In this article, the author develops an Islamic normative legal theoretical framework by using three key Islamic methodological approaches—(1) juridical theory of law (uṣūl), (2) legal maxims (qawāʿid), and (3) purposive-based theory (maqāṣid)—in light of Ronald Dworkin’s notions of rules, principles, and policies, respectively. While uṣūl is used to develop rules, qawāʿid and maqāṣid provide the normative values that govern rulemaking. In addition to presenting a coherent model of Islamic normative legal theory, the author examines legitimacy issues of Islamic law that relate to links of rules to sharīʿa revealed texts and applies the Islamic normative legal theoretical framework to contemporary rulings on the environment, organ transplants, and Islamic finance. The case studies show that using the integrated normative framework would yield more ethical rulings than those that focus on juridical methods (uṣūl) only. The author argues that while the extent of legal legitimacy can vary across different rulings, the application of the Islamic normative legal framework ensures normative legitimacy in all cases, ensuring the moral character of Islamic law.

Ulbe Bosma’s book on the global history of sugar offers fundamentally new insights into the nexus of technology, corporate capital, government policies, and ideologies of progress in the making of commodity frontiers. From the perspective of historical materialist anthropology, it is important to broaden the research agenda even further. With reference to Maussian historical personae in the making of global capitalism, for example, a long history of raiders of state budgets emerges from Bosma’s work. Incorporating Sidney Mintz’s work on Sweetness and Power on a critical extension of world-system theory reveals, for the case of colonial and postcolonial Mauritius, that economic subsystems and local responses to slavery and indenture have a permanence for kinship structures, social policies, real estate markets, trade union legislations, and postcolonial development policies in special economic zones. Such a widened focus allows for the incorporation of the Caribbean Plantation School theorists into our analysis of sugar commodity chains within a comprehensive world systems perspective beyond the commodity frontiers agenda.

This study analyzes Turkey’s political landscape by harnessing computational social science techniques to parse extensive data about public ideologies from the Politus database. Unlike existing theoretical frameworks that focus on the ideologies of political elites and cadres, this study examines public ideologies in a contentious political manner. Exploiting an artificial intelligence-based data generation pipeline on digital traces, it distills the eight most prevalent ideologies down to the city level and employs exploratory statistical analyses. Principal component analysis delineates two fundamental axes: the traditional left–right political spectrum and a separate spectrum of secular–religious inclination, encompassing both political and cultural dimensions. Then, cluster analysis reveals three distinct groups: left-leaning and religiously inclined; center-right-leaning and religiously inclined; and those with a center-right-leaning focus and a pronounced secular orientation. The outcomes provide valuable insights into the political and cultural axes within political society, offering a clearer understanding of the most recent ideological and political climate in Turkey.

Can desires be irrational? This paper focuses on the possibility that desires might be irrational because they fail to cohere with other mental states of the person in question. Recent literature on structural irrationality has largely neglected structural requirements on desire, and this paper begins to rectify that neglect. This paper endorses various rational requirements on desire, but primarily focuses on the instrumental requirement to desire the means to our ends. It explains how this requirement should be understood, and defends it from numerous objections, such as the worry that there are no real instrumental desires but only combinations of ultimate desires and beliefs, and the worry that it would require us to desire even very foolish means to our ends.

The transition to democracy in Chile, which took place under the rules established in the authoritarian constitution, led political parties and voters to align along an authoritarian/democratic divide. In the campaign for the constitutional plebiscite in 2022, some of those in favor of a new constitution linked their position to democratic values and labeled those opposed to the new draft as lacking democratic values. Many of those opposed to the new constitution purposely distanced themselves from the authoritarian legacy. We rely on a pre-electoral poll to explore democratic values in the vote choice in the plebiscite. When factoring for economic perceptions, ideological identification, and sociodemographic traits, while holding authoritarian values was positively associated with voting Reject, expressing democratic values had a weak association with voting Approve. The authoritarian/democratic divide in the party system in the early 1990s was not a relevant determinant of vote choice in the 2022 plebiscite.

The global diffusion of state power has led to a decline in global governance; that is, in the attempt to build authoritative rules and institutions that represent the common goals of the international community. The rise of China and other powers has increased the heterogeneity of the international system, and the erstwhile hegemon has turned against the international order. The major powers today have vastly different domestic characteristics and pursue strongly divergent interests. This has gridlocked and marginalized multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization and seen a worrying disregard for international law. In response, the institutional ecosystem of global governance is adapting by lowering its scope, weakening its commitments, and splintering into partly competing institutional orders. Adaptation and decline are not mutually exclusive: Today, we can witness the adaptation of global governance to its own decline. Theoretically, this points to the enduring relevance of hegemonic stability theory for global governance. The result is a reduced normative ambition for global governance, signaling a retreat from the grand internationalist vision of organized cooperation among all the members of the international community.

Panentheists advocate for a unique and rival view of God and his relationship to the cosmos. A common panentheistic slogan says the cosmos is in God, but God is more than the cosmos. God is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. However, it’s unclear how we should interpret this slogan. Focusing on key passages in the Bhagavad-Gīta, I propose three desiderata that a minimal account of the panentheist’s God-world relation must adhere to and argue that the relation of metaphysical grounding meets all three. On my view, panentheism is the view that God’s existence grounds the existence of the cosmos. I develop this view in opposition to rival accounts and argue that we can plausibly demarcate panentheism from traditional theism in terms of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma offers an ambitious and sweeping account of the global history of sugar. Readers interested in sugar’s role in shaping economies, environments, and societies will find it a captivating synthesis of its past and present trajectories. In this commentary, I engage critically with the book, focusing on the areas most closely aligned with my own research on the Brazilian sugar industry. I highlight key points related to labour, race, and resistance in order to broaden the debate on the sugar frontier.

