Global definitions of political determinants of health: A systematic review.

ABSTRACT This scoping review examines how contemporary Islamic education integrates environmental ethics (Eco-Islam) and democratic multicultural values as potential resources for reimagining Religious Education (RE) in the Anthropocene. Drawing on a corpus of 120 international scholarly articles (2014–2025), the study maps dominant thematic mechanisms, evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, and proposes a conceptual framework for transformative RE. While the corpus is dominated by Indonesian studies (79%), reflecting its role as a laboratory for Islamic education innovation, the proposed TES-RE framework is presented as a transferable heuristic, not a prescriptive model, with explicitly stated contextual limitations. The findings identify three integrative mechanisms: Critical Wisdom-Based Environments, which foster holistic, spiritually-grounded pedagogies; Prophetic Eco-Pedagogy, which roots environmental stewardship in Qur’anic hermeneutics and jurisprudence; and Critical Democratic Encounter, which engages Islamic traditions with pluralistic citizenship. Using Floridi’s ‘infosphere’ and Chasokela’s Transformative Learning Theory as lenses, the review argues that these mechanisms offer viable pathways for developing an eco-social, critically reflective RE paradigm. The study concludes with a SWOT analysis and a CIMO-logic framework to guide curriculum and pedagogical innovation in RE, aiming to equip learners for ethical, ecological, and civic engagement in a pluralistic world.

ABSTRACT Fossil fuel reliant countries contribute disproportionately to climate change, yet little is known about how nations’ fossil fuel reliance relates to public support for climate change mitigation. A large cross-national study (N = 101,956) across 105 countries and six continents showed that citizens of nations with greater fossil fuel reliance were less likely to believe that climate change should be a priority for their government, more supportive of continued fossil fuel use, and less supportive of increased renewable energy use. These associations remained significant after controlling for a wide set of country-level indicators, including fossil fuel consumption, economic development, democratic governance, corruption, and climate vulnerability, as well as demographic characteristics. Overall, these findings show that fossil fuel reliance is linked to reduced support for climate change mitigation. They also point to the need for a transition that acknowledges citizens’ concerns about phasing out fossil fuels in fossil fuel reliant societies.

ABSTRACT Nigeria as a nation gained independence on 1 October 1960. Before independence, the country exclusively adopted a traditional system of governance, dominated by the Yoruba in the Western region, Hausa/Fulani in the Northern region, and the Igbo segmented system in the Eastern region. The pre-colonial era (pre-1500), colonial era (1800–1960), and post-colonial era (1970s and early 1980s) were the major transitions in the political history of Nigeria, which reshaped its mode of governance. The transition to democratic government in 1999 marked the emergence of the Post-Colonial era, ending decades of military dictatorship. This paper examines transitional stages in the Nigerian political system, identifies major challenges to democratic consolidation, and proffers a way forward. It was believed that independence would lead to party transformation and democratic consolidation that would ensure state ownership, a credible election that would secure the political needs of the people. Data were collected through a secondary source, and a qualitative research design was adopted. The findings revealed that the challenges faced by the country have serious implications for political transition and democratic consolidation in Nigeria. It contributes to knowledge through theoretical integration and recommends commitment to institutional reforms and good governance for a successful democratic consolidation.

The emergence of advanced AI agents represents a transformative socio-technical development, with leading technology companies positioning agentic AI as the next frontier of human–computer interaction. Crucially the same corporations driving this agenda have long been subject to scrutiny over datafication, data extraction, and monopolistic data governance. Yet, the data-intensive structural logic underlying future AI agents has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article addresses this gap by providing a political-economy analysis of how the developmental trajectory of AI agents is structurally embedded in the data ecosystems of Big Tech corporations, and of how this embeddedness may reinforce their data dominance. The article analyzes the adverse ethical implications that concentrated data power poses at both individual and collective levels, examines how the technical architecture of AI agents may exacerbate these challenges, and evaluates a set of mitigation strategies oriented toward more democratic and sustainable AI governance.

Most of our knowledge about the dog-human relationship comes from studies with dogs from 'WEIRD' (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Here, we investigate cultural differences in dog-owner interactions worldwide. To achieve this, we developed a test battery comprising six well-established social-cognitive experiments and a questionnaire that assessed the psychological and practical aspects of the dog-human bond. We tested hunting dogs alongside their owners in five rural societies across culturally diverse locations in various countries: Vanuatu, Mongolia, Madagascar, Peru, and Germany. Despite dramatic cultural and environmental differences, we found that dog-human relationships were remarkably similar. Residual differences may be attributed to variations in hunting techniques and differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies.

