The 20th century has been a century of political famines, that is, famines directly—and at times willfully—caused by human policies, in war1 and in peacetime. Scores of millions starved to death in times during which there was enough food to feed everyone and the means to transport it where needed.

In this article, the authors examine how the potential success of head/body transplantation raises questions as to how halakha—Jewish law and jurisprudence—might draw the line between determining whether a person is dead or alive. In presenting the primary Talmudic passages that refer to determination of life and death, and their discussion among halakhists and halakhic decisors, the authors show how the halakha might determine the demarcation between life and death as it applies to head/body transplants or potentially other innovations in medical technology.

This article offers a new perspective on a diverse corpus of high-status Western Slavic objects from the domain of the Piast dynasty in Poland, dated between the tenth and eleventh centuries ad. It is proposed that the lavish zoomorphic decorations, often depicting snakes, found on jewellery, weapons, and equestrian equipment reflected Western Slavic pre-Christian religious ideas and served as material markers of elite identity. The results of this study lead to a more nuanced understanding of Western Slavic worldviews and their material expressions, paving the way for new investigations into cultural interactions both within and beyond the Slavic homelands.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Shanghai became China's most important film centre, for both production and distribution. The city hosted the largest number of movie theatres in the country. After the establishment of the first theatre in 1908 by a Spanish national, the distribution of movie theatres gradually transferred and expanded from Hongkew District, north of Suzhou Creek to the south bank of the International Settlement. This article examines the characteristics of the distribution of movie theatres in the city from the perspective of authorities’ policy, population density, population structure, traffic and cultural space. It analyses the factors leading to the particular geographical distribution and discusses the possible links between the space of cinema, urban development and urban cultural space.

This article situates the development of the kin-state politics literature within the context of post-Cold War scholarship on ethnicity, nationalism, and conflict. It outlines how an increasingly mature literature emerged around the domestic political and foreign policy drivers of kin-state politics as scholars drew from a number of perspectives, from the literature on irredentism to that on diaspora politics and transborder nationalism. The article then evaluates scholarship on the drivers and impacts of kin-state politics, with a focus on the consequences of kin-state politics for the cultural and political landscape of external kin communities and the impact on regional security and stability. While a rich and nuanced literature has helped to contextualize the tensions and complexities of the former, I argue that the latter needs to be developed further. Careful work needs to be done to more precisely establish the conditions under which kin-state politics constitute a security threat. Future scholarship should bring together a more ground level perspective of how kin-state policies are perceived, utilized, and/or instrumentalized by their intended subjects with a critical understanding of how the “game” of kin-state politics is played within the home state and the kin-state.

This article has two main objectives. First, we aim to revisit debates about the structure of Song Dynasty faction lists and the relationship between eleventh- and twelfth century factional politics on the basis of a large-scale network analysis of co-occurrence ties reported in the prose collections of those contemporary to the events. Second, we aim to innovate methodologically by developing a series of approaches to compare historical networks of different sizes with regard to overall network metrics as well as the significance of particular attributes such as native and workplace in their makeup. The probabilistic and sampling methods developed here should be applicable for various kinds of historical network analysis. The corresponding data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xtf-z3au.

On the solely jurisdictional reading, the nonestablishment clause in the US Constitution's First Amendment was designed to confirm that power over politics in relation to religion was assigned solely to the several states. This article first summarizes two presentations of that view (those of Steven D. Smith and Akhil Reed Amar), offers a critique of it, and then outlines an alternative. The critique is theoretical, seeking to show the incoherence of the solely jurisdictional reading, such that any theorist who assumes its internal consistency cancels her or his own interpretation of the First Amendment. This incoherence is present because that reading assumes the suprarational character of religious or comprehensive convictions, even while those citizens who hold any such conviction believe that justice depends on the ultimate terms of political evaluation they affirm. On the alternative outlined, religious freedom makes sense if and only if the ultimate terms of evaluation are given in common (adult) human experience, and thus the question about them is itself rational.

This article draws on empirical research conducted with European Commission officials in three Directorates-General and its other services on their perception of how the legislative and policy-making process facilitates the interaction of science and environmental law. This article deploys Sheila Jasanoff's theoretical framework of co-production as an important lens to examine how the European Commission creates this interaction of science and law in environmental policy making and identifies how the Commission incorporates different voices and stakeholders in this policy area. The Commission can be seen as a vehicle of co-production of science and law in EU environmental policy by building strong expert identities, putting in place institutional processes and instruments, and creating discourse between scientists and lawyers leading to outputs of co-production. It is argued that in actively facilitating co-production, the Commission underpins the legislative and policy-making process with its institutional values.

This paper uses a case study of a 1970s controversy in artificial-intelligence (AI) research to explore how scientists understand the relationships between research and practical applications. It is part of a project that seeks to map such relationships in order to enable better policy recommendations to be grounded empirically through historical evidence. In 1972 the mathematician James Lighthill submitted a report, published in 1973, on the state of artificial-intelligence research under way in the United Kingdom. The criticisms made in the report have been held to be a major cause behind the dramatic slowing down (subsequently called an ‘AI winter’) of such research. This paper has two aims, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to inquire into the causes, motivations and content of the Lighthill report. I argue that behind James Lighthill's criticisms of a central part of artificial intelligence was a principle he held throughout his career – that the best research was tightly coupled to practical problem solving. I also show that the Science Research Council provided a preliminary steer to the direction of this apparently independent report. The broader aim of the paper is to map some of the ways that scientists (and in Lighthill's case, a mathematician) have articulated and justified relationships between research and practical, real-world problems, an issue previously identified as central to historical analysis of modern science. The paper therefore offers some deepened historical case studies of the processes identified in Agar's ‘working-worlds’ model.