The modern business corporation emerged from the medieval and chartered corporations. The medieval tradition of legal pluralism was replaced by two ‘pure’ disciplines – Law and Economics – that left no conceptual space to understand its hybrid nature, decentralizing law-making and centralizing market transactions, or to frame its person-thing duality. Under intellectual monopoly capitalism, this hybrid nature has degenerated: corporations have monopolized knowledge, outsourced production to dependent peripheral firms, and become deeply intertwined with financial markets and geopolitical rivalries – lending substance to notions of techno-feudalism, while marking a profound break with the medieval tradition of open science that first made competitive markets possible.

Despite his support for the creation of the West Indies Federation in the late 1950s, the anticolonial activist and political thinker CLR James expressed severe reservations regarding the process that led to its creation. While his criticisms are brief, this paper reconstructs a Jamesian critique of the plebiscite as a means of anticolonial self-determination. Situating his discussion of the plebiscite in the broader arc of his political thought from the 1930s to the 1960s, I identify three lines of critique that revolve around broad questions of mass leadership and the reproduction of colonial domination. First, drawing on his discussion of the tragic flaw of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership during the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the plebiscite enabled popular leaders to skirt their responsibility to effectively communicate with the revolutionary masses. Second, James feared that the plebiscite fixed the principle of territorial sovereignty in place in advance of the process of decolonization by tethering popular authority to clearly bound territorial constituencies. Third, by giving the people a simple choice between two options, James worried that the plebiscite would undermine radical processes of democratic self-constitution. Against conventional critiques of the plebiscite as a means of consolidating dictatorial power under the guise of vox populi, James reveals how ostensibly popular political forms, such as the plebiscite, undercut the enactment of popular agency in colonial contexts.

This endeavor encompasses establishing a dynamic model for a constrained joint module system in collaborative robots, predicated upon the Udwadia-Kalaba equation and constraint-following methodologies. Additionally, a leakage-type adaptive robust controller is developed to assuage uncertainties and disturbances. The structure of the dynamic model is methodically crafted, accommodating uncertain parameters to delineate the behavioral dynamics of the system. Furthermore, a meticulous derivation of a second-order representation of the constraint equations is undertaken to facilitate precise boundaries of the limitations imposed by the system. The proposed controller demonstrates adeptness in tailoring its strategies to the characteristics of both known and unknown attributes of the system, deftly navigating the intrinsic uncertainties of the system. Systematic simulations and empirical analyses have been performed to authenticate the efficacy of the advocated approach in regulating the joint module system. The research outcomes not only augment comprehension of robust control techniques for joint module systems but also furnish invaluable insights to propel future advancements within this specialized domain.

Vaccine hesitant sentiments are reported among some ethnic and racial minority communities. This study argues that their vaccine hesitancy stems from distrust in the government that marginalizes them. Building on existing studies on ethnicity, health, and political trust, this study offers an original contribution by using causal mediation analyses to provide suggestive evidence of a mediating relationship between ethnic marginalization and vaccination intention and by focusing on African countries. We conduct causal mediation analyses of nationally representative survey data across 14 African countries and find that trust in government mediates the effect of perceived ethnic marginalization on COVID-19 vaccination intention. Perceived marginalization decreases government trust and thus reduces vaccination intention. The findings have implications beyond the pandemic era. A path dependent consequence of marginalization during non-crisis times hinders collective actions during crisis times. Governments must put efforts into combating ethnic marginalization during non-crisis times.

Longitudinal studies on population representative samples offer unique insights. The Estonian Children Personality Behaviour and Health Study (ECPBHS; EstChild) was launched in 1998 on two birth cohort samples at age 9 or 15 with an exceptional participation rate, has been monitored at ages 15, 18, 25 and 33, and also recruited parents of the target subjects. This multidisciplinary investigation has been focused on behavioural neuroscience, illuminating findings on what could be discerned from biomarkers, candidate genes, gene × environment interactions, and epigenetic markers in representative samples, and in birth cohorts living through societal transformation. ECPBHS analyzed how biomarkers and lifestyle are associated with real-life behaviours and developmental trajectories, phenotypes such as neuroticism, bulimia, aggressiveness or attention deficit, and outcomes from incidence of psychiatric disorders to the obtaining of university education. Novel evidence has been observed on clustering of fears and the inner structure of impulsivity and reward sensitivity, together with clues how these may have co-emerged with metabolic types. New insights have been provided to understand the classic biomarkers, cholesterol and platelet monoamine oxidase activity, as well as several functional gene variants. Hypotheses how to synthetize molecular genetics and sociology, how sex or gender matters in the light of gene×environment interactions and how family and parental roles shape the behaviour of offspring have been put forward. The ECPBHS has offered clues on why in biological psychiatry many replication attempts are predestined to fail, and how to learn from such failures.

This article reconstructs the history of the ‘Centro per gli Studi sullo Sviluppo Economico’ created through a collaboration between the SVIMEZ (Associazione per lo sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno) and the Ford Foundation and active between 1958 and 1969. Through the analysis of unpublished documentation from the SVIMEZ archives, the article shows how the ‘Italian laboratory’ of Southern Italy became an international case study in the context of the Cold War and the dawn of development economics. The Centre played a crucial role in training economists and officials and in disseminating the Italian experience at the Mediterranean and global levels, combining international theoretical approaches with the empirical legacy of policies for the ‘Mezzogiorno’. The paper highlights how this experience represented a meeting point between American philanthropy, Western modernisation and bottom-up development practices, contributing to the construction of transnational networks and the spread of development culture in the era of decolonisation.