In settings of deep poverty and inequality, implementing policies that balance urgent needs with long-term development is crucial. What strategies are used to build public support for long-term oriented policies? Evidence shows that both left- and right-wing governments have played a role in the expansion of social policy. This article explores the context and meanings that governments with different ideologies assign to distributive policies, focusing on how these policies are communicated. In particular, I argue that ideology significantly shapes the framing presidents use when discussing and announcing social policies. Left-leaning governments emphasize social inclusion while right-leaning governments stress the productivity-enhancing aspects of these policies. Using text analysis techniques, including à la carte embeddings (ALC) this study analyzes presidential communications from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The findings show how ideology drives communication strategies, revealing that in more polarized societies, presidents distinguish themselves more consistently through how they construct and communicate these policies.

States are increasingly resorting to international cooperative agreements to deter migrants and refugees from irregularly arriving at their borders. Although scholars have shown how these cooperative deterrence policies are undermining important refugee and human rights protections, making migration journeys more dangerous, and securitizing and criminalizing people on the move, what has not been adequately examined is how these cooperative arrangements can bring about normative changes that produce indifference to the suffering of refugees and migrants. This article examines the psychosocial dynamics of cooperative deterrence policies to show how the social processes of authorization, routinization, evasion of responsibility, and dehumanization weaken moral restraints and opportunities for moral contemplation. Governments are using these social processes to implement, legitimize, and promote harmful policies; evade legal responsibility; and obscure the moral implications of their policies. This article sheds new light on the psychosocial effects of cooperative deterrence, the dark side of international cooperation, and the role that indifference plays in maintaining and legitimizing migration deterrence polices.

This article proposes a reframing of the ethics of human intelligence collection (HUMINT). Intelligence officers (IOs) engaged in HUMINT routinely transgress ordinary ethical norms: to serve their nation-state, they lie, manipulate, deceive, and instrumentalize others not only in professional settings (“doing HUMINT”) but also in private life (“living HUMINT”). The currently dominant framework for HUMINT ethics, derived from the just war tradition, does not adequately address key challenges—particularly at the individual level. I therefore argue for a reframing grounded in the lived experience of HUMINT, aimed at real dilemmas faced by conscientious IOs. The proposal has two components: first, expanding the space for individual moral responsibility across all levels of intelligence decision-making; and second, emphasizing peace as a minimal common telos to guide ethical deliberation by both IOs and their agencies. The reframing, I conclude, can enhance the efficiency and accountability of intelligence agencies while providing IOs with a more robust framework to guide their actions.

The consensus on the need to regulate artificial intelligence is clear, but the how remains elusive. Private regulation, as proposed by the tech industry itself, and state regulation, as embodied in the recent EU Artificial Intelligence Act, are two common forms of governance. We advance a third option that has received very little attention to date: professional regulation. Professional regulation is modeled after hybrid public-private regulatory structures found in medicine, such as those put forth by the American Medical Association. Such governance schemes develop both technical and ethical standards, shaping professional training, continuing knowledge, and conduct. We contend that it is the most practical means of ensuring the development of human-centered AI in an era of rapid technological change and intensely opposing views of what regulation ought to do. This article places the responsibility of acting ethically on the group that knows the technology best and can anticipate its effects: AI developers. But unlike other voluntary standards, professional regulation articulates and enforces standards to certify individuals. Professional licensing is an alternative that provides public protections based on privately developed standards that ensure the safety of AI prior to their release.

This review essay critically examines three recent books on the digitalization and datafication of humanitarian action: #Help, Humanitarian Extractivism, and Technocolonialism. Each monograph offers a compelling analysis of the myriad ways that humanitarians’ use of digital technologies has reshaped governance and the international order, created new risks, and exacerbated power imbalances. Fundamentally, each book concludes that the various transformations technology has wrought in humanitarianism are, at best, unintended, inconsistent, or unfulfilled in their impact and, at worst, deeply problematic. Setting aside the books’ contributions, each leaves out two important elements. First, in selecting examples, the authors leave mostly unanswered the question of what, if any, positive impacts data and technology have had on or for humanitarian response and those whom it is intended to help. Second, each is mostly silent with regard to practical steps that can be taken to address its critiques, with only Technocolonialism offering three broad avenues for reform. In the context of the current crisis in the humanitarian sector, with the closure of USAID and dramatic declines in funding, there is a need for pragmatic options for the future that, by necessity, involve a creative reimagining of the digital infrastructures underpinning the humanitarian response.

This article examines how the socio-indexical meanings of dialects/style are reconfigured through two-way parallel migration in Ningbo-Fenghua, China, focusing on the socio-indexical (re)valuation of Putonghua, Ningbonese, and Fenghuanese. Using two-phase matched-guise experiments and interviews, the study traces how mobility patterns and generational positioning mediate these meanings. Results show that, while Putonghua retains institutional prestige, it is often regarded affectively empty. In contrast, Fenghuanese and Ningbonese carry ambivalent, shifting values. Fenghua-born migrants reframe Fenghuanese as a resource for expressing intimacy, trust, and regionalism, while non-migrants view it as outdated. Ningbonese occupies a middle-ground, indexing familiarity, respectability, or obsolescence depending on context. Notably, younger speakers collapse dialectal distinctions, reframing both as ‘old speech’ tied to generation rather than place. These findings challenge Global North models that link indexical revaluation to elite cosmopolitanism, showing instead how meaning-making in the Global South can also emerge through administrative restructuring, regional absorption, and long-standing mobility patterns. (Indexicality, social meaning, Ningbo-Fenghua, migration and language, language attitudes).

