Sexual slavery has been an ongoing human rights issue within South Korea since World War II, yet discourse has almost exclusively centred on World War II sex slaves. Redress efforts typically focus on these survivors, their bodies symbolising the Korean nation, with post-World War II Korean sex slaves generally seen as ‘willing’ prostitutes. Nevertheless, the bodies, experiences and victimhood of all survivors remain contested. This paper discusses the connection between the ‘ideal’ victims, the World War II Korean sex slaves, and an example of ‘non-ideal’ victims, the gijichon women of the 1970s. Drawing upon recent judgments, Korean law and society, it analyses the impact of an ‘ideal’ victim construct upon survivors’ pursuit of redress in the Korean courts. In this paper I argue that, despite some success within domestic courts, the ‘ideal’ victim construct can explain why all survivors remain marginalised and have yet to receive full truth and justice.

Manchester has long been a model for the class divisions characteristic of British Victorian cities, and this segregation has largely been attributed as a spatial phenomenon as informed by qualitative sources from the period. The digitization of historical source material, however, allows for quantitative assessments of residential differentiation. By analysing patterns of residential distribution using nineteenth-century, individual-level census data, it is revealed that early Victorian Manchester was characterized more by residential heterogeneity than segregation. In light of this finding, this article revisits the source base for early Victorian Manchester in order to reconcile the differences in the physical and social dimensions of segregation for a more accurate and holistic understanding of urban dynamics and the mechanisms of class formation. It explains this dissonance by exploring the city’s architectural, occupational, and cultural structures: while rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl in the industrial city, temporal rhythms of employment, institutionalized cultures of class, and emerging modes of urban maintenance and discipline all produced practices which differentiated and isolated one class from another.

This article reconsiders the method of constitutional interpretation employed by the Australian High Court, in light of the lack of formal amendments to the Australian Constitution. The Court eschews any power to change the meaning of the Constitution, including to keep pace with contemporary needs and values. That is in large part because section 128 of the Constitution vests power in the people and their representatives to change the Constitution – and thus it is said, it would be undemocratic for the Court to change the Constitution for them. But section 128 has fallen into desuetude: constitutional referendums are rare, and rarely succeed. This requires a reassessment of the values served by the interpretive method of the High Court, though this article concludes that this method remains normatively sound. It does serve democracy – though only in a thin sense of that term. More importantly, it preserves the institutional legitimacy of the High Court.

Global crises have wreaked havoc on the world economy, causing severe instability and retrenchment of employees in many countries. This necessitates interrogating the retrenchment laws that seek to resolve issues and encourage fruitful outcomes throughout the work ecosystem. This article explores stakeholders’ perceptions of Zimbabwe’s retrenchment laws. The research utilised a qualitative approach with 68 participants, including employers, employees, trade unionists, legal practitioners, and labour consultants. The study revealed that employers were not utilising available special measures to avoid retrenchment. Stakeholders faced challenges such as difficulties in interpreting the retrenchment sections in the Labour Act, distance, processes which are lengthy and costly, and compliance. Further, this study underscores the tension between organisational survival and employee rights, framed through proximity justice and organisational justice theories. The primary recommendation is that retrenchments should be carefully planned, well-thought-out, and purposefully carried out in order to prevent legal disputes. Employers should exercise patience to carry out a thorough analysis of the problems before retrenching employees. Although this research sought to increase knowledge of retrenchment laws, such findings call for additional research using longitudinal and cross-sectional field surveys.

The 1970s oil shocks sparked high and persistent inflation in advanced economies, also tied to the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 that left monetary policy without a stable institutional reference framework. Only in the following decades did a new monetary regime emerge, centered on inflation targeting schemes adopted by independent central banks. Beyond this, other factors affected inflation persistence, namely wage-price spirals rooted in automatic wage adjustment mechanisms, and fiscal policies financed thanks to the regulatory requirement for the central bank to purchase unsold public debt. This article gives a concise analysis of the rationale and provides descriptive evidence of the role these institutional aspects played in the 1970s, suggesting how their evolution has reduced the likelihood of 1970s-style inflationary episodes today. A structural VAR-based counterfactual exercise confirms that absent wage and fiscal pressures inflation persistence would have been significantly lower.

This article investigates why moments of semiotic silence, or minimal engagement, occur in Facebook practices among Filipino migrant workers engaged in grassroots organizations working for migrants’ rights. We investigate how members and leaders of these organizations subjectively and intersubjectively assess moments of semiotic silence through their discourses. Taking a sociolinguistically grounded chronotopic approach, we show how they make sense of these moments by invoking a multiplicity of space-times related to sociopolitical constraints, their working situation, communication with family, and the organizing of migrants. This study provides empirical data, highlighting the importance of identity, materiality, and media ideology in understanding grassroots social media practices and political engagement. On this basis, we come to understand a broader range of ways in which migrant workers use or do not use social media in relation to community involvement and public discourse. (Social media engagement, grassroots organizing, chronotope, identity construction, media ideology, materiality, migrants’ rights)

Sabotage is ubiquitous but little understood in international relations. Sabotage, especially in terms of attacks on infrastructure and property, has increased in recent years and has taken a more central role in national security discourse across Europe. Unfortunately, scholarship is underdeveloped and fragmented across disciplinary silos, leading to conceptual confusion about the nature and scope of sabotage as a form of statecraft. This article seeks to provide conceptual clarity, and in doing so, lay the foundations to better understand and respond to such activity. It does so first by synthesizing ideas from disjointed literatures on conflict, intelligence, terrorism, public administration, and cybersecurity, before distilling key characteristics of sabotage and offering a novel definition. The article finds that sabotage is the weaponization of friction to degrade the performance of systems from within. Sabotage has a strategic logic distinct from related concepts of covert action and subversion: corrosively turning friction into advantage. This logic limits its impact as stand-alone tool but makes it particularly well-placed to enhance and enable other policy instruments. By placing sabotage on the research agenda and theoretically advancing scholarship on ‘secret statecraft’ more widely, this article has significant implications for understanding and responding to contemporary security challenges.

