The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) is one of the best-known and most controversial of the international investment treaties. The energy transition necessary to achieve the Paris Agreement climate target will require large and sustained flows of investment capital. Scholars, environmentalists, industry representatives, and governmental officials have intensively debated the modernization of the ECT. The main point of contention is whether the ECT can facilitate the energy transition or whether it entrenches fossil lock-in in unsustainable and unjust ways. This article proposes a comprehensive and integrated approach to the ECT, guided by the theoretical matrix of Earth system law scholarship. Our analysis reveals that the ECT cannot address contemporary socio-ecological challenges, but rather it remains a sectoral piece of a supranational economic constitution far removed from the most pressing exigencies of the Anthropocene.

This study investigates the impact of warfare on nuptial patterns, focusing on the trends and characteristics of age differences within marriage. Specifically, it explores the socio-demographic outcomes of the Imjin War (1592–1598) and post-war reconstruction in Korea, using the earliest extant Chosŏn household registers, compiled between 1606 and 1630. Individual-level microdata were derived involving 2,336 married couples based on 11,749 entries in these registers, covering four administrative districts located in the southeastern region of the Korean peninsula severely devastated by the war. Factors such as status, property, warfare, social practices, and legal regulations influenced spousal age differences. First, social rank and family wealth played pivotal roles, with age gaps widening as a husband's socio-economic status increased. Second, females born after 1580, whose first marriages were affected by the Imjin War and post-war circumstances, experienced an average marital age gap of about ten years. Third, this effect was further complicated by the imposition of socio-legal rules on remarriage; that is, the yangban entailed a pronounced age difference owing to the Neo-Confucian norm of chaste widowhood. This study enriches the understanding of historical marriage customs in Korea and offers insights for studies on age disparity in marriage.

It is a revealing exercise to search for variations of the word “colonial” in the indexes and tables of contents of these recent monographs in Anglophone literary studies. As the subdiscipline begins to chronicle contemporary cultural developments in which the British Empire’s legacies grow ever-less marked, it is perhaps inevitable that the terms and concepts that governed the preceding phase of scholarship—colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism—begin to recede into the background. The sudden and sharp recession of these terms, however, raises fundamental questions regarding the study of English-language texts from the Caribbean, South Asia, West, and East Africa (among other locales). Among the foremost of such questions may be: does the term “postcolonialism” now designate a mere literary period, as opposed to being what scholars over the last several decades seem to have agreed it also is, namely a critical method? What are the effects and implications of this shift, wherein not just literary works newly arrived to a world scene still marked and structured by colonial legacies, but older ones long identified as definitionally “postcolonial,” are increasingly treated without such concepts and terms? Suggestions of answers to such questions arise throughout these three books, all of which seek to reconsider one of the keystone concerns of postcolonial studies, namely the relationship between contemporary Anglophone writing and the authors and texts of the British literary canon.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, China extended significant medical aid to international communities, aiming to combat the virus's spread and foster global solidarity. However, despite the appreciation expressed by recipient governments for China's assistance, the general public's perception of China did not significantly improve. This prompts the question: why did China's COVID-19 health diplomacy fail to resonate with foreign audiences? This article delves into the cases of Thailand and the Philippines to argue that public perceptions of countries providing aid can be heavily influenced by domestic political dynamics, particularly when incumbent governments already face legitimacy challenges prior to aid delivery. By scrutinizing the implementation of China's aid and the state-to-state relations between China and incumbent governments, political opposition forces can exploit any shortcomings or missteps, placing blame squarely on the incumbents. Given the existing distrust toward incumbent governments, the public is more inclined to accept messages propagated by opposition groups, thereby hindering any positive shift in perception toward China. This perspective complements existing research that predominantly focuses on the diplomatic strategies of donor countries, suggesting instead that the domestic politics of host countries play a pivotal role in shaping the effectiveness of foreign nations' efforts to cultivate favorable images among foreign audiences.

Climate change litigation is developing rapidly and pervasively, emerging as a space for legal innovation. Until now, this process has occurred mainly in national courts. The result is a decentralization of the interpretation of human rights relating to climate change. This article argues that such decentralization could, in principle, have a destabilizing impact on claims to the universality of human rights. However, close examination of this litigation shows that a prototype is emerging, certain features of which are becoming ‘hard wired’ through the process of judicial dialogue. By exploring the content of this prototype, its decentralized development, and its self-reinforcing nature, we see a legal space emerging in which environmental human rights sit between the universal and the contextual.

The English Preposing in PP construction (PiPP; e.g., Happy though/as we were) is extremely rare but displays an intricate set of stable syntactic properties. How do people become proficient with this construction despite such limited evidence? It is tempting to posit innate learning mechanisms, but present-day large language models seem to learn to represent PiPPs as well, even though such models employ only very general learning mechanisms and experience very few instances of the construction during training. This suggests an alternative hypothesis on which knowledge of more frequent constructions helps shape knowledge of PiPPs. I seek to make this idea precise using model-theoretic syntax (MTS). In MTS, a grammar is essentially a set of constraints on forms. In this context, PiPPs can be seen as arising from a mix of construction-specific and general-purpose constraints, all of which seem inferable from general linguistic experience.

Post-independence national historical writings have often been seen as a product of nationalist advocacy and modern nation-state formation. Moving beyond this perspective, this article considers how political leaders took a direct role in promoting different kinds and forms of collective historical thoughts to strengthen their leadership. Specifically, the article explores an active engagement of independent Cambodia's leaders such as Prince Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot, who independently saw national historical understanding as one's own monopolized source of power. It also discusses how different historical accounts in the country were shaped by, and kept up with, other important factors such as Cold War confrontations and regional and global historiographical trends, including “Modernist” and “Marxist” approaches. Discussing these factors helps us understand more critically national historical accounts, which were closely intertwined with specific socioreligious and political circumstances such as political rule and legitimacy, widespread public anxieties, and geopolitical tensions. It also sheds light on the substantial impact of state-imposed historical interpretations on society. As informed by the Cambodian case, this impact can be seen in the implementation of state projects stirred by certain kinds of historical understanding which consequently transformed the living conditions of thousands of people.

When organizations solve collective action problems or realize values, they do so by means of institutions. These are commonly regarded as self-stabilizing. Yet, they can also be subject to endogenous processes of decay, or so we argue. We explain this in terms of psychological and cultural processes, which can change even if the formal structures remain unchanged. One key implication is that the extent to which norms, values and ideals motivate individuals to comply with institutions is limited.