Affective processes fuel and orient social behaviour throughout life; if they did not exist, there would be no striving, no goal-pursuit, no goal-oriented action. Two interconnected brain regions are deeply involved in the socially adaptive functions of affect and emotion. Both the maturation and functioning of the brain mechanisms involved undergo the shaping influence of the manifold experience that is derived from social interactions.

The economic crisis in Southeast Asia has provoked a debate on the economic and political culture of the region. Is Asian capitalism really suffering from structural deficiencies or does it only signify the imposition of western ethnocentric values? Inside Southeast Asia, public discussion on the issue of corruption has erupted, involving culturally specific notions of what is acceptable or not. Likewise, unbridled exercise of power increasingly faces an indigenous demand for more accountability of the powerholders. The reform debate that is conducted between Southeast Asians themselves seems to be more promising than western calls for democracy and economic transparency.

Science as part of an open society cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed set of specialists. The problem of scientific rhetoric, however, is that scientific knowledge cannot be everybody's knowledge in volume or in the concepts used and that therefore a loss of information content occurs when scientific knowledge is projected onto the screen of everyday knowledge: science then appears only as a silhouette. Even so silhouettes can convey an important message in relation to a special context under discussion. The particular silhouette selected then becomes a question of truthfulness in scientific rhetoric.

The reproductive capacity of our species is far in excess of its needs. If all women used their reproductive potential to the full they would give birth to about 15 children on average. As averages of 6 or 7 were once sufficient to compensate for the high level of mortality, and higher numbers would have led to unacceptably high levels of population growth, that, presumably, is the level of fertility found in traditional European societies and in developing countries before the onset of fertility decline. In European societies, fertility decline began in the 19th century. It was a reaction to the disequilibrium that resulted from the long-term decline in mortality. However, a clear sequence cannot always be established. The assumption that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s that this demographic transition, as it is customarily called, would lead to a new equilibrium appears not to have been well founded. Average family size has declined to such low levels that the age structure is seriously affected and the replacement of generations is no longer assured. A new disequilibrium has resulted. If this is a temporary phenomenon it is not an important issue. However, if it has to be assumed that future generations will also limit their reproduction to not more than 10% of their potential, the perspective is different. Even with continued high levels of immigration, population decline will then become inevitable. While some argue this will turn out to be beneficial, it is not without disadvantages.

Noir is a genre label with a long and complex history. The success of certain European home-grown forms of the genre (the French polar, the Scandinavian noir, etc.) invite us to reflect on the range but also the limits of the label in today’s European culture. The seemingly paradoxical example of Donald Westlake’s Ordo, an American noir novel that is perhaps neither ‘truly American’ nor ‘noir’ (and perhaps not even a ‘novel’) will serve here as a test case for some reflections on the actual use and function of the noir label in European literary culture.

In this article, Elizabethan and Jacobean Baroque drama is considered as a comparative, structuring reference and as a control parameter for understanding contemporary British public television police drama as a genre in its own right. The argument for its autonomy and specificity lies not primarily with formal arguments, but with its intimate connection with representations on government and governance, as practices and world-models aimed at the management of complexity. Starting from the above, I premise that the public police drama format is highly relevant for Europe at large, not only as a fictional means of comprehending complex government, but as an emerging forum of actual public deliberation on the means and goals of complex government. The logical extension of the current study would be a future analysis of the manner in which the suggested template of police drama was absorbed in the continental television and government culture. For the moment the argument is restricted to pointing out the premises offered by the British original format for a poetics of complex order and of multi-level governance essential for the configuration of a European political imaginary.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren is often referred to as one of the last colonial museums in the world. This article provides an overview of the various steps taken in the fundamental transformation process and the plan for renovation of the museum with a view to making it a modern and dynamic Africa museum. For this institution, which is simultaneously a Museum, Research Institute, and Centre of Information Dissemination, a mere change of décor is not sufficient: a fundamental shift in vision, a series of risks, and especially a move towards dialogue and transparency have been part of the process, which has implications that extend far beyond the walls of the museum.