Located on the eastern coast of Lesbos island in the north-east Aegean, Thermi emerges as one of the most emblematic sites in the Early Bronze Age. Since its excavation by Winifred Lamb in the early 1930s, it has been recognised as an early urban settlement, similarly to its equivalent insular sites on Lemnos, Chios and Samos. Although often linked to Anatolian influences due to similarities in pottery assemblages and material culture, especially in terms of morphology, Thermi’s ceramics have largely been confined to significant typological classifications without further analytical investigation. This paper presents the results of a comprehensive study encompassing morpho-stylistic, macroscopic and petrographic analysis of this ceramic assemblage across all settlement phases during the third millennium BC. Through petrographic analysis of pottery and raw material samples, this study has determined the provenance and allowed the characterisation of local and intra-island pottery production and consumption strategies. Additionally, it has identified evidence of Thermi’s extra-insular connectivity with various sources across the Aegean region. While certain ceramic manufacturing choices exhibit diachronic continuities, there is evidence of chronological patterning in the appearance of clay recipes. These changes correlate well with contemporaneous shifts in architectural developments, patterns of consumption of valued goods and the broader outreach of the settlement.

We examined how BMI, BMI trajectories, and BMI fluctuation around these trajectories in adolescence were correlated with BMI trajectories and BMI fluctuation in early adulthood, as well as the genetic basis of these associations. BMI data from Finnish twins (N = 1379, 48% males) were collected at ages 11.5, 14, 17.5, 24, and 37 years. BMI trajectories in adolescence (11.5–17.5 years) and early adulthood (17.5–37 years) were estimated using linear mixed-effect models. BMI fluctuation was calculated as the average squared differences between observed and expected BMI around these trajectories. Genetic twin models and a polygenic risk score for BMI (PRSBMI) were used to assess genetic contributions to BMI fluctuation and its associations with BMI and BMI trajectories. Adolescent BMI fluctuation was positively correlated with early adulthood BMI trajectories in females, while in males, adolescent BMI trajectories were positively associated with BMI fluctuation in early adulthood. Genetic factors affected BMI fluctuation in both adolescence and early adulthood when estimated using twin modelling and PRSBMI. Adolescent BMI was positively associated with early adulthood fluctuation in both sexes, with genetic factors playing a role (genetic correlations .08–.29). It was concluded that genetic factors play a significant role in BMI fluctuations in adolescence and early adulthood, with some overlap with the genetics of BMI.

Timely selection of appropriate empirical treatment for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE) bacteremia remains challenging, especially when prior antibiotic exposure data is unavailable. We found that intensive care unit stay duration predicts CRE bacteremia—with ≥8 days showing 81% sensitivity and 96% PPV—providing a practical clue for empirical therapy decisions.

Systematized information on the background of policymakers across long time-periods and all geographical regions of the world remains limited. In this article, we introduce Paths to Power (PtP), a new dataset on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet members. PtP contains detailed individual-level data – whenever identifiable – on 44,789 cabinet members across 141 countries in the period 1966-2021. This comprehensive dataset will be of relevance to numerous scholars (and others) interested in understanding politics and recent political history, and it enables a wide variety of new, empirically founded insights. We first present how the data is created and then discuss data quality and limitations. Next, we show how PtP is useful for researchers in diverse fields, including comparative politics, political sociology, gender studies, public administration, and international relations.

We characterize a general traveling periodic wave of the defocusing mKdV (modified Korteweg–de Vries) equation by using a quotient of products of Jacobi’s elliptic theta functions. Compared to the standing periodic wave of the defocusing NLS (nonlinear Schrödinger) equation, these solutions are special cases of Riemann’s theta function of genus two. Based on our characterization, we derive a new two-parameter solution form which defines a general three-parameter solution form with the scaling transformation. Eigenfunctions of the Lax system for the general traveling periodic wave are also characterized as quotients of products of Jacobi’s theta functions. As the main outcome of our analytical computations, we derive a new solution of the defocusing mKdV equation which describes the kink breather propagating on a general traveling wave background.

Drawing on recent scholarship on international criminalisation, this article demonstrates how this concept is not only critical for explaining why certain global atrocities were recognised as international crimes but also why others failed to be criminalised in world politics. To do so, it focuses on piracy, an act that has been conventionally depicted as the first international crime to have been established within the international legal order but was subsequently excluded from the existing list of current international crimes. Guided by a conceptualisation of international criminalisation as a process that embraces, firstly, the emergence of an international criminal norm and, secondly, the translation of such a norm into an international legal proscription, the article analyses four historical periods across the twentieth century during which piracy was the subject of international debate amongst legal diplomats. Through a close analysis of primary documents from this period, it shows how piracy failed to be recognised as an international crime principally because an international criminal norm against piracy failed to emerge in world politics across this period.