Campaigns on behalf of Russian political prisoners stretch from the revolutionary “nihilists” of the 1880s to the dissidents of the 1970s. While the efforts of political émigrés and their Western sympathizers – to promote awareness, raise funds, and pressure governments – met with decidedly mixed success, there were several watershed moments. This article examines how one such breakthrough, the compilation and publication of Letters from Russian Prisons in 1925, resulted in the formation of the International Committee for Political Prisoners (ICPP) as the first ever transnational amnesty NGO. Along with 300 pages of harrowing accounts of Soviet prisons, camps, and exile, the book featured endorsements by “Twenty-Two Well-Known European and American Authors”. The disputatious process of this volume's compilation and the controversy greeting its issuance show the challenges of extending civil liberties advocacy to include criticism of the Soviet Union among left and liberal figures in the interwar period. In establishing a new field of endeavor – universalist transnational activism to aid political detainees – the ICPP navigated a complex network of relationships among a diverse array of political and intellectual figures.

How do peacebuilding institutions affect political behavior? This article studies the historic victory of the Colombian left in the 2022 presidential elections in light of the implementation of local peacebuilding programs through the 2016 Peace Accords. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the Development Plans with a Territorial Focus (PDET), a central component of the 2016 Peace Accords between the government and the FARC, increased the vote share for the leftist coalition, Pacto Histórico, in the 2022 elections by increasing voter turnout in PDET regions. In a departure from existing literature, we find that the explanatory effect of violence on vote share is significantly reduced when we include an indicator for PDET implementation and additional covariates. While there is a substantial body of work examining the effects of conflict violence and the presence of armed actors on elections, there has been relatively little focus on how the peacebuilding has affected vote choice and political behavior. We see our project as a bridge to fill this gap in the literature.

The idea of global modernisms rests upon freighted power relationships. Far from decolonizing, this concept reinscribes values of Euro- and US-centric discourses. This article addresses the inherent friction of global musical modernisms through Carlos Chávez's 1940 composition La paloma azul, written for concerts at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Tasked with appealing to a US audience, Chávez created work that participates in modernism's hierarchical frame, where Mexico provides exotic fantasy for bourgeois New Yorkers.

Chávez was not alone in having been positioned as ‘modernism's shadow’ – the negative counterexample that confirms modernism's progressive image. Global musical modernism suggests that modernism can shed its exclusionary identity and encompass more. But it hides how modernism has always been international, and how composers such as Chávez have been central to its construction. By ignoring modernism's historical realities, global musical modernism shores up existing understandings and maintains the marginal status of whatever is categorized as ‘global’.

The CCAMLR System of Inspection has been in place for more than 30 years, but its implementation and impact have yet to be summarised and analysed. The purpose of the research is to clarify the legal basis, analyse the implementation and make suggestions for further improvements. By analysing the CAMLR Convention and historical files, the System of Inspection has been further improved and many details have been added based on some international fisheries agreements and domestic laws regulating fisheries. Article XXIV of the CAMLR Convention, various Conservation Measures and documents form the legal basis of the System of Inspection. The System is divided into two types, namely At-sea inspection and Port inspection. Combined with the annual reports of CCAMLR meetings over the past 30 years, the System has become relatively complete as a “Compliance Monitoring Mechanism” under the CCAMLR Compliance Evaluation Procedure with other monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) tools. However, inspection data have not been stable over the years. Since 2017, the increase in catches has not led to an increase in the number of inspections in the annual reports. In addition, At-sea inspections do not cover all Subareas of the Convention. At present, the objects of inspection have been extended to Non-Member vessels, so that it should also be sanctioned through various mechanisms. In addition, the System of Inspection is different from the Compliance Evaluation Procedure and the relationship between the two needs to be confirmed in practice. Due to the change in inspection methods, the lack of inspection data and the increase in other MCS tools, At-sea inspection does not cover all Subareas of the Convention. The System of Inspection is constantly being practised and improved. The study calls on Members to continue to carry out inspections and to improve the System in order to achieve the conservation and rational use of fishery resources.

