The vortex-induced vibration of multiple spring-mounted bodies free to move in the orthogonal direction of the flow is investigated. In a first step, we derive a linear arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian method to solve the fluid–structure linear problem as well as a forced problem where a harmonic motion of the bodies is imposed. We then propose a low computational-cost impedance-based criterion to predict the instability thresholds. A global stability analysis of the fluid–structure system is then performed for a tandem of cylinders and the instability thresholds obtained are found to be in perfect agreement with the predictions of the impedance-based criterion. An extensive parametric study is then performed for a tandem of cylinders and the effects of mass, damping and spacing between the bodies are investigated. Finally we also apply the impedance-based method to a three-body system to show its validity to a higher number of bodies.

Elected governments across the globe increasingly limit fundamental rights, arguably to manage societal divisions or counter serious harms, such as extremism and political violence. Yet which speech restrictions and group bans qualify as illiberal restrictions adopted by intrusive states, and which constitute safeguards in liberal societies endangered by extremism, remain open questions. This uncertainty hinders normative and empirical assessments of whether the changes in democratic legal architectures that we have observed in the United States, Europe, and Latin America signal democratic erosion or resilience. Integrating research from comparative politics, political theory, and law, we distinguish between a defensive and an illiberal logic of rights restructuring and, relatedly, propose conceptual tools to specify whether actual legal provisions limiting rights meet or violate liberal democratic minimum standards. To examine theoretically expected trends in rights restructuring, we employ these tools to analyze changes in the regulation of association, assembly, and expression in 12 European countries over a 23-year period. Worryingly, provisions falling outside the boundaries of self-defense—indicating an illiberal logic of rights restructuring—have grown. This substantiates concerns about democratic erosion, reinforced by a growing number of elected governments pushing, if not overstepping, legal limits to implement their political agendas.

This article argues that the India League’s 1942–47 anticolonial campaign for a Constituent Assembly for India played a constitutive role in Indian independence. It examines the Constituent Assembly not as an institution that followed the decision to offer India independence but as an anticolonial idea that helped produce it. A necessary part of this was the dissolution of the ‘minority veto’ placed on Indian constitutional progress, mainly by the Conservative Party. It traces the transmission of the Constituent Assembly idea through the India League’s transnational networks until it became a Congress demand in India and a Labour Party initiative in Britain, leading to the Cripps Mission and the policy of the 1945 Labour government. In doing so this article challenges the historiography of geopolitical decolonization by finding Indian independence to be the product of an anticolonial campaign that operated through solidarity and elective affinities with the global left. This was contested by both the Conservative Party and the Muslim League, and the article also examines how Muslim League opposition to being ‘minoritized’ within the Constituent Assembly contributed to the Partition of India.

Energy-efficient biomass cookstoves and small solar systems play an important role in the transition to clean energy. Despite their affordability and scalability, uptake remains low among households in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines whether household-level behavioural factors help explain this under-adoption. Drawing on data from real-purchase offers in rural Rwanda and Senegal, we analyse how willingness to pay for the technologies varies with risk aversion, innovation resistance, time preferences and beliefs. These traits explain part of the variation in purchase decisions, though effects are generally moderate. The findings improve our understanding of consumer behaviour with regard to innovative consumer goods at the base of the pyramid and inform policy and market strategies of suppliers entering these markets. We conclude by recommending that behavioural approaches be applied conservatively and only in conjunction with efforts to improve affordability and access.

This is a commentary on von Bogdandy’s article ‘On the Meaning and Promise of European Society’. It attempts to outline what an account of European society might look like if it were formulated from a more straightforward Hegelian perspective.

Failure extropy, introduced by Nair and Sathar Nair [(2020). On dynamic failure extropy. J. Indian Soc. Probab. Stat. 21: 287–-313], provides a complementary perspective to entropy for quantifying uncertainty in lifetime distributions. However, it becomes mathematically invalid for distributions with unbounded support. To overcome this limitation, Tahmasebi and Toomaj [(2022). On negative cumulative extropy with applications. Commun. Stat. Theory Methods 51(15): 5025-–5047] proposed the concept of negative cumulative extropy (NCEx), offering a bounded and interpretable alternative. In this paper, we extend the notion of NCEx to the bivariate dynamic setting, where uncertainty is assessed for systems whose components have failed at specified times. The proposed formulation effectively captures the uncertainty associated with past lifetimes under dependence, which the existing NCEx cannot address. The measure is further generalized to a vector-valued form, and its fundamental properties are established, including monotonicity, invariance, bounds expressed in terms of the expected inactivity time, and key characterizations. A new stochastic ordering based on the proposed measure is also established. To facilitate practical implementation, a nonparametric estimator is developed and its performance evaluated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The practical relevance of the proposed measure is demonstrated using a real dataset, and its superiority over existing entropy-based approaches is shown on an additional dataset.