We present a philosophically motivated framework for modelling moral agency. In addition to choosing strategies, agents in this framework choose among an appropriate exogenous set of moralities that depends on the context of the game. Further, agents can use mixed strategies to choose their degree of morality. We present two models to demonstrate the framework. In the first model, agents choose between empathy and selfishness while playing prisoner’s dilemma. In the second, agents choose between Kantian universalizing and selfishness while playing a public goods game. For both models, the degree of morality gets determined endogenously rather than assigned parametrically.

Finding the right balance between education and entertainment in science communication has always been a challenge. This essay argues that this balance has often been framed in terms of the correct proportion and use of animation and live-action footage in popular-science media. Clarifying the assumptions behind a century of concerns about animation and science, this historical case study examines the advisory board’s complaints about animation in the Bell System Science Series, which aired in the United States between 1956 and 1964. AT&T interrupted the series mid-stream by switching the creative team from Frank Capra and his production company to Owen Crump at Warner Bros. Studio. Capra’s use of animation in the series featured prominently in this decision. The historical record – as well as Capra’s and Crump’s different aesthetic choices about animation – tells us much about the board’s objections and how they were resolved in production. This essay examines the differences between the two parts of the series to uncover a course correction steered primarily by the scientific advisory board, which reveals a sometimes-fraught relationship between live-action footage and animation in science education that persists even today.

With formal international organizations (IOs) facing gridlock and informal IOs proliferating, cooperation in the twenty-first century looks different than it did in previous eras. Global governance institutions today also face additional challenges, including a fragmented information environment where publics are increasingly vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation. What do these trends portend for international politics? One way to answer this question is to return to a core ingredient of a well-functioning IO—information provision—and ask how such changes affect efficiency. Viewed through this lens, we see decline in some arenas and adaptation in others. Formal IOs are struggling to retain relevance as their weak policy responses and ambiguous rules create space for competing signals. The proliferation of informal institutions, on the other hand, may represent global governance evolution, as these technocratic bodies are often well-insulated from many political challenges. Yet even if global governance retains functionality, the legitimacy implications of such trends are troubling. IO legitimacy depends in part on process, and from this standpoint, the informational gains of informal governance must be weighed against losses of accountability and transparency. Ultimately, evaluating the normative implications of these trends requires making judgments about the preferred legitimizing principles for global governance.

This essay reveals the institutional dynamics of hard times in the issue area of human rights. I show that the human rights regime has developed innovative-yet-informal institutions like individuals-based coalitions for the international protection and progressive development of human rights. Yet, as these informal institutions function very much based on, first, the interpersonal relations among their members, and, second, legal instruments that require no further consent by states, the advocacy success of liberal human rights defenders has, in turn, provided a playbook for advocates and governments from the illiberal end of the ideology spectrum. In addition, new human rights advocates in the form of certain private law firms have entered the UN through their pro bono work. They promise valuable resources for a crisis-ridden system but often represent corporate clients with conflicts of interest. Given the imminent risk of ideological capture and illiberal interests in human rights paralyzing the system, I reemphasize the need for regulating access to the human rights global governance institutions.

Following the trajectories of vaccines against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in France and Britain up to the 1960s, this paper will show how vaccine efficacy has two meanings: 1) technical – or experimental – which refers to test protocols and regimes of evidence, and 2) practical – or experiential – which refers to the experience various actors have of diseases and their direct or indirect impacts on society and the economy, as well as on representations and imaginaries they share about diseases, vaccines, and vaccination. The assessment protocols in the two countries are analysed to show how these two meanings are deeply intertwined and influence the different public policies chosen by each country. Although statistically assessed, the efficacy of the same vaccines appears situated, depending not only on regimes of evidence but also on the reality of agricultural practices, on national stock exchanges, and on various imaginaries about animal health and the absence of disease that differ between and within countries. As a consequence, this analysis reveals how public policies regarding vaccination do not always come from governmental incentives but can also emerge from private and local initiatives.

This article explores the intersection of Cold War geopolitics, cultural psychiatry, and migration in Taiwan from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. Building on recent scholarship in cultural psychiatry and Cold War science, it examines how geopolitical tensions shaped psychiatric knowledge production in East Asia. Focusing on the psychological and social impact of the 1949 mass migration, when over a million Chinese immigrants arrived in Taiwan, alongside the clinical and academic work of Taiwanese psychiatrists, the study highlights how migration and societal upheaval became central research concerns. Operating under the authoritarian Kuomintang regime and within the constraints and opportunities of international politics, Taiwanese psychiatrists – most of whom were native-born with colonial backgrounds – drew on intellectual traditions from imperial Japan, fascist Germany, and the Cold War Western bloc. Navigating both global psychiatric discourses and local concerns, they positioned themselves as key contributors to the international development of psychiatric research. While their portrayals of Chinese character structure and family dynamics sometimes reflected essentialist views, their work also demonstrated a nuanced awareness of historical change and contemporary realities during a period of intense political repression and uncertainty. By analysing archival sources and medical texts, this article illuminates the complex interplay between geopolitics and psychiatric knowledge production in Cold War Taiwan.

The presence of children in eighteenth-century English voluntary hospitals is an area of increasing interest and attention. The Northampton Infirmary admission records detail inpatient and outpatient ages from 1744 to 1804, allowing for longitudinal investigations of children in the institution. The most common distempers affecting children were surgical infections, infectious diseases, and skin diseases; fifty-six per cent of the child patients were male and 43.3 per cent were female. Nearly seventy-five per cent of children left the hospital ‘cured’. This article outlines the Northampton Infirmary Eighteenth Century Child Admission Database, and demonstrates how the patterning of distempers within and among children provides insight into the health journeys of eighteenth-century children through the lens of their bodies, their parents, and their institutional recommenders.