This article revisits the history of Muslim Turkish society, questioning its essentialist portrayal as a “religious society,” with religiosity narrowly defined through Sunni Islamic doctrines. It examines the content of Sunni folk Islam through the Mevlid, Karbala, and Ebâ Müslim books published by İstanbul Maarif Kitaphanesi until the 1980s, as well as their political appropriation by elite actors during the early Cold War period. I argue that Sunni and Alevi religiosity shared key elements beyond saint veneration, particularly praising the Prophet through Nur Muhammad, love of Ahl Al-Bayt, and mourning for Karbala. Using these books as religious media through a material approach to religion, I maintain that they made Muhammad and Ahl Al-Bayt “accessible,” “tangible,” and “sense-able” in the world in oral, pictorial, and scriptural forms. Since the publishers, editors, authors, readers, and listeners of these books were descendants of Turkish speakers dating back to the twelfth century, I propose the term “Islam in Turkish” as a conceptual framework to capture these shared elements. I argue that this concept, denoting a vernacular form of religiosity, has the potential to replace the modern category of Turkish folk Islam and contribute to global critical discussions on Islam.

This article considers the function of American food and its exchange at the time of the Allied occupation of Italy to revisit the complexity of the encounter with the local population. Through unpublished diaries and confidential reports of the Psychological Warfare Branch, as well as video materials, published interviews and published diaries, the article makes the issues around food central to the understanding of the dynamics of the Italian occupation. While contributing to the growing literature on food availability in the Second World War, the article expands in particular on the historic function of American comfort food and rations, to explore the experience of the Italian occupation through the interactions of gifting, bartering and black market trade. It illuminates the complexity of mutual perceptions shaped by hope, nostalgia, supremacy, and fairness. It concludes with a reading of John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, which, as a cultural product, brings together and makes valid for future generations, the contrasting image of a benign and a damaging occupation explored in the article.

This study seeks to elucidate the historical development and transmission of the traditions associated with the ‘Seven Sets’ through a cross-textual analysis of Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Gāndhārī sources. The Seven Sets comprise the four establishings of mindfulness, the four right endeavors/abandonings, the four bases of success, the five faculties, the five powers, the seven factors of awakening, and the noble eightfold path. The Eight-Set tradition emerged alongside the Seven-Set tradition by the second century, followed by the forty-one and forty-three dharmas contributing to awakening (bodhipakkhiya/bodhipakṣya) by the fifth century. However, the Seven Sets became the most dominant. Both the Vaibhāṣika and Mahāvihāra schools upheld the Seven Sets as the definitive framework for the dharmas contributing to awakening, rejecting any additional items. The Vaibhāṣika dismissed the forty-one dharmas as heretical, whereas the Mahāvihāra excluded the four meditations incorporated into the Eight Sets. After the sixth century, the Eight-Set tradition was subsumed by the Seven-Set tradition. No evidence supports the long-term survival of the other two traditions. The dominance of the Seven Sets reflects the transition in South Asian Buddhism from pluralism to doctrinal unity.

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Montreal in November 2025.

This article estimates separate individual and partisan incumbencyeffects in Uruguay’s regional elections (1971–2020). It contributes tothe limited evidence on incumbency effects in developing countries andto the emerging Differences-in-Discontinuities (Diff-in-Disc)literature, which addresses endogeneity and disentangles candidatefrom party effects within the same institutional setting. Exploitingconstitutionally mandated term limits and strong electoralenforcement, we identify clean causal effects using close electionsunder open and closed races. Results show a large and statisticallysignificant individual incumbency effect of approximately 74%,alongside non-significant partisan effects. These findings suggestthat incumbency in Uruguay is primarily personal rather thanparty-based. The results contribute to debates on personalization ofpolitics, proportional representation, and institutional developmentin Latin America, highlighting how strong democratic institutions cancoexist with highly individualized electoral dynamics.

Do voters take into account the deaths of family members and close friends when evaluating the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—particularly when that response is problematic or even negligent—as in the case of Mexico under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) administration? Using data from the 2021 Mexican Election Study, this research shows that opposition partisans who lost close friends or relatives to COVID-19 are more likely to evaluate the government’s response to the pandemic negatively. In contrast, National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) partisans do not hold accountable their co-partisan government. They are no more likely to evaluate the government’s response negatively, even when they experience the same losses. Experimental evidence further shows that MORENA partisans do not lower their evaluations of government performance after being informed about the country’s high COVID-19 mortality. They are also more likely to underestimate the number of COVID-19 deaths in the country, even after being presented with official mortality figures. These findings underscore how partisanship can cloud accountability, leading some voters to dismiss objective information and to judge government performance primarily through the lens of partisan loyalty. Partisanship can distort the accountability mechanism at the core of retrospective voting even during a major health crisis.