In the Western world, the humanities have been under pressure for the last two or three decades. There are various reasons for this, which have to do with the changed status of humanities disciplines within universities, but also with the public at large. Employment prospects are deemed slimmer for humanities graduates than for STEM graduates. Aging populations requiring more health and old age provisions, and globalization increasing economic competition, are leading to economization and rationalization in the world of academe, relegating the humanities often – quite naturally, so to speak – to the end of the funding chain. Still, there are good reasons to continue funding, and promoting, the humanities. These reasons have to do with questions of identity, but also of economics.*

A novel written by a Muslim Andalusian of the 12th century brilliantly argues that all knowledge can be obtained by applying reason to experience.

It is argued that patterns of behaviour that distinguish human ‘moral communities’ have evolved culturally and been subject to natural selection. For this to work, these behaviour patterns must be maintained stably over substantial numbers of people and periods of time. Religious prescription – which is essentially equivalent to ethics – has provided this stability.1–3 It follows that ethics must also have evolved and been subject to natural selection.

This article employs the framework of critical infrastructure studies to outline the settler–colonial oppression and decolonial resistance in the Crimean Peninsula. It shows how Soviet and Russian colonialism intertwined ongoing landscape destruction with forced displacements and colonial othering. In addition, it outlines the laborious process of decolonial nourishment to define infrastructure beyond settler terms, questioning what counts as such. The text counters Russian colonial understanding of infrastructure that could not comprehend indigenous Crimean Tatar irrigation systems, constructed through intimate relations with soil and water rather than large-scale geoengineering. The Crimean Tatar water infrastructures are considered, in line with other forms of resistance, as ones of decolonial care. They create the possibility of a future which goes against that imposed by the Russian state.

Academic research and education are, more than ever, a collective endeavour. This article discusses how different modes of governance facilitate or obstruct collective action in universities. Based on theories of public goods and the resource-based perspective, we develop the concept of university commons in order to analyse the challenges arising from the governance of collective action. We examine how to effectively balance collegial and managerial governance to create a sustainable portfolio of university commons.

This study investigates the impact of financial depth and capital market development on the growth of European nations. Financial depth is important if the benefits of financial integration are to be realized. In fact, financial depth is a channel that promotes growth and risk sharing and curbs macroeconomic volatility. Panel data of 17 European nations from 1970 to 2013 were taken and results were obtained through the Pool Mean Group Estimation technique. Our results show that, for European nations, financial depth and stock market development contributed to long-term growth. However, the contribution of financial depth outweighs that of stock market development. Moreover, it was observed that in the case of Hungary and Ireland, capital market development and financial depth contributed to short-term growth. Trade openness was found to be significant for growth in the cases of Austria and Finland while financial depth and trade openness were found to be significant for Germany and Switzerland. In conclusion, in the short-run, financial depth contributed more to growth than stock market development. Therefore, the role of financial depth in enhancing growth can be said to be more persistent than that of stock market development.

In December 2000, the political leaders of the EU met in Lisbon and announced that by the year 2010 the EU will be the most competitive, dynamic, knowledge-based economy. My first reaction was: ‘They don't know what they are talking about’. It sounded to me like the pep talk of a coach of a soccer team before a match he knows his team cannot win. It is difficult to promote good science. Patience is needed: at first the results are few and only after several years of consistent policy can the trickle grow into a stream. Patience is not one of the usual qualities of success-driven politicians. Recently (and wisely) our beloved leaders lowered their ambitions and adopted a new target: by 2010 all EU members will spend 3% of their GNP on research and development. This is promising, if the money is spent wisely. To do research at the highest level money is certainly needed, but brains and organisation are needed as well. In this paper I address the question: how does European research in astronomy compare with that in the USA?

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s opened the gates of immigration to Israel and to the West. The wave of immigration to Israel also included criminal elements who wanted to evade the rule of law in their countries. The arrival of these people to Israel aroused my interest in the historical causes of corruption in Russia, forms of corrupt behaviour by state employees, and the processes of development and creation of criminal organizations in Russia.

Language processing is grounded in brain function. Words of different semantic categories are processed in different cortical areas. Several examples of this distributed processing are given: colour words are processed in visual areas, whereas action words are processed in motor areas. The processing of action words in described in more details. A pathological condition, Parkinson’s disease, is used as an illustration of a motor impairment that selectively affects the comprehension of action words. This comprehension impairment is attributed to a difficulty in accessing the procedural knowledge carried by this specific class of words.

