Humanity is at a crossroads in addressing biodiversity loss. Several assessments have reported on the weak compliance with the Aichi Biodiversity Targets by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To address this lack of compliance, the challenges in implementing and enforcing CBD obligations must be understood. Key implementation challenges of the CBD are identified through a content analysis of policy documents, multi-stakeholder interviews, and participant observation at the recent CBD Conference of the Parties. Building on this analysis, the article explores the extent to which the review mechanisms of international human rights law, with their various strategies for eliciting compliance, can help to improve CBD mechanisms. The findings of this article reveal insights that the CBD can draw from international human rights law to address these compliance challenges, such as facilitating the participation of civil society organizations to provide specific input, and engaging independent biodiversity experts to assess implementation. The article concludes that insights from human rights review mechanisms are useful for improving the emerging peer review mechanism of the CBD, which is important for strengthening accountability within the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

This study analyzes the social evaluations of the Andalusian Spanish ceceo merger and its split, distinción. A matched-guise experiment was created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve Western Andalusian speakers, varying only in syllable-initial [s̪] and [θ] for <s> and <z,ci,ce>, creating ceceo and distinción guises. Based on 221 listeners from Huelva and Lepe, Spain, mixed effects linear regression models found that speakers with distinción guises were evaluated as being of higher social status, more urban, and more formal than speakers with ceceo guises. Additionally, listeners' comments referred not only to the sounds and graphemes, but also to the merger itself and its social connotations. The implications are two-fold: (i) consonant mergers may be subject to more overt social evaluation than vocalic mergers; and (ii) a merger can acquire social meaning, and this meaning in turn, may promote its split. (Mergers, splits, sociolinguistic perception, language attitudes, Andalusian Spanish, sociophonetics, dialect levelling, ceceo, distinción)*

Deciphering the bibliographical details of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, 1839-1843 has long been problematic owing to production of the Zoology in 24 parts over a 31-year time span (1844−1875), two publication periods (1844−1848, 1874−1875) each with a different publisher, non-consecutive issuance of text pages and plates, non-uniform plate numbering, ambiguities in publication dates and publisher imprints, conflicting bibliographical information in previous reports, and perhaps most of all the extreme rarity of parts still in their original state. The present report, based on what appears to be the most thorough examination of parts and reissues in original state to date, closes numerous knowledge gaps.

This article analyzes novel patterns of interaction between right-wing parties and protest movements during major contentious cycles in Argentina (2012–13) and Brazil (2013–16), which preceded the advent of the Cambiemos coalition in the former and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in the latter. Drawing on a dual process-tracing strategy and a wide range of data sources, this study shows that these interactions are central to understanding why and how right-wing parties leverage novel repertoires and resources from digital activists during contemporary protest cycles, a dynamic conceptualized as a new party linkage strategy through digital intermediation. The study traces its three-phase development in both countries, revealing how differences in institutional contexts and the strength of activist groups contributed to divergent trajectories of partisan opposition toward the end of the cycles, regarding both the subsequent reconfiguration of the right and the entry of digital activists into institutional arenas.

This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses the role of the press in constructing the meaning and implications of the 1963 count. In contrast with the literature's emphasis on identification, categorization, and enumeration, our focus is on how the census results informed a broader range of visual and textual narratives. It is argued that analysing the multiple ways in which demographic sources shape debates about trust, identity, and the state in the public sphere results in a richer understanding of the politics of counting people and narrows the gap between demographic and cultural history.

This article provides the first history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a legal entity. It makes two contributions. First, this history recasts the story of the so-called first disestablishment, revealing that it was longer and more contentious than is often assumed. Disestablishment produced a body of corporate law encoded with strong theological assumptions. Because corporate law was the primary mechanism for regulating churches, this created problems for groups like Roman Catholics and Latter-day Saints who did not share the law's theological commitments. Far from being settled in the early 1830s, the first disestablishment continued to spawn bitter legal battles into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, this article reveals legal personality as one of the key points of conflict between the Latter-day Saints and American society. This is a useful corrective to accounts that emphasize polygamy and theocracy as the points of legal contention. An understanding of the history of the church as a legal entity supplements these stories by revealing how the hard-fought legal battles of the late nineteenth century can be seen as an extension of the process of legal disestablishment that began during the American Revolution.

This article explores the role of informal customary institutions (usos y costumbres) in local public goods provision in Mexico. It argues that the presence of informal customary institutions offers submunicipal village communities considerable advantages in local distributive politics. Hamlet communities with dense customary institutions have higher collective action capacity to organize their citizens for small-scale protests in municipal centers, which grants them access to more social infrastructure projects controlled by municipal politicians. This article therefore suggests a novel theoretical mechanism through which customary institutions affect development outcomes: collective contentious action. The study tests the main empirical implications of this theory, drawing on an original survey of submunicipal community presidents in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala and qualitative interviews.

This article comparatively analyzes the strategies and political impact of “pro-life” and feminist movements in the struggle over abortion policy in Mexico. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, it argues that anti-abortion movements are more likely to influence policymaking in contexts where they can tap into hegemonic religious institutions’ networks and alliances and indirectly provide incumbents with legitimizing moral and financial support in exchange for restrictive reforms. Partisan contexts shape incumbents’ need for such support. Feminist activists, by contrast, have neither elite connections nor access to similar mobilization resources. To make this argument, the analysis examines pro-life and feminist movements in two Mexican states: Yucatán, where Congress passed a restrictive reform; and Hidalgo, where an identical initiative failed.

This article examines organized opposition to feminist and LGBTI political projects in Colombia. Although there is a large body of literature on feminist movements and a growing literature on LGBTI movements, there is little research on resistance to them. Through an intersectional feminist lens, this study analyzes the “anti-gender” campaign organized against the gender perspective in Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement to demonstrate the limitations of backlash theory and certain normative understandings of human rights. In contrast to assumptions that backlash is predetermined, the study demonstrates that the anti-gender mobilization against the peace agreement was circumstantial rather than inevitable. To highlight the productive nature of backlash, it traces how opponents employed human rights rhetoric to establish an alternative present and promote an imagined future rooted in exclusion and repression. In addition, it shows that mobilized backlash against feminist and LGBTI movements does not necessarily decelerate or reverse the respective movements’ agendas.

Brian Leftow continues to argue against my use of the constitution relation in explaining the Trinity. I consider his arguments, and have a bit more to say about Leftow's own formulation of trinitarian doctrine.

Graham Oppy has criticized several Thomistic versions of the cosmological argument in a series of publications over the years, most recently in a Religious Studies article responding to my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Here I reply to his criticisms, arguing that while Oppy raises important issues, a besetting weakness of his approach is a failure adequately to grapple with the metaphysical underpinnings of the arguments.

This article presents an analysis of the use of populist framing mechanisms by grassroots right-wing organizations. It brings together the social movement literature on framing and the populist literature to understand how actors build an emergent field of activism in a highly contentious context. Based on the analysis of a sample of 4,574 Facebook posts published by 5 civil society organizations during the campaign to oust Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, it argues that two mechanisms, reductionism and antagonism, enabled actors to focus on similar targets and diagnostics while maintaining relevant differences when seeking to motivate followers and present prognostic frames. These were key mechanisms used by all the actors, albeit with different contents, depending on the frame task. This article contributes to filling gaps in the framing and populist literatures and sheds light on the relevance of populist communication in the rise of right-wing activism.