After Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress in February 1918, ‘self-determination’ was expected to be a guiding concept for a post-imperial order once the Great War had ended. Yet when the Covenant of the League of Nations was negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, the phrase was removed. Why and by whom? The existing literature offers little answer. This article argues that Wilson fought for inclusion of both the phrase ‘self-determination’ and the substance of it but was convinced to remove both by his own advisers and members of the British delegation. These men had an agenda at variance with Wilson’s, one focused on solidifying wartime transatlantic co-operation into a post-war governance model that would strengthen the British imperial position and bring the US into support of it. That agenda could not accommodate Wilsonian self-determination. Its resulting disappearance effectively reversed the post-imperial sense of wartime statements on self-determination made by Wilson and David Lloyd George. Anti-colonial movements, as the Paris negotiators knew, had taken inspiration from those promises. Their hopes for an organized dismantling of the imperial order were disappointed. Only after four decades of political violence would the pre-war order be replaced by one that better resembled Wilson’s abandoned vision.

Chen-Gounelas-Liedtke recently introduced a powerful regeneration technique, a process opposite to specialization, to prove existence results for rational curves on projective $K3$ surfaces. We show that, for projective irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds, an analogous regeneration principle holds and provides a very flexible tool to prove existence of uniruled divisors, significantly improving known results.

In 2020 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revisited a spectrum allocation decision it made in 1999. The Agency found that frequencies set aside for specific technologies used by vehicles – Intelligent Transportation Services (ITS) – had been left largely unused. It crafted new rules, shifting 45 MHz of the 75 MHz allocation to newly designated wireless services focusing on Wi-Fi applications, while leaving the remaining (40% of bandwidth) reserved for ITS. The FCC decision was premised on a cost–benefit analysis performed by the agency, supported by two similar studies submitted by outside interests. Yet, upon examination, the cost–benefit calculations prove stunningly uncompelling. In their economic logic, their understanding of existing market data and their use of FCC policy, fundamental errors render net benefit estimates irrelevant to decision-making. In particular, the value of marginal products (VMPs) as well as the opportunity costs of rival allocations are ignored. These failings are stunning, both on their own and given that the FCC, in its reallocation, critiqued its 1999 decision as socially unproductive – and yet deployed just the same basic methodological format, relying on FCC administrative determinations to select favored business models for supplying wireless services.

It is 100 years since the rights of those in ‘actual occupation’ joined the statute book as interests capable of binding transferees of land despite not appearing on the register. This paper seizes the opportunity to investigate and excavate the overlooked and under-examined historical origins of the actual occupation concept and to revisit the oft-touted rationales for the principle’s recognition. In so doing, the paper rejects the commonly-rehearsed justifications for the concept and makes the radical case for abolition of actual occupation.

How does social science insulate police from social movements’ demand for abolition? We explore this through a content analysis of policing social science research funded by Arnold Ventures, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice published from 2011 to 2022 (N = 143 studies). Our mixed method content analysis revealed what we call “Academic Copaganda,” or studies contesting social movement claims by authors (1) masking their conflicts of interest, or (2) espousing police epistemology. Although Academic Copaganda comprised 20% of studies in the sample, they received most media mentions after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. We conclude by discussing our contributions to legal scholarship on police legitimacy and empirical critical race theory.

The objective of this article is to explain the characteristics of the agri-food exporting boom experienced by the Latin American countries between 1994 and 2019 and its determining factors. In so doing, we analyse the evolution of exports, their composition by product, the principal origins and destinations, the importance of regional trade agreements and the behaviour of export prices. Furthermore, a series of gravity models are estimated, using the agri-food exports of nineteen Latin American countries to their 186 main trading partners between 1994 and 2019. These models are estimated for total agri-food exports and for their breakdown into three product groups. Among the main determinants identified, our results suggest that external demand and the proliferation of regional trade agreements were the primary reasons for this export boom. Finally, we evaluate these results within the context of the region's economic history.

This paper reviews two important design choices for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). First, how CBDC intermediaries should be compensated for their services. Second, how payments from traditional banks into CBDC wallets should be cleared. Both of these design choices have important implications for the financial stability of the banking system.

In a collection of Hatt-ı Hümayuns (Imperial Edicts) at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, I located the Ottoman translation of the Greek Declaration of Independence. This article examines the terminology that Ottomans used to interpret the language employed by the revolutionary Greeks. The goal of this study is to examine Ottoman attempts to define the rebels and conceptualize the inner motive behind the revolt of their subjects. This article argues that confiscated documents such as the Greek Declaration of Independence contributed to the familiarization of the imperial authorities with the ideological background to the rebellion and the reasons that triggered it.