It is clear that European unification will affect legal education in Europe. Political integration and the increasing coming together of the legal systems in Europe need a new approach from universities teaching law studies. This article examines the goals of legal education and how they can be reached. In addition, it defends the thesis that a law faculty must not teach law, but must train lawyers: they must become technicians able to solve social and human problems by the legal route and they must be agents of peaceful change. It is argued that, in addition to national law schools, top law schools in Europe should be structured on the American model with very strict selection.

Almost a generation has gone by since the end of the Cold War, a time that has brought many changes. It has become steadily clearer that not the affirmation of the centrality of the democratic West – as asserted by Francis Fukuyama in his famous essay – but the opposite has occurred. There has been continuous erosion of the power of the West. First, the economic and geopolitical balance has increasingly shifted to Southeast Asia, where quite a few states have authoritarian, even totalitarian, socioeconomic arrangements. China is, of course, the best-known example. Second, the demographic and cultural tides have changed. In the past, Europe sent waves of émigrés all over the world. Now the West has become the destination of millions from non-European countries. The pattern of cultural adaptation has also undergone dramatic changes. A considerable number of non-Europeans have no desire to assimilate, or at least they wish to preserve their heritage. All these processes – especially as they relate to the fact that the West is losing its economic competitiveness – cause a response that often leads to racism and neo-fascism. Those who study European neo-fascists almost instinctively compare them with pre-Second World War fascists and Nazis. This temptation is reinforced by the fact that these neo-fascists often use Nazi symbols and trappings. However, a close look at these European neo-fascists/neo-Nazis and their prewar counterparts indicates that their similarities are usually deceptive and they actually belong to quite different species. Present-day neo-fascists/neo-Nazis are not imperialists, as were the German Nazis who dreamed about a worldwide empire. Current European right-wingers are parochial isolationists. They want not an empire but the cleansing of their state from newcomers, especially those of non-European origin. Many are even suspicious of European unity; they see the European Union as the key that opens the gates of their countries, not just to Asians/Africans but to East Europeans, seen as almost an alien race. Second, their view of Jews is different from that of the Nazis. They may be anti-Semitic, but their dislike of Jews is hardly the central element of their worldview. Moreover, they are similar to many of the general public who differentiate between ‘their’ native Jews – against whom they have no grudges – and newcomers from, say, Eastern Europe, whom they consider parasitic aliens. Furthermore, they have problems with the church. Some may be neo-pagans; in this they are also quite different from the Nazis, who had a tense relationship with the church but did not openly oppose it. Russian rightists in many ways follow the model of the European far right. This is due not only to direct ideological borrowing but also to similar conditions. Russia's heartland, for example, is also a major destination for non-European migrants. Still, the Russian far right's views unquestionably have elements arising from the country's specific conditions. As a result, they have developed several peculiar ideological characteristics. They are often pagan and quite hostile to the Orthodox Church. They also see Jews as part of an unholy cabal of Asiatics set on Russia's destruction.

The discoveries of the first planets around a pulsar and around a star similar to our Sun have opened, after centuries of speculation, a new era in astronomy. The quest for other worlds has become reality. In this paper, the motivations for this search are presented. A comparative review is made of different techniques for their detection, with special attention paid to the planet parameters that can be derived from each method. The first discoveries and their astrophysical consequences are analysed. New questions and future projects beyond these first discoveries are reviewed, with special attention given to the search for life in extrasolar planetary systems. Finally, worldwide activities and the role of Europe are described.

Divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seem to be the rule in Europe. In some cases, they conjure up the most painful memories of actual civil-war events, but usually they constitute the common experience of most Europeans, who lived through different kinds of war, revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups d’état, dictatorships, totalitarian systems, regime changes, territorial losses, ethnic cleansings, and exchanges of population. In spite of major breakthroughs, we find all over Europe that the experiences and humiliations of previous generations have remained mainly unspoken and unelaborated at both individual and community levels. Dangerous as they are, such narratives and undigested traumas necessarily call for well-advised, learned and thoughtful acts of overwriting and reworking. A broadly based, well-founded, historical, multi- and interdisciplinary research project for the comparison of the various modes of trauma management in the different countries and regions of Europe can open up new perspectives and provide essential tools for working out individual and collective traumatic historical experiences. Its main question is how different communities were able to process their collective traumatic historical experiences, and what can be learned from the outcomes of these processes. The project will compare the common and different characteristics of the various regimes of memory and patterns of consolidation.