This article presents a community-based account of salience as an alternative and a complement to the ‘natural salience’ approach which is endorsed by almost all game theorists who use this concept. While in the naturalistic approach, salience is understood as an objective and natural property of some entities (events, strategies, outcomes), the community-based account claims that salience is a function of community membership. Building on David Lewis’s theory of common knowledge and on some of its recent refined accounts, I suggest that salience acts as a correlating device in a correlated equilibrium. What is constitutive of salience is common understanding, the fact that agents have common knowledge that they share the same modes of reasoning with respect to a well-identified set of events. I argue that the basis for common understanding is community membership. The relevance of this account stems from the fact that it answers the objection that salience is either unnecessary or unable to account for coordination between rational agents.

Studies that examine the effects of decentralisation for social change or stasis have placed necessary attention on its institutional dynamics: the ways social institutions have transformed as a result of new governance regimes, or alternatively, how the existing institutional context and attendant power relations determine its actualisation. The second facet of the structure/agency dialectic is often overlooked however, that is, the actors themselves. This article seeks to overcome this lacuna by exploring the effects of citizens' engagement in practices associated with decentralised governance for individuals' understandings of self, society, and their relationship with the state. A comparison of two villages in Telangana, India, and Central Lombok, Indonesia reveals how differences in the distribution of welfare benefits have implications for the potential of such interactions to be sites of creative self-formation. Differences such as the regularity and ability to demand entitlements, preferential versus equal access to resources, and the levels at which citizens engage with the state, may be crucial for processes of subjectification, and by extension, social transformation.

In the conduct of prewar Japanese foreign relations, political associations (seiji kessha) – we might also call them pressure groups – exerted considerable political influence, particularly on Japan's relations with China and other Asian nations. One of the best known of these political associations is the Kokuryūkai (the “Amur Society,” also known as the “Black Dragon Society”), which was founded in 1901 and, in 1946, was banned as an ultranationalist association by the American occupation authorities. The Kokuryūkai was also identified as the center of an expansionist conspiracy to steer Japan towards war with the Western powers.

In the absence of detailed studies of the Kokuryūkai, this article aims to clarify the organization's political views and activities and to demonstrate its influence on Japanese foreign relations and involvement in East Asia in the early twentieth century. Drawing on primary sources such as the association's publications and its leaders' memoranda and letters, I show that the Kokuryūkai engaged in intensive networking activities and the accumulation of social capital involving not only Japanese but also Chinese and Korean politicians and diplomats. Nevertheless, I conclude that the association's influence on the origins of the Asia-Pacific War should not be overstated, since its activities reached a climax in the late 1910s and effectively ended with the death of founder Uchida Ryōhei in 1937.

Through an examination of issues arising from mahjong playing, this article explores changes in daily life and popular culture at the turn of the twenty-first century and argues that these changes reflect political, economic, social, and cultural transformations, in which conflicts between individual rights and collective interests have become increasingly prominent. This study discusses issues relating to mahjong from stories at four different levels: individual, community, the city, and the nation, which, respectively, look at conflicts among neighbors, examine the role of the Residential Committee in the neighborhood, observe the responses of the municipal government and official media to the city's image, and reveal the dilemma when the socialist state confronts mahjong issues. From the specific issues arising from mahjong, we can see how the new culture of the market economy in today's China coexists with elements from a more traditional lifestyle.

This note provides an introduction to the accompanying article by Allan Gibbard that was originally written for the 1968–69 Harvard graduate seminar conducted by Kenneth Arrow, John Rawls and Amartya Sen.

In the nineteenth century, colonial officials relied heavily on coercion to recruit “coolie” labour for “public works” and to provide various support services in the North-East Frontier of British India. “Treaties” with defeated chiefs and the subsequent population enumeration and taxation were strongly oriented to the mobilization of labour for road building and porterage. Forced labour provided the colonial officials with a steady supply of coolies to work on the roads as well as carriers for military expeditions. In mobilizing labour resources, however, colonial officials had to create and draw upon native agents such as the headmen and interpreters who came to play a crucial role in the colonial order of things. Focusing on the Naga Hills, this article will examine the efforts of the colonial state to secure a large circulating labour force, the forms of labour relations that emerged from the need to build colonial infrastructure and the demand for coolies in military expeditions, the response of the hill people to labour conscription and its impact on the hill “tribes”.

