Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights’ when combined with states’ anti-imperialist victim branding, and uncritical anti-imperialist solidarities give rise to a reactionary politics I call the ‘Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights’. Here, anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of culture are recast as victims, and the state is treated as synonymous with the population it rules. Western imperialism, the human rights corpus, and those deploying human rights conceived of as extensions of Western imperialism are recast as the savages. Finally, leftist thinkers, anti-imperialist thought, and the resisting victim state and its constructions of Indigenous culture become the saviors. This politics eclipses local populations’ agency and lived experiences by (1) diminishing the moral weight of both the state’s transgressions and the human rights paradigm, (2) interrupting a sustained focus on the anti-imperialist-branding state’s acts of subjugation, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture as traditional saviourism does (but valorising rather than vilifying it), and (4) adhering to notions of moral complexity which deny or obscure the elements of moral clarity encompassed.

According to a well-known aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon, knowledge is power. But what does it mean for knowledge to be power? This paper addresses the question not by offering a new theory of knowledge, but by examining how, and under what conditions, knowledge places an epistemic subject at an advantage over those who lack it. The account developed here does two things: first, it explicates the widely held intuition that possessing knowledge confers an empowering advantage; second, it explains why, in certain contexts, increased knowledge can paradoxically generate a sense of powerlessness. This account diverges from both causal and practicalist views of the power of knowledge: the former takes power to be a causal consequence of possessing knowledge, while the latter understands knowledge as inherently linked with the ability to perform potentially useful actions. In contrast, I argue that the power of knowledge is best understood as a probabilistic advantage, namely, an increase in the likelihood that an epistemic subject will be more successful in interacting with the outside world.

Positive health outcomes are realized when individuals receive interprofessional care, which also includes collaboration with family and care providers. We used social network analysis to explore interprofessional care networks and experiences of independent, community-dwelling older adults and how they perceive collaboration between different medical and non-medical network members. Twenty-three participants were interviewed and asked to name individuals contributing to their health and well-being (network of care) and position them in a concentric circle to reflect the relative strength of relationships. The average network size was 11. Closest relationships were with spouses, children, and family physicians. Relationship strength with network members was marked by frequency, accessibility, longevity, and impact of interactions. Participants were ardent self-advocates for their care, but reported few apparent episodes of collaboration between network members. Our study highlights that coordinated and collaborative care for independent community-dwelling older adults is lacking and does not routinely engage non-medical network members.

Minimal kinematics identifies likelihood degenerations where the critical points are given by rational formulas. These rest on the Horn uniformization of Kapranov–Huh. We characterize all choices of minimal kinematics on the moduli space $\mathcal{M}_{0,n}$. These choices are motivated by the CHY model in physics and they are represented combinatorially by 2-trees. We compute 2-tree amplitudes, and we explore extensions to non-planar on-shell diagrams, here identified with the hypertrees of Castravet–Tevelev.

Recent executive orders (EOs) issued by the federal government, including EO 14148, EO 14151, EO 14168, and EO 14173, have significantly altered policies related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in research and graduate training within industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. These orders reverse longstanding federal commitments to DEIA initiatives, modifying research funding criteria, restructuring legal protections, and eliminating diversity-driven hiring mandates. This policy shift introduces substantial challenges for I-O psychology, particularly in securing funding for DEIA-related research, maintaining inclusive graduate training programs, and fostering diverse representation in academia and the workforce. To assess the impact of these policies, I examine the historical context of DEIA policies before these executive actions, outline key modifications introduced by the new EOs, and assess their potential implications for research, graduate education, and workforce development in I-O psychology. These policy changes may constrain academic freedom, reduce opportunities for underrepresented scholars, and disrupt progress in workplace diversity research, ultimately reshaping the field’s capacity to contribute to evidence-based DEIA initiatives.

We present a methodology for a new composite, quantitative “mash-up” index of health system sustainability and resilience, drawing on a qualitative framework developed to assess these dimensions of the health system. The paper summarises quantifiable measures of sustainability and resilience, with sustainability defined through 7 domains and 50 indicator variables, while health system resilience is based on 6 domains and 23 variables. Each domain is captured by a separate index. A composite index is constructed through aggregation across the two dimensions, and their associated domains and indicators. All indices are aggregated through estimation of a geometric means, and are bound between 0 and 100. We pilot across 5 countries over 23 years, with the ultimate aim of identifying health policy strategies for improving national health system capacities and performances; as well as facilitating policy responses to address problematic issues of sustainability and resilience. Face validity suggests that the index captures the non-resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pilot study reveals considerable differences at both the dimension and domain levels within and between the examined countries, while suggesting scope for improvement in both dimensions across all countries. The index thus provides an indicative approach for temporal and spatial yardstick comparison.