In Renaissance Italy, the political power of authorities found one of its expressions in material symbols of sovereignty. The placing of inscriptions, sculptures and columns and the commissioning of frescoes in streets, piazzas and public spaces, for example, were essential ways of communicating political or spiritual authority to the populace. Sometimes perceived as representations of a top-down form of communication, in the urban context these same material emblems of power became political objects through which to express dissent, as in the case of public loggias, speaking statues or graffiti on walls and civic palaces. Presenting case-studies from various cities in northern Italy, this article investigates the dialectics between the people and the authorities in the urban fabric, especially in everyday life. Combining a spatial and a material approach to politics, this article reveals the dynamic and relational nature of political public spaces.

Excavations at the vicarage yard (prästgården) at the famous Late Iron Age magnate centre of Gamla Uppsala, Sweden, have yielded six Viking Age (c. ad 750–1100) boat burials, several containing the remains of domestic dogs. The present study is an osteological examination of the remains of three of these dogs, one each from three boat graves, with a primary goal of morphological reconstruction and a secondary focus on identifying sex, age, and pathology. Two dogs were large, slender sight hounds, while the third was somewhat smaller and of indeterminate type. The preference for sight hounds in high-status graves is consistent with previous results from the contemporaneous nearby boat cemeteries of Vendel and Valsgärde, adding weight to the hypothesis of a shared funerary culture between these sites in the Late Iron Age.

Focusing on seventeenth-century Madrid, this article explores the interplay between urban public space and a specific type of written defamatory statements, the carteles de desafío or letters of challenge, with the aim of examining the implications of this interaction. Letters of challenge were primarily conceived as a communication tool between the participants in duels and challenges. Displayed in public spaces, they could take on new meanings and even replace the combat itself, while at the same time perpetuating the values of a male honour culture that encouraged the use of violence among large sectors of society to settle disputes.

Plastic pollution in the Arctic marine system is sparsely quantified, and few enforceable policies are in place to ameliorate the issue. With an inflow-outflow budget for the Arctic Ocean, we identify gateways through which plastic enters and exits the Arctic marine system. While estimating the flux of plastic through rivers, sea ice, and ocean, we also quantify marine plastic pollution from Arctic shipping and fishing. Plastic fluxes are calculated using horizontal volume fluxes of water and ice and combining them with plastic waste concentration data; flux from fishing and shipping is generated through combining waste estimates with estimated ship traffic. We estimate that fishing and shipping contribute 105 tonnes of plastic flux per annum, compared to 10−1 tonnes per annum from river inflow. The ocean has a far smaller net outflow, dwarfed by that of ice, at 10−8 to 10−7 and 10−5 to 10−3 tonnes per annum, respectively. We examine how a suite of proposed policy interventions would quantitatively change those concentrations, and how the current governance environment makes each feasible; we find interventions targeting vessel traffic most effective. These interventions include a prohibition on the use of certain plastics in fishing as well as a Polar Code permitting scheme.

In an attempt to counteract the silence of Exeter’s late sixteenth-century cartographic representation and to explore further the idea of urban social relations expressed in auditory terms, this article investigates the issues involved in the ringing of Exeter’s civic bells, some of which may reflect a fractious relationship between two sources of authority within the city walls. It sets out some of the challenges to recreating this city’s broader sonic identity and outlines the results of initial attempts to do so.

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified substantive views about justice in outcome distributions.

The Dobbs decision has precipitated renewed medical, political, and professional interest in the issue of abortion. Because this decision handed responsibility for regulation of abortion back to the states, and because the states are enacting or have enacted policies that tend to be very permissive or very restrictive, the result has been legal and professional confusion for physicians and their patients. Medical education cannot resolve either the legal or ethical issues regarding abortion. However, medical education must prepare future physicians for caring for patients seeking abortion-related services. Physicians must be prepared to interact appropriately (sensitively and with integrity) with patients or colleagues whose views on abortion differ significantly from their own. This essay describes our educational effort to achieve that objective. The motto that governed this exercise was “No Easy Answers.”