The objective of this research was to determine the number of people using the Ross Island recreational walking tracks, and to examine the relationships between the number of users, track morphological characteristics, and soil physiochemical properties. Infrared track counters provided 2-years of data on five walking tracks on the island. Track width and track incision were measured and soil sampling in the vicinity of the track counter and an adjacent control site was undertaken. Between January 2009 and January 2011 5084 passes were recorded on the Scott Base to McMurdo Station walking track, 2842 on the Wind Vane Hill walking track, 3561 on the Round Observation Hill walking track, 10936 on the Up Observation Hill track, and 693 on the Crater Hill summit walking track. There were more users on all tracks in the 2010–2011 summer season than the 2009–2010 summer season. The highest frequency of visitors occurred on Sundays during the summer (November to January). There was no relationship between the number of passes on the track and the measured impact indicators. This indicates that higher usage of a formed track had little cumulative impact. Track width and incision were related to the slope of the terrain, with tracks traversing flatter areas generally wider (R2 = 0.85) and less incised (R2 = 0.96), than those traversing steeper hillsides. There were no significant differences between tracks and control samples in soil pH, soil EC, organic C, total N, and total P. However, soil bulk density was higher in the walking tracks than adjacent control areas (p < 0.05).

Arrow’s impossibility result stems chiefly from a combination of two requirements: independence and fixity. Independence says that the social choice is independent of individual preferences involving unavailable alternatives. Fixity says that the social choice is fixed by a social preference relation that is independent of what is available. Arrow found that requiring, further, that this relation be transitive yields impossibility. Here it is shown that allowing intransitive social indifference still permits only a vastly unsatisfactory system, a liberum veto oligarchy. Arrow’s argument for independence, though, undermines any rationale for fixity.

Russian has a family of reflexive constructions that have non-canonical syntax and express a variety of meanings that range from disposition (‘I feel like working’) to ability (‘I cannot work here’) and generic assessment of quality (‘I work well here’). Previous analyses assume that these constructions are derived by a regular syntactic rule and postulate a null modal in the structure to account for their semantics (Benedicto 1995, Franks 1995, Rivero & Arregui 2012). Focusing on the ‘feel like’ construction, I show that derivational analyses have difficulty explaining its idiosyncratic properties, including non-canonical agreement (independent of the structural subject), as well as the interpretation of aspect. Moreover, derivational analyses overgeneralize, since only a subset of predicates occur in the ‘feel like’ construction in Russian, as the data from the Russian National Corpus indicate. In order to account for their idiosyncratic properties and semi-productivity, I propose that the ‘feel like’ construction and its kin are stored in the lexicon as constructions (Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 1997, 2008). The proposed analysis clarifies the status of reflexive constructions in Russian and establishes the scope of cross-linguistic semantic variation by comparing reflexives in Russian to that in other Slavic languages.

Set in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre, The Hungry Tide traces the transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics provides a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

The Southern Bluefin Tuna dispute of the late 1990s will long be remembered as one of the most important fishery disputes of all time, influencing both ocean governance and international dispute settlement. This commentary explores the legacy of that dispute with a particular emphasis on the growth and development of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna and how the regime is functioning with the addition of several new members. We will focus also on the specific challenges to the conservation and management of the southern bluefin tuna. This includes biological parameters and the legal and political landscape of global fisheries conservation generally. Finally, we will explore emerging conservation strategies to assist the recovery of this highly valuable fish species.

This paper aims to show how the photography of Frederick A. Cook (1865–1940) played an important role in the making of his polar explorer-hero image. It considers portraits and Arctic and Antarctic photographs that Cook used in his own publications and illustrated lectures, and which he provided for press articles. The paper is underpinned by discourse analysis and the concept of the photograph as a representation of reality filtered through various lenses. The visual impact and discursive messages of the photographs were aimed at situating readers and audiences in responsive attitudes that would generate a public persona which he exploited to increase his fame and heroic reputation. In time, Cook's photography also played a critical part in the collapse of the hero image.

Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the term Anthropocene. In case we need reminding, Anthropocene names the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000.1 In 1945, there occurred “The Great Acceleration,” a huge data spike in the graph of human involvement in Earth systems. (The title’s Kubrick joke stems from the crustal deposition of radioactive materials since 1945.) Like Marx, Crutzen sees the steam engine as iconic. As this is written, geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz are convincing the Royal Society of Geologists to make the term official.

This reading rewrites the nahḍah, as the other appellation for Arab modernity, and interrogates it through a postcolonial critique. The nahḍah is usually addressed in terms of the encounter with Europe, the indebtedness to and engagement with the Enlightenment discourse at the turn of the last century. I dispute more commonplace negativist readings of the past by nahḍah scholars and direct attention instead to other competing trends that enhanced significant identitarian politics. I also unearth the reasons behind the loudly pronounced negativism, its pitfalls and failure to map out a comprehensive field of an enormous knowledge that unfolded in compendiums, commentaries, lexicons, encyclopedias, along with separate monographs. I apply the term republic of letters to this specifically loaded scholarly interaction, one that preceded and heralded other configurational sites in Europe. A community of scholars over centuries and across the Islamic lands emerged between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries that could have furnished “Enlightened” modernists with some different understanding and critical theoretical approach to the encounter with Europe and the colonial and postcolonial state of affairs.