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In contemporary politics, the rise of a leadership style centered on “gaslighting”—persuasion through systematic besmirching, belittling, and the inversion of shared norms—poses profound challenges to democracy. This essay traces the conceptual roots of gaslighting and its uptake as a style of leadership, explores its distinguishing features compared to other manipulative political tactics, and uses the current American situation (that is, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and JD Vance) alongside international examples to illustrate its consequences. Against this backdrop, “adaptive leadership” is advanced as a normative counterweight—one that invites honest engagement with adaptive challenges and bolsters civic trust. The contrast illuminates the stakes for democratic culture as gaslighting erodes the very fabric of orientation, accountability, and mutual respect. It is no exaggeration here to speak of a battle for the soul of democracy.
Cultural heritage occupies a paradoxical position in law: It is protected as property but experienced as a repository of identity, memory, and dignity. This article examines whether cultural heritage could, in principle, be recognized as a subject of law, drawing on emerging developments in environmental and nonhuman personhood. After tracing the historical and conceptual evolution of legal personhood—from human and corporate subjects to nature and ecosystems—it explores the moral, relational, and symbolic dimensions that might justify extending personhood to heritage. The analysis highlights both the potential benefits of such recognition, including stronger ethical and representational protections, and the associated risks, such as legal inflation, state appropriation, and conflicts with ownership and restitution law. Ultimately, it argues that rethinking heritage through the lens of relational personhood reveals the need for a more pluralistic and ethically responsive legal imagination.
Is an autocracy’s official rhetoric a reliable proxy for forecasting military escalation? While the conventional hands-tying mechanism argues that official rhetoric binds leaders to stated positions and limits their ability to back down, recent scholarship on bluster suggests that autocracies may employ hawkish rhetoric to justify de-escalation ex-post. This study evaluates these competing perspectives by analyzing China’s official rhetoric and military behavior in the Taiwan Strait from 2016 to 2022. Employing a word-embedding approach, I construct an original Chinese-language lexicon capturing implicit threats from over two million state-media articles. I show that increases in China’s implicit threats toward Taiwan are associated with a higher likelihood of military escalation, implying that official rhetoric conveys predictive information rather than mere cheap talk.
This chapter examines influential legislative remedies: the 1907 creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal, the 1995 creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) and the 2024 legislation to annul and compensate miscarriages of justice caused by the Post Office’s faulty computer system. The Court of Appeal’s restrictive approach to overturning convictions and admitting new evidence is critiqued. The role of wrongful convictions in abolishing the death penalty is examined. The CCRC’s performance, including some of its failures and underfunding, is assessed. The migration of similar institutions to Scotland, Norway, New Zealand and Canada is also examined. Failed attempts in 2006 to limit appeals to innocence and successful attempts in 2014 to require it for compensation are critically assessed. The tension between the Innocence Network of the United Kingdom’s (INUK) focus on innocence and the legal system’s focus on the safety of convictions is analysed in light of INUK’s demise and future evolution of innocence organisations. Finally, the Post Office Scandal and the implications of enacting legislation to depart from ordinary methods of correcting and compensating miscarriages of justice are assessed.
‘Remote work’ and ‘telework’, which used to be regarded as exceptional subcategories of labor engagement, became the norm for white collar workers during the pandemic. Recent years have seen the advent of hybrid labor arrangements, where work is directly or indirectly provided through apps or similar pieces of software and other technological innovations. The overarching work digitization phenomenon is defined by increasing delocalisation and fragmentation of workplaces, and by algorithmic management. Even work typically performed on-site includes nowadays elements of delocalization. This chapter revisits our understanding of ‘teleworking’ and examines the appropriateness of existing collective labor law institutions to address the needs and particular conditions of workers engaged in digitized hybrid work. It considers that a solution may lie with the extension of the scope and focus of the rights to collective organization and action, and with a re-evaluation of their substantive content. The chapter seeks solutions in worker empowerment through the redeployment of collective labor rights and institutions. The chapter also briefly touches upon illustrative case studies that provide glimpses into possible avenues of traditional and alternative collective action tactics. The relevant current EU framework is used to contextualize the discussion.
Resonance lines encode rich information about astrophysical sources and their environments, yet fully analytic treatments of multi-line radiative transfer remain almost entirely unexplored. We present exact, closed-form solutions for steady-state resonant-line radiativeP transfer in “V-shaped” atomic networks, where a single ground state couples to multiple transitions. Starting from the full angle-dependent transfer equation, we generalise absorption and emission coefficients to an arbitrary number of lines, derive a modified Fokker–Planck expansion of the frequency-redistribution integral, and use a judicious change of variables to reduce the problem to a Helmholtz equation with point-like sources in frequency space. This transformation admits analytic solutions for arbitrary sets of lines with fixed frequency offsets and strengths in both slab and spherical geometries. We implement V-shaped line networks in the colt Monte Carlo radiative transfer code and find excellent agreement with the analytic predictions across a wide range of line separations, optical depths, and damping parameters, establishing our solutions as stringent validation benchmarks. For concrete applications related to the Lyman-alpha (Ly$\alpha$) transition of neutral hydrogen, we examine how fine-structure splitting and deuterium injection modify the emergent spectra, internal radiation field, and radiative force multiplier. We show that these effects leave previous conclusions about Ly$\alpha$ feedback in the early universe essentially unchanged. Even when direct observational diagnostics are subtle, our framework provides novel analytic and numerical insights into coupled resonance-line transport and facilitates progress in general modelling of multi-line radiative transfer in diverse astrophysical settings.