Direct democratic institutions are often introduced by popular vote, but there is little research on what motivates voters to support these new instruments. Using a unique dataset on the ideological positions of voters and members of parliament, this article examines support for the introduction of the initiative right in a popular vote. We find that voters support the initiative right when they are inadequately represented in parliament. Moreover, the analysis shows that the voting behavior is consistent with voters understanding the strategic implications of adopting the popular initiative. We demonstrate that voters support its adoption if they are ideologically more proximate to the median voter than they are to the median legislator. Finally, the article shows that ideological distance matters for voters of the ruling party as well, which helps explain why a majority of voters support a political institution that limits the ruling party’s room for maneuver.

This article explores the hitherto understudied development of long-distance telephony in early 20th century China. It first explores the development of long-distance telephony before 1927 when it first appeared in China and was developed by foreign actors, the Qing government and various warlord regimes. The article then turns to the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) and compares the efforts of the Nationalist government in building long-distance telephone infrastructure with those of the Guangdong provincial government and other regional regimes. The article uses the case of long-distance telephony to make two larger arguments about state-building in Republican China (1912-1949). First, it brings in telecommunications development as a major element of state-building of both central and regional regimes. Second, building on recent work by scholars of Chinese Republican-era state-building, it emphasizes the importance of studying state-building from the vantage point of both central and regional regimes in Republican China. Additionally, the article demonstrates the value of an infrastructural approach to the study of political competition and formation in China during the Republican era.

Kant’s aim in the Transcendental Deduction is to prove that the a priori categories of the understanding necessarily apply to objects of experience. He claims that he will do this simply by explaining how they could so apply. But the idea that a mere explanation of this possibility should provide a defence of the categories’ actual (let alone necessary) applicability is surprising. We argue that it can be understood by attending to the source of the scepticism that the Critique’s Analytic is supposed to overcome: Hume’s inability to explain causal knowledge in the Enquiry.

This paper revisits the role of skill distribution in shaping regional comparative advantage. Theoretically, we show that it is the relative skill dispersion between exporters and importers, rather than the absolute skill dispersion of exporters, that matters for the pattern of international trade. Using industry-level data on Chinese provincial export flows, we demonstrate that regions with a more dispersed skill distribution relative to their trading partners export more goods produced by sectors with lower skill complementarity. Exploring the potential mechanisms, we further find that the trade-promoting effect from relative skill dispersion probably operates through improving product quality and diversity.

An empty simplex is a lattice simplex in which vertices are the only lattice points. We show two constructions leading to the first known empty simplices of width larger than their dimension:

• ◦ We introduce cyclotomic simplices and exhaustively compute all the cyclotomic simplices of dimension $10$ and volume up to $2^{31}$. Among them, we find five empty ones of width $11$ and none of larger width.

• ◦ Using circulant matrices of a very specific form, we construct empty simplices of arbitrary dimension d and width growing asymptotically as $d/\operatorname {\mathrm {arcsinh}}(1) \sim 1.1346\,d$.

In the last decades, it has been well known that low grade inflammation plays a potential role in the pathogenesis of different cancers. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies was to evaluate the association between inflammatory potential of diet measured through the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII), energy-adjusted DII (E-DII), empirical dietary inflammatory pattern (EDIP) and inflammatory score of the diet (ISD) and risk of colorectal cancer (CRC) and site-specific colon cancer. A systematic electronic search of PubMed/Medline, Scopus, the Web of Sciences, and reference lists up to November 21, 2023, was performed. Data were pooled by the generic inverse variance method using random effect model. To assess the heterogeneity of included studies, the I2 index was used. A total of 28 original studies, comprising 2,287,836 participants, were selected to include in this meta-analysis. Pooled results showed a significant association between higher adherence to proinflammatory diet and increased risk of CRC (ES:1.39;95%CI:1.29-1.51;I2=82.9%), colon (ES:1.40;95%CI:1.26-1.55; I²= 73.3%, p<0.01), proximal colon (ES:1.28; 95% CI:1.17-1.40;I²=29.1%), distal (ES:1.50;95%CI:1.30-1.74;I²= 63.5%) and rectal (ES:1.46;95%CI:1.23-1.74;I²=80%). Stratified analysis by type of dietary indices noted that greater adherence to the DII, E-DII, and EDIP were related to significant increase in risk of overall CRC and site-specific colon cancers. Our results highlighted the proposed role of inflammatory protentional of diet as important risk factor for CRC. Adherence to an anti-inflammatory dietary pattern should be recommended to reduce incidence of CRC, globally.

The article studies how public policies of migrant ‘integration’ are enacted and made sense of in the street-level welfare state from the perspective of social work practitioners performing integration work and with a focus on language and language skills acquisition. It draws from twenty-seven semi-structured individual interviews and reflective discussions after service user meetings with eleven social workers and social advisors in migrant integration services conducted between 2018 and 2019 in the Helsinki capital region of Finland. Results infer ambiguous, yet persistent, ideals of monolingualism in which Finnish language skills acquisition plays a central role and linguistic diversity turns into individual lack of skills and capacities through service user responsibilisation. Yet practitioners refer to the unfeasible situations this creates for service users as well as to their own struggles as practitioners within the monolingual service system.