unfolds across national economies, shapes our understanding of capitalist varieties and the emergence of new actors and networks. The essay contends that linking these dimensions and integrating micro- and macro-approaches enables scholarship to pursue a shared understanding of green finance and its (in)capacities to confront socioecological crises under financial capitalism.

Multiple terrorist attacks on cultural heritage since 2001 have drawn heritage into international security politics, reframing it from a Law of Armed Conflict issue to one of hybrid warfare. This exploratory study uses semi-structured interviews with 51 practitioners from two community groups to examine perspectives on terrorism and heritage, testing assumptions in the literature against protection practices. Findings reveal that credible, dynamic threat data is scarce, leading to reliance on historic event data to extrapolate future risks. The article proposes a new multi-layered cultural intelligence framework for more critical threat assessments and argues that concerns over religiously motivated terrorist attacks may be overstated, suggesting a shift toward considering political and ideological drivers within unconventional warfare.

The Silurian of Podolia, Ukraine, is renowned for its arthropod fauna, including eurypterids and the synziphosurine Pasternakevia. Here, we describe one of several new arthropods recently discovered in the vicinity of the Smotrych River. Smotrychaspis kurtopleurae gen. et sp. nov. is a synziphosurine euchelicerate with semicircular carapace lacking eyes, an unfused opisthosoma with 11 visible segments, the posterior tergites wide and bearing falcate epimera and a relatively long and stout telson. Smotrychaspis resembles pseudoniscid and bunodid synziphosurines but cannot be placed in either of these families.

Judicial transformation may result either from shifts in institutional context (prompting behavioral adjustment among incumbent judges) or changes in the composition of the bench (particularly through court-packing strategies that introduce new appointees). This article examines the case of the Polish Constitutional Court to evaluate which of these mechanisms better accounts for the controversial transformation of the court since late 2015. Drawing on data from constitutional abstract review decisions spanning 2003 to 2023, we analyze the behavior of distinct cohorts of judges. Our findings reveal a marked alignment with government positions following the October 2015 parliamentary elections, especially among judges appointed by the newly elected ruling party. The evidence suggests that the transformation is driven primarily by changes in judicial composition rather than by behavioral adaptation among pre-existing judges.

Let K be an imaginary quadratic field, and let $E/\mathbb {Q}$ be an elliptic curve with complex multiplication by $\mathcal {O}_K$. Let $K_\infty /K$ be the anticyclotomic $\mathbb {Z}_p$-extension of K and $K_n$ be the intermediate layers. Under additional assumptions on Kobayashi’s signed Selmer groups, we prove an asymptotic formula for .

Deliberative democracy is used increasingly around the world and experiences relevant public support across several countries. However, political parties remain generally reluctant to engage in deliberation. This symposium explains why some parties engage with deliberative practices whereas others disregard them in several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. The symposium contributes theoretically to the literature by proposing analytical frameworks that explain parties’ approaches toward deliberative practices. The symposium’s empirical contribution lies in the identification of several variables that have been understudied so far in the research about parties and deliberation, including competition gains, organizational conflicts, and information deficit.

What are the effects of campaigns of coercive social mobilization on political attitudes? We show that such policies can strengthen authoritarian regimes by altering citizens’ patterns of trust. From 1968 to 1978, 16–17 million Chinese teenagers were “sent-down” to labor in rural areas, where they lived without their families under difficult conditions. Using a regression discontinuity design to account for selection into being sent-down, we show that former sent-down students are more critical of local government performance compared to their counterparts, yet they are less critical of the national government and generally more supportive of the regime. We see no significant differences in political participation, though there is some suggestive evidence that the sent-down students are more likely to favor officially sanctioned political activities. These results appear to stem from the close social control and isolation from family associated with the sent-down experience.

Cover crops (CC) play a critical role in developing and maintaining agroecosystem resiliency. However, current research indicates an inconsistent effect of CC on soil health indicators and the relationship of soil health with crop yield and quality parameters. Hence, a long-term CC experiment established in 2007 at Ridgetown, Ontario, Canada was used to evaluate the CC effects on soil health indicators (56 indicators collected from 0 to 15 cm depth) and tomato fruit marketable yield and quality in 2019. To determine the association of soil functionality with tomato fruit yield and quality (i.e., plant compounds associated with human health), soil health indicator(s) were grouped into six critical soil functions. The CC treatments used to assess the soil health indicators and associated soil functions were winter cereal rye, radish, a mixture of radish and rye (radish + rye), and a no cover crop control (no-CC). Cover crops significantly enhanced 22 indicators by 2–35% than the no-CC treatment with the majority associated with nutrient supply. Fruit yield was greater with long-term cover crop, but there was no evidence that CC adoption would influence phytochemical contents and antioxidant activities of processing tomato. Among the tested CCs, greater values for most of the soil health indicators were observed for radish + rye ≥ radish > rye. Principal component analysis (PCA) demonstrated a clear separation of no-CC plots from the long-term CC species for the soil functions of erosion control, nutrient supply, and climate regulation; thus, confirming the implications of long-term CCing on increasing soil functioning and building resilient production systems.

We introduced positive cones in an earlier paper as a notion of ordering on central simple algebras with involution that corresponds to signatures of hermitian forms. In the current article, we describe signatures of hermitian forms directly out of positive cones, and also use this approach to rectify a problem that affected some results in the previously mentioned paper.

Is national policy more responsive to the preferences of white Americans than to those of people of color? To answer this fundamental question, we examine how well federal lawmaking reflects the preferences of 520,000 Black, Latino, Asian American, and white citizens from 2006 to 2022. Average racial gaps in responsiveness are small regardless of issue area. However, white voters are significantly advantaged when Republicans control the government. Respondents’ class, age, and ideology cannot explain this disparity. Respondents’ partisanship explains some, but not all, of it. To further investigate, we analyze roll call votes in Congress, focusing on the Senate—the pivotal lawmaking institution. Similar patterns emerge: Republican Senators better represent white (versus Black or Latino) constituents. Moreover, Black-white disparities are larger in states where Black Americans comprise more of the population. This suggests a role for white racial attitudes, and, indeed, we find that state-level white racial resentment predicts Black-white representational disparities.

Negotiations by more than 180 States during the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) session 5.2 to develop a legally binding instrument with the purpose to end plastic pollution have, once again, concluded without a treaty. This is especially disastrous for developing States and marginalized peoples (such as indigenous communities and waste pickers), who are disproportionately suffering from plastic pollution. In this article, we show that developing States were underrepresented at the INC-5.2 negotiations in Geneva: Their delegations were on average only half as large (~5 delegates) when compared to delegations from Western European States (~13 delegates) and those from States with a high and very high Human Development Index (~10 delegates). In addition, more than 230 industry representatives participated in INC-5.2, exerting influence in diverse ways, both during official negotiations and through side events, organized by lobbying organizations. Finally, we discuss the importance of how treaty negotiations were organized: Simultaneously occurring negotiation formats (such as contact groups and informal meetings) put smaller delegations at a disadvantage, causing procedural injustice, which falls under the responsibility of the INC Secretariat.

Orenburg, a Russian border fortress on the Kazakh steppe founded in 1743, was the first city of the Tsarist Empire that was provided with a full set of official street names. While toponymic designations in empires have often been investigated in the context of the struggle of competing national groups for visibility, the case of Orenburg provides an example of how toponymic designations served to claim a newly conquered region as an integral part of the empire. As Orenburg’s street names were rarely in use in everyday life, this article argues moreover that both their orientation and representation functions were of little importance, and that their main purpose was to demonstrate the progressive governing techniques the administration had at its disposal.