This article examines the collecting that occurred after the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, using the collections database as a lens for understanding how this recent period of Irish history is currently being narrativized. The Eighth Amendment prohibited abortion in almost all circumstances by equating the life of a pregnant person to that of the unborn child; its repeal was a result of four decades of grassroots, feminist campaigning. The collections now being preserved depict this activism, and are made up of campaign documents, photographs, and first-person stories archived from Facebook. Through a close analysis of the database of the Digital Repository of Ireland, where most of these materials are held, this article argues for an interpretation of the database as a political infrastructure, which refracts existing tensions surrounding the future of Irish feminisms and the activist archive. It also examines the database’s politics of visibility in relation to the shame and silence that defined women’s position in Ireland prior to the referendum and advances a theorisation of the archival database as a historiographical technology, which plays an active role in the production of Irish identity in the wake of the Eighth.
The effects of confinement and polydispersity on the shear-induced diffusivity of non-Brownian, neutrally buoyant spheres suspended in a Newtonian fluid are investigated using simulations that incorporate short-range lubrication forces, surface roughness and frictional contacts. Simulations were performed at a fixed volume fraction of 0.45 for multiple values of particle roughness and friction coefficient. Confinement by bounding walls promoted layered structures that suppressed particle mobility and reduced diffusivity, while also diminishing the influence of friction and roughness. In contrast, high polydispersity disrupted layering and enhanced diffusivity, even in confined systems. Polydispersity also led to size-dependent demixing, with smaller particles preferentially migrating towards the walls and exhibiting higher mobility. These results have implications for modelling and controlling transport in suspensions, where confinement and polydispersity alter the effects of friction and roughness on shear-induced diffusion.
This chapter applies the volume’s interactive and holistic approach to the development and analysis of the regulation of remote work. The discussion underscores how employment contracts themselves combine locational elements, of direct significance for remote work, with specifications of the temporal extension of the work contract and its full time or part time nature. Moreover, as the chapter shows, the combinatory constellation of employment situations that results is itself then subject to regulation in ways that the regulatory institutions often frame interactively, using concepts rooted in one type of employment condition to deal with another condition – for example combining features of the contract’s time commitment with its locational definition. The chapter also discusses the importance of the subsidiarity principle for channeling the multilevel and interactive component of remote work’s regulation. These points are then used to address issues of fundamental rights for workers and more specifically, of labor rights under new and evolving employment conditions.
Cyber disinformation is a global, very sophisticated phenomenon, capable of producing negative consequences on democratic values and institutions. This chapter argues that individual behavior of users plays a key role in the control of the phenomenon and aims to identify factors that impact on users’ behavioral intentions and cyber hygiene behavior. This chapter integrates the Extended Theory of Planned Behavior and a Structural Equation Model, realized through Partial Least Square – –Structural Equation Modeling, applied to the cyber disinformation phenomenon. The research data were collected using a questionnaire administered in Poland and Romania and analyzed using the Structural Equation Model. The model’s parameters were processed using the SmartPLS software. The reliability of the variables was assessed using Cronbach’s Alpha and Composite Reliability. The research revealed the applicability of the Theory of Planned Behavior model and found that Moral Norms and Perceived Behavioral Control have an impact on Behavioral Intention and Cyber Hygiene Behavior. The findings of this chapter can provide stakeholders with important insights that can lead to improved responses to the phenomenon.
The book ends with a brief discussion of key conclusions. My four substantive chapters demonstrate different accounts of making-good-again. Read together, they show how the conduct of restitution emerges as a material question of responsibility which is asked through texts and objects in different genres, including law. Responsibility as a material practice is shown to be dynamic, contingent and contextual, shaped by personae and places.
For a long time, criminal justice typically operated through the human body. Historically, the intentional infliction of severe physical harm, such as through quartering and the rack, has been central to both criminal investigation and punishment. This centrality of the human body in criminal justice arguably changed with the rise of carceral punishment and, as of the mid 1900s, with the emergence of human rights protection to the integrity of persons. Yet, it is still the case that nowadays the use of physical force by state officials makes many appearances in modern criminal justice, ranging from handcuffing, taking bodily material for DNA analysis and using pepper spray on arrest, to physical force strip searches in prison and mechanical restraint in forensic hospitals. Moreover, capital punishment, as the supreme corporal sanction, is permitted under international human rights law and still applies in many jurisdictions worldwide.