Historically, conservation has focused on species, ecological communities, systems and processes, rather than on individual animals. Even among advocates for compassionate conservation, the focus on animal welfare or animal rights only relates to conservation activities. However, in recent years the idea of managing ecosystems primarily to improve wild animal welfare has been gaining traction among animal ethicists and animal welfare researchers. Managing ecosystems for animal welfare is generally antithetical to management to support ecological and evolutionary processes, since essential features of those processes, such as predation, privation and competition, are sources of animal suffering. Our aim in this paper is not to defend the proposal that ecosystem management should focus primarily on improving wild animal welfare. It is, rather, to situate this proposal in relation to concerns about wild animal welfare expressed by the public and conservation biologists; to connect it to the rise of subjectivist theories of animal welfare; to introduce the ethical arguments used to support elevating the importance of individual wild animals; to explain the advocacy context; to outline potential implications for conservation; and to review critiques of taking a wild animal welfare focus in ecosystem management.

This article examines recent developments relating to the use of third-party findings of fact at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). A proliferation of fact-finding mechanisms creates more opportunities for litigants to ask the ICJ to rely on third-party facts. This demands renewed attention to how the ICJ responds to this type of evidence, especially given the rise of public interest litigation that may depend especially heavily on such materials. The analysis focuses on the ICJ’s approach in recent requests for the indication of provisional measures and asks whether the Court’s approach to third-party evidence differs depending on the phase of litigation, using the 2024 judgment in Ukraine v. Russia as a case study. Ultimately, recent decisions suggest that the ICJ’s efforts to distinguish evidence generated through an adversarial, court-like process from findings of fact based on investigation and fieldwork are often blurred in practice. Moreover, while the Court’s liberal approach to third-party evidence at the provisional measures phase may be justifiable, the quest for coherence in how the Court approaches third-party evidence, especially on the merits, remains a work in progress. To that end, the article suggests ways in which the Court could engage more closely with third-party fact-finding reports in the fulfillment of its adjudicatory function.

Feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: virtuous insofar as it serves as a ground of possibility for other virtues, but also burdensome because, taking into consideration the background condition of extreme suffering in the world, it evokes anguish by always being joined to its opposite, indifference. For Tessman, indifference is horrifying and an irredeemable meta-vice. However, in this essay, I bring Tessman into conversation with critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno to argue for a more nuanced feminist ethical appraisal of indifference. Adorno’s critique of coldness shares several important elements with Tessman’s critique of indifference; for Adorno, coldness made the Holocaust possible, and overcoming it means striving to cultivate identification-based solidarity. But Adorno’s dialectical approach to coldness has important implications for a character-focused liberatory ethical project, and his testimony to his own coldness, as a Holocaust survivor, introduces further complexity to this picture. Drawing on and moving beyond Adorno’s work, I argue that certain kinds of coldness—in particular, critical coldness and self-protective coldness—can have liberatory feminist potential. I introduce the concept of liberatory vices to delineate this new category of dispositions.

What does it mean to care for culture? How does an individual, a community, a government, a nongovernmental organization, or an international agency care for objects entangled in the legal and illegal antiquities trade, held in contentious museum collections, or at risk due to cultural or natural disasters? How do the various stewards of the past work across the unpredictable boundaries of private, public, and community ownership? Caring for culture involves a range of activities and commitments aimed at safeguarding tangible and intangible cultural representations and ensuring that they remain accessible to present and future generations while honoring the traditions, beliefs, and identities of the contemporary communities. This editorial introduction to this thematic issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice begins with an analysis of the duty of care for the Neo-Assyrian reliefs at the Virginia Theological Seminary, asking whether the decision to sell one of their fragments was caring for culture or a commodification of the past. The remaining contributions to this issue share the theme of caring for culture, acknowledging and building on the enduring scholarship of Neil J. Brodie and Patty Gerstenblith.

Pakistan and India were born of conflict and have endured over seventy-five years of rivalry since their birth in 1947. This has led to South Asia being one of the least integrated regions in the world, constraining its economic potential and human development. Yet the relationship has not been one of unending conflict; there have been periods of calm and even hope. Cricket, a common heritage and passion for both, has often delivered episodes of optimism, providing glimpses of what India-Pakistan cooperation could achieve were a conducive environment provided. On several occasions cricket has succeeded in uniting people of the estranged nations, allowing the nascent cultural ties that have existed for centuries to flourish. This article looks at how periods of connectivity and rupture between India and Pakistan have been reflected in the cricketing ties between the two nations and how these ties have been impacted by the wider political environment.

Scientific progress relies on reproducibility, replicability, and robustness of research outcomes. After briefly discussing these terms and their significance for reliable scientific discovery, we argue for the importance of investigating robustness of outcomes to experimental protocol variations. We highlight challenges in achieving robust, replicable results in multi-step plant science experiments, using split-root assays in Arabidopsis thaliana as a case study. These experiments are important for unraveling the contributions of local, systemic and long-distance signalling in plant responses and play a central role in nutrient foraging research. The complexity of these experiments allows for extensive variation in protocols. We investigate what variations do or do not result in similar outcomes and provide concrete recommendations for enhancing the replicability and robustness of these and other complex experiments by extending the level of detail in research protocols.