Over the last decade, the Scottish Government have pursued a positive, highly visible immigration politics, despite Scotland lacking formal immigration powers and being enveloped within a United Kingdom that has simultaneously pursued an increasingly securitised approach. With securitisation intensifying globally, coupled with a rise in, and political success of, anti-immigration parties and actors, this article investigates the question of why the Scottish Government has pursued a desecuritising approach – a neglected strand of (de)securitisation studies that principally focuses on the how. We draw on insights from ontological security studies to investigate the Scottish Government’s desecuritisation activity between 2014 and 2024, demonstrating that, whilst there are rationalist-materialist explanations, desecuritisation was not inevitable. Instead, by exploring the relationship between immigration and the construction of the Scottish self at the ontological level we can more fully understand the drivers behind desecuritisation. Pursuing a desecuritised immigration politics is shown, first, to support the Scottish Government’s core autobiographical narrative about who ‘Scotland’ is (open, welcoming, and internationalist), and second, through nurturing a Lacanian fantasy, to be affectively rewarding. Last, the article contributes to the (re)conceptualisation of linearity and temporality in (de)securitisation studies, showcasing contemporary-orientated desecuritisation moves dovetailing with moves aimed at an institutional ‘future-proofing’ of desecuritised immigration governance.

In LA County, contact precautions for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus require 7.3 million gowns annually generating 506 tons of plastic waste and 1.73 million kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents, which cause the loss of 4.07 disability-adjusted life-years. Unintended consequences of gown use necessitates exploration of infection prevention alternatives.

Through archival research, this article examines the relationship between the UK government, UK banks and the Bank of England during the development of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) sovereign debt crisis in Poland, Romania and Hungary. UK banks played a key role in the development of East–West relations during the Cold War through actively developing business ties with CEE countries. This article reveals that the UK government saw these relationships as a means to further its foreign policy goals towards the region and strengthen East–West European political and economic ties, which it sought to encourage through the use of export credit guarantees. It also illustrates how these foreign policy goals were the motivation for the UK government to encourage continued lending to Poland, Romania and Hungary during the outbreak of the CEE sovereign debt crisis through the Bank of England in its role as an intermediary between the government and banks. The article contributes to the underexplored role of export credit agencies, specifically the UK’s Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD), in the development of the sovereign debt crisis and demonstrates how UK banks helped finance the UK’s foreign policy toward CEE during the Cold War with the support and encouragement of the UK government.

This paper discusses a deflationary theory of human action developed by John Hyman. His theory of human action comprises two central claims, one about the general nature of action, another about the mark of human agency. An action is the causing of a change by a substance. A human action, as opposed to sub-personal actions, is one that results from the integrated operations of our cognitive and motor systems. Taken together these two claims offer a minimalist theory of human action that does not appeal to intention, the will or the power to choose. The first claim is by now familiar in the literature, not so the second one. This paper offers a critical discussion of this second claim. I shall argue that it sits uncomfortably with certain kinds of mental action. As a fix, I argue that we should appeal to the functional role of the executive system to specify the relevant kind of integration characteristic of human action. I proceed to show how the revised proposal shares the appeal of Hyman’s view while avoiding its difficulties.

