Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine profoundly disrupted Arctic governance, challenging the long-standing notion of Arctic exceptionalism and creating enduring turbulence. While scholarly debate has largely focused on geopolitical and institutional consequences, the local-level impacts remain underexamined. This study investigates adaptive governance (AG) responses to the war’s effects in Norway’s northernmost counties, Troms and Finnmark, which share a direct border with Russia. The analysis draws on the concepts of crisis, turbulence, and AG, situating them within broader scholarship on how decision-making сenters respond to crises and turbulence and political adaptation. It examines stakeholder responses across four key domains: civilian preparedness, international cooperation, infrastructure development, and the economic repercussions of sanctions. Based on 19 semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and media analysis, the study reveals both adaptation and persistent challenges shaped by pre-existing governance structures, demographic and economic conditions, and past cooperation with Russia. The study contributes to AG literature by unpacking the interplay between strategies, highlighting structural constraints, and demonstrating how geopolitical disruptions shape local governance in strategically significant environments.

In this paper we study the idea of consequentialism in dynamic games by considering two versions: A commonly used utility-based version stating that the player’s preferences are governed by a utility function on consequences, and a preference-based version which faithfully translates the original idea of consequentialism to restrictions on the player’s preferences. Utility-based consequentialism always implies preference-based consequentialism, but the other direction is not necessarily true, as is shown by means of a counterexample. In this paper we offer conditions under which the two notions are equivalent.

Over the past decade or so, ethical recruitment has become increasingly popular as an aspirational standard for addressing labour violations and human rights issues in the transnational recruitment of migrant workers. While multi-national corporations (MNCs) – both international buyers and their Tier 1 suppliers – have been quick to adopt and codify ethical recruitment principles in their company codes of conduct, the same cannot be said for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) further down the supply chain. Grounded in a case study of a small packaging company in Penang, Malaysia, this article explores how SMEs navigate their human resources and financial constraints in their attempt to practise ethical recruitment. We conclude with some brief reflections on the role of recruitment agents and the (in)equitable allocation of costs across global supply chains in making ethical recruitment a realistic and achievable goal for SMEs.

Immersive technologies, such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), allow people to immerse themselves in a complete virtual environment, or enhance the physical world with digital elements. Also referred to as extended reality (XR), these technologies create experiences that feel real, whether fully or partially virtual. The impact of XR on human rights and society is linked to a large-scale consumer breakthrough, which could pose significant human rights risks. This article discusses these risks through the lens of four public values rooted in human rights instruments: privacy, autonomy, non-discrimination and a clean and healthy environment. It highlights the urgency for governments to protect and companies to respect the rights of both XR users and non-users. The aim is to initiate discussions on early interventions, avoiding missteps seen during the rise of social media, when benefits were encouraged, while risks were overlooked.

The 2017 French Law on the Duty of Vigilance of Parent and Lead Companies has been hailed as a pioneering national legislation to hold corporations accountable for human rights and environmental abuses. Most lawsuits brought under this law have faced a plethora of admissibility objections, and so far, only one case has resulted in a decision on the merits. Initial formalistic court decisions on admissibility have now been mostly dismissed. However, critical questions around the role and powers entrusted to judges under the law remain contested.

To those living through them, the Elizabethan and early Stuart years of England’s history seemed unusually riven by plots and conspiracies. Protestants feared the public effects of the private machinations of the Scottish queen and her supporters, of Jesuits, and of perfidious “papists” more generally. Catholic polemicists countered with narratives of dark deeds done by men who subverted rather than served the Crown: “secret histories” circulated that warned of William and Robert Cecil, the earl of Leicester, and others undermining the public state of the realm.1 Very real conspiracies by men such as the Earl of Essex and Guy Fawkes fostered fears of others. From the hard and hungry 1590s, protests against enclosures and lack of food became so common and concerning that the authorities contrived to brand some such riots as the products of treasonous conspiracies that threatened not just particular landlords or grain merchants but the public at large.2 Over the early seventeenth century, fears of covert machinations by both the poor and the powerful only increased, culminating in the fear that King Charles himself had become a pawn in a Catholic conspiracy that endangered the lives and liberties of his subjects.3 Talk of plots and conspiracies—real and imagined—abounded in an increasingly divided and discordant political culture, seen as threatening a “public” they arguably helped to create.

This article explores how late nineteenth-century British socialists theorized the relationship between socialism and democracy through debates about the referendum. At the 1896 London Congress of the Second International, Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw defended parliamentary representation, expertise, and leadership as essential to socialist politics. In contrast, radicals in the Social Democratic Federation, and the Independent Labour Party advanced a theory of “real democracy” centered on direct popular legislation. Rejecting parliamentarism as corrupt, they envisioned referenda, mandates, and recall as tools to secure individual sovereignty and to dissolve the dominance of permanent majorities. This model redefined majority rule as transient, issue-specific, and plural, challenging both plebiscitary leadership and technocratic elitism. Although the International ultimately adopted the referendum only for strategic purposes, these debates reveal an original, if forgotten, socialist account of democracy as a form of pluralist, non-electoral majoritarianism.

An open question about cartography is whether one and the same functional head may iterate on the functional hierarchy. We demonstrate that the stackability of certain modals from the same semantic class in Mandarin offers clear evidence for such a possibility.

Jury selection in the US involves voir dire, an examination process wherein prospective jurors are questioned about their potential for fairness or bias. Such inquiries are hampered by social desirability pressures inhibiting admissions of bias. Analogous pressures hamper survey interviews, but since voir dire examinations are unscripted their study can reveal how desirability pressures are addressed through naturally occurring variations in question design. This article combines sequential and distributional analyses of >100 transcribed question-answer sequences targeting juror fairness/bias, and documents various tendencies and preferences in question design. Court officials focus on bias rather than fairness by default, and the predominant bias-targeting questions are mitigated through: (i) indirect references to bias, (ii) diffusion of responsibility for bias, and (iii) projecting bias as minimal or unlikely. The findings shed light on the social dynamics of jury selection and, more broadly, how question design practices are adapted for inquiry into sensitive subjects. (Questions, law, voir dire, juries, social desirability bias, conversation analysis)