This article critically examines how Web3 decentralization policy trends impact global digital governance, questioning whether they genuinely distribute power or merely shift influence to a new, tech-savvy elite. Based on fieldwork in Silicon Valley since August 2022 and engagement with scholars and practitioners up to December 2025, the article provides a conceptual analysis with emerging empirical insights around the nascent global Web3 movement. While Web3 advocates challenge centralized data monopolies and traditional state structures, this analysis critiques the assumption that Web3 democratizes power, highlighting both its potential for inclusion and risks of exclusion, insofar as it may reinforce hierarchies rooted in technical expertise and digital access. While acknowledging the broader landscape of Web3 governance (including hybrid and federated models) and scoping the Global North and Global South contexts considering global adoption cases, the article particularly focuses on three post-Westphalian paradigms: (i) Network States, (ii) Network Sovereignties, and (iii) Algorithmic Nations. While Network States advocate for crypto-libertarian governance, Network Sovereignties and Algorithmic Nations emphasize cooperative governance aimed at empowering minority communities, such as indigenous groups, stateless nations, and e-diasporas, through decentralized, data-driven systems. By engaging with both the limitations and some promises, prospects, and pitfalls of Web3, this article questions whether Web3 can create a more inclusive global order or if influence is increasingly concentrated among a new elite. This article contributes to debates on sovereignty, governance, and citizenship by advocating hybrid policy frameworks that balance global and local dynamics, emphasizing solidarity, digital justice, and international cooperation for equitable Web3 governance.

Many pressing riverine problems in Asia today can be traced back to the development of a set of new conceptualizations, technologies, and institutions of river management between roughly 1800 and 1945, a period moulded by the expansion of modern imperial powers on a global scale. This special feature investigates the multifaceted entanglements between rivers and imperialism in modern Asia by bringing together cases in Japan, India, China, and Vietnam. Building on the understanding of the dual potential of rivers to support and resist imperial ambitions, the articles in this special feature reconstruct the complicated human-river interactions across Asia that confounded anthropocentric expectations and show how imperial ethos, technologies, and institutions of river management were carried out, resisted, or transformed in varied local contexts by human and non-human actors alike. Understanding the unruly history of rivers in imperial Asia can help us to better understand the precarious future of rivers and their management on the warming continent.

Over the next decade, I expect more and more computing on phones and small computers and less on clouds and supercomputers. Supercomputers are super impressive to engineers, but not to economists because economies of scale have more to do with the size of the market than the size of the machine. Clouds are like wire-wrapped Cray computers; they were never designed for mass production. There was never much supply or demand. Supercomputers and clouds are too expensive and burn too much power. The future is more promising for phones because the market is larger. In addition, there are a number of other advantages to computing on phones and small (commodity) machines designed for mass markets: privacy, power, size, weight, latency, bandwidth, and especially affordability.

Scholars have long emphasised the consensual nature of the intergovernmental negotiations in the Council of the European Union. Unlike other international organisations, where surface consensus has been found to be merely a cover for the dominance of powerful states, the EU literature describes a norm of generosity that works as a real constraining factor. In contrast, this article warns against descriptions of the EU as different in kind. Based on interviews with 231 EU Member State representatives involved in day‐to‐day negotiations in the Council, it finds a strong bias in generosity on behalf of the three dominant powers: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The ‘Big 3’ are strikingly unwilling to make generous concessions, compared to other states. Furthermore, from a rational perspective, there are good reasons for expecting this pattern. The study also shows that extensive pooling of power in the form of qualified majority rule and hard law commitment is associated with less generosity, while there seems to be no socialising effect towards generosity from exposure to the ‘Brussels community’. These findings cast a new light on the common narrative of the EU as a ‘soft‐bargaining’ anomaly among international organisations, where national interests are upgraded into common interests by a process of norm socialisation. Instead, it seems that the purported ‘consensus norm’ has been far from successful in transcending fundamental power asymmetries between the EU Member States.

The paper investigates processes and consequences of ‘philanthropic kinning’, that is the use of kinship and family idioms in constructing and maintaining personal relations between donors and recipients in philanthropy. Usual studies collapse the occurrence of kinship metaphors in philanthropy either as evidence of ‘prosociality’ (e.g. trust, care or love) or more frequently as evidence of ‘paternalism’ (power and domination of donors over recipients, and their objectification). This paper claims that introducing kinship and parenting studies into researching philanthropy would greatly refine our understanding of donor–recipient relations. In the framework of a qualitative case study of a philanthropic ‘godparenthood’ programme organised in Hungary supporting ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania, this paper looks at the roles, responsibilities and obligations various forms of philanthropic kinship offer for the participants; and relations of power unfolding in helping interactions. With such concerns, this paper complements earlier research on hybridisation of philanthropy, through its sectoral entanglements with kinship and family. Also, it contributes to research on inequalities in philanthropy, by showing how philanthropic kinning may recreate, modify or reshape donor–recipient power relations in diverse ways.

It has become the new truth of our age that the western world we have known is fast losing its pre-eminence to be replaced by a new international system shaped by China and increasingly determined by the economic rise of Asia. This at least is how many economists, historians and students of world politics are now viewing the future of the larger international system. This essay does not dispute some self-evident economic facts nor assume that the world will look the same in 50 years time as it does now. It does, however, question the idea that there is a power shift in the making and that the West and the United States are in steep decline. The world has a long way to go before we begin to live in a ‘post-western’ world.

The international aid system forms a powerful structural force impacting organizational landscapes and civil societies all over the world in complex ways we do not yet understand. Dominant NGO research has failed to properly address this crucial issue, because of a conceptual, theoretical, and ideological tradition that is itself embedded in this very same system’s normative, rhetorical agenda. This paper suggests some conceptual and theoretical approaches that should encourage more comparative research on the role of the development NGOs in shaping national and global civil societies.

The proliferation of volunteering for development (V4D) models, approaches and funding sources means V4D is no longer able to be neatly located within the third sector. The enormous diversity of interactions within the Youth V4D (YV4D) field provides an opportunity to examine new and different activities and trajectories to ascertain the extent to which the traditional values of V4D, reciprocity and solidarity continue to form part of YV4D. Using the classical third sector model of Evers and Laville (The third sector in Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2004), and drawing on Polanyi (The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001 [1944]) and Mauss (The gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, Routledge, London, 1990 [1925]), in particular their concepts of redistribution and reciprocity, we present three case studies of new hybrid YV4D trajectories—university YV4D, state YV4D programmes, and volunteer tourism/voluntourism—to reveal the different logics and features of contemporary YV4D. We argue that understanding these contemporary YV4D trajectories requires a focus on organisational and stakeholder structures of diverse volunteering activities, their relational logics and the forms of reciprocity they involve. We find that in the YV4D case studies we explore the neoliberal market logic of exchange, along with political ideologies and state interests, affects the YV4D model design.