Sorgoleone, an allelochemical exuded from root hairs of grain sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench], has proven herbicidal activity on several weeds and crops. Due to its hydrophobic nature and affinity for organic matter, sorgoleone can persist in the soil for a long period. Although sorghum residues are beneficial for weed suppression, growers in the southeastern United States have raised concerns that these residues may negatively affect wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) emergence in double-crop systems. Two independent laboratory studies were conducted to evaluate sorgoleone activity: (1) weed species/wheat variety study, which included four weed species, Italian ryegrass [Lolium perenne L. ssp. multiflorum (Lam.) Husnot], large crabgrass [Digitaria sanguinalis (L.) Scop.], sicklepod [Senna obtusifolia (L.) Irwin & Barneby], and velvetleaf [Abutilon theophrasti Medik.], and two wheat varieties, ‘USG3251’ and ‘Shirley’; and (2) wheat variety and group study, which included a total of 20 varieties distributed in four wheat groups. In both studies, sorgoleone was applied at 0.025, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, and 0.30 g L−1 to seeds grown in petri dishes under laboratory conditions. In Study 1, sorgoleone activity had a stronger effect on grass weeds than on broadleaf weeds. Lolium perenne ssp. multiflorum was the most susceptible weed, showing 77% growth reduction at 0.3 g L−1 of sorgoleone. At the same concentration, D. sanguinalis showed the second-highest response, with a 32% growth reduction, followed by A. theophrasti and S. obtusifolia, with reductions of 23% and 20%, respectively. No effect of sorgoleone was observed on wheat varieties. In Study 2, growth reduction was only observed for six wheat varieties at the highest sorgoleone concentrations. Furthermore, in between group comparisons, Hard Red wheat presented higher response to sorgoleone. These findings demonstrate strong herbicidal activity of sorgoleone on grass weeds, particularly L. perenne ssp. multiflorum, while having minimal effects on most wheat varieties.

Liberal and Conservative federal governments engage in nation-building within official languages governance, seeking to align social and political norms with partisan principles. This article compares the Chrétien, Harper and Justin Trudeau governments’ instrumentalization of Canadian identity in the five action plans and roadmaps for official languages developed since 2003. These documents are comprehensive five-year outlines of the governments’ approach to official languages, interspersed with priorities, funding commitments and minister statements. This analysis is facilitated by a novel interpretive framework, drawing attention to the use of a national narrative, values and affect. Our analysis reveals the Chrétien government to have translated the Liberal, civics-based depiction of Canadian identity to suit an international focus. The Harper government portrayed Canadian identity as true to settler roots, rebuking the Liberal model. Finally, the Trudeau government established a pluralist Canadian narrative to justify Liberal civics as a means for protecting and promoting equity and diversity.

In this paper, we explore the electoral consequences of the opioid epidemic in the United States, particularly its relationship with the Republican vote share in US presidential elections. We argue that the worsening opioid crisis is associated with a shift toward the Republican Party, and that these gains result from a decline in both Democratic support and voter abstention. We test these expectations using county-level presidential election results and individual-level data. The findings show that increasing overdose death rates are associated with an increase in Republican votes and a decline in Democratic votes and voter abstention. Additionally, the survey analyses reveal that this relationship is strongest among independents. Independents are also more likely to support stricter border security and higher spending on law enforcement as drug death rates increase. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the political consequences of the drug crisis in the US by demonstrating how overdose death rates are associated with voting behavior, and identifying which voters are most likely to change their vote in response to this worsening situation.

In view of recent typological work revealing important intra-typological variations among verb-framed languages in motion expression, we investigated children’s acquisition of caused motion events in Uyghur. Four-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and adults participated in a cartoon narration task, and analyses of data in terms of syntactic packaging, semantic density, and information focus showed that, while children’s use of packaging strategies involving complex syntax (i.e., subordination) – previously found to be challenging for children speaking verb-framed languages – was adult-like from age 8, they continued to diverge from the adult patterns for measures of semantic density and information focus at age 10. We take this developmental asymmetry as emanating from different kinds of knowledge entailed in encoding motion and suggest that they may be on different developmental timelines because they demand differential amount of experience with a language.

Education aims to improve our innate abilities, teach new skills and habits, and nurture intellectual virtues. Poorly designed or misused generative AI disrupts these educational goals. I propose strategies to design generative AI that aligns with education’s aims. The paper proposes a design for a generative AI tutor that teaches students to question well. I argue that such an AI can also help students learn to lead noble inquiries, achieve deeper understanding, and experience a sense of curiosity and fascination. Students who learn to question effectively through such an AI tutor may also develop crucial intellectual virtues.

This article advances the concept of deliberative campaigns as a structured, cyclical and party-integrated process to reinvigorate democratic systems under strain from exclusion, polarization and disengagement. Deliberative campaigns embed ongoing, reciprocal deliberation between citizens and representatives throughout and beyond election cycles, making party platform creation a continuous, participatory endeavor. Drawing on the systemic approach to democracy, the article argues that deliberative campaigns uniquely combine deliberation, representation and voting to better address empowered inclusion, collective will formation and collective decision-making. Unlike conventional campaigns, which tend toward elite-driven, one-sided communication and microtargeting, deliberative campaigns foster informed, inclusive dialogue that can rebuild trust, reduce polarization and enhance accountability. The approach offers both theoretical and practical contributions to democratic systems scholarship by showing how institutionalizing citizen–representative dialogue can create platforms that more faithfully represent collective priorities and strengthen responsiveness in partisan democratic politics.

There is an urgent need for better evidence-based interventions in mental health. High-quality randomised controlled trials in humans are often lacking, especially when dealing with complex situations or novel therapeutic targets. Other potentially useful data may be available, such as from early-phase trials, observational or mechanistic studies or animal experiments. Triangulation offers an opportunity to consider a wider variety of evidence together to prioritise future research directions, and ultimately to inform clinical decisions. Here we describe GATE (the GALENOS Approach to Triangulating Evidence). This is the methodology of triangulation, co-produced with people with lived experience, and applied as an integral part of the GALENOS project (Global Alliance for Living Evidence on aNxiety, depressiOn and pSychosis; https://www.galenos.org.uk/). We outline the considerations of triangulation in psychiatry and our experience to date in assessing animal and human data together, using triangulation to prioritise future research directions. With GATE at its core, GALENOS not only enables novel insights to emerge, but points us towards a future of collaborative research better equipped to examine the most pressing questions in mental health.

This article reexamines the relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield through the lens of one of Bentham’s last projects, “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831), and his support for Wakefield’s scheme of “systematic colonization.” Their intellectual encounter explains how key Benthamite principles were integrated into Wakefield’s influential vision, with lasting effects. While famous for opposing the penal colony in New South Wales, Bentham was persuaded by Wakefield’s principles of commodifying Indigenous land as the basis for restricting landownership in order to compel labor, foster civilization, and fund emigration. Bentham’s distinctive perspective emerges from a comparison of his commentary with the body of work published by the Wakefieldians between mid-1829 and 1831. In turn, after Bentham’s death in June 1832, Wakefield drew heavily from his ideas. Bentham’s and Wakefield’s shared investment in the entwined discourses of penal reform and systematic colonization legitimized Britain’s imperial reorientation toward colonization.

We show that the Potts model on a graph can be approximated by a sequence of independent and identically distributed spins in terms of Wasserstein distance at high temperatures. We prove a similar result for the Curie–Weiss–Potts model on the complete graph, conditioned on being close enough to any of its equilibrium macrostates, in the low-temperature regime. Our proof technique is based on Stein’s method for comparing the stationary distributions of two Glauber dynamics with similar updates, one of which is rapid mixing and contracting on a subset of the state space. Along the way, we prove a new upper bound on the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics for the conditional measure of the Curie–Weiss–Potts model near an equilibrium macrostate.

We demonstrate a high-efficiency, high-power Er:CaF2 single-crystal fiber (SCF) continuous-wave (CW) laser pumped by a 976 nm laser diode. By carefully analyzing the thermal lensing effect and optimizing mode matching, we achieved a maximum CW output power of 10.02 W, corresponding to a slope efficiency as high as 32.2% for pump power below 25 W. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the highest output power ever reported for 2.8 μm SCF lasers, approximately an order of magnitude higher than previous results. In addition, a wavelength redshift beyond 2.8 μm was observed at high power, extending beyond the strong absorption region of water vapor. These results indicate that Er-doped CaF2 SCFs are promising candidates for high-power mid-infrared lasers.