Far from being a mere intermediary, the lawyer holds a pivotal role within the legal and democratic framework. Their significance rests on three core pillars: (i) the technical defense of rights, safeguarding adversarial proceedings and the right to a full defense; (ii) the enforcement of constitutional guarantees, whether through litigation or advisory work; and (iii) the promotion of social justice, expanding citizenship through an ethos of ethics and independence. Thus, protecting the prerogatives of the legal profession ultimately means protecting the citizen. Ethics plays a pivotal role in the legal field, not merely as an academic discipline but as a normative foundation that underpins the legitimacy of legal professionals’ actions. This paper examines the importance of Ethics in Law, outlining its main aspects—from philosophical roots to practical impacts on contemporary legal practice. It discusses jurisprudence and the normative framework found in the Brazilian Bar Association Statute (Law No. 8,906/1994) and the OAB Code of Ethics and Discipline (2015), highlighting principles such as dignity, independence, loyalty, and professional secrecy. Through bibliographic review and document analysis, the study concludes that the teaching and practice of legal ethics reinforce fundamental rights, bolstering public trust in the justice system and the effectiveness of the Democratic Rule of Law.

This article examines the role of international law in ensuring Mongolia’s national security from the perspective of small-state security policy. The contemporary international security environment is no longer limited to traditional military threats, border disputes, and armed conflict. It is increasingly shaped by multidimensional factors such as human rights, information and cyber domains, economic and energy security, environmental risks, migration, transnational crime, and hybrid threats. Under such conditions, the legal system for ensuring national security must develop not only within the scope of domestic legislation but also in close connection with the generally recognized principles and norms of international law, international treaties, multilateral institutional mechanisms, international courts and dispute settlement systems, and legal regimes relating to human rights and collective security. As a landlocked small state located between two great powers, with relatively limited demographic, economic, and material military resources, Mongolia has a particular need to use international law as a strategic instrument of national security. International law plays a crucial role in safeguarding Mongolia’s independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, inviolability of borders, human rights, multi-pillared foreign policy, international cooperation, peace support operations, disarmament commitments, and nuclear-weapon-free status. The study applies document analysis, systemic legal analysis, comparative legal analysis, small-state security policy analysis, and theoretical synthesis of international law. The findings suggest that international law performs five key functions within Mongolia’s legal system for ensuring national security: first, a guarantee function for protecting independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, second, a normative function for strengthening human security, human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law, third, a strategic function for supporting the external security of a small state through multilateral cooperation, international organizations, diplomacy, and legal mechanisms, fourth, a cooperation function for addressing non-traditional and transnational threats, and fifth, a regulatory function for guiding domestic legal and institutional reform. The article concludes that Mongolia needs to strengthen the incorporation of international legal norms into domestic legislation, assess the implementation of international treaties, enhance professional capacity in international law, introduce international legal risk analysis into national security policymaking, and increase Mongolia’s active contribution to the development and implementation of international law.

ABSTRACT Donald Trump’s presidency is a uniquely important move in a historical debate as old as the republic concerning the relationships between the presidency and democracy. Trump’s mode of presidential address is best understood not as an aberrant form of liberal democracy but as a reflection of an embrace of a different paradigm: competitive-elitist democracy. His presidency represents a perceptual shift precipitated by the asymmetrical polarization both of the American public and of the political media ecosystem towards a view of democracy that prioritizes party competition over liberal norms. Trump’s rhetoric is better understood as an embrace of a new, more threatening model of democracy. Relying on his second inaugural as our primary text, we make this argument by first, discussing two models of democracy (liberal and competitive-elite) necessary for understanding the relationship between the presidency and democratic governance. We then turn to two foundational elements of presidential communication, and then look carefully at Donald Trump’s second inaugural as evidence of his commitment to a competitive-elite conception of democracy. We conclude with some thoughts about what this analysis portends for democracy in the United States and for the study of presidential rhetoric within that context.

Social studies is a primary focus of contemporary efforts to control education, thus controlling a democratic society. Previous threats in the U.S. have temporarily disrupted high quality social education while current ones carry governmental, political, and legal restrictions representing far more power. Since an educated population is basic to the core of democratic governance, threats to intellectual and academic freedom are threats to that process. Legitimate social education incorporates inquiry, evidence-based knowledge, and critical thinking. Examples of the threat are examined in this article, followed by a summary of grounds for academic freedom. Recommendations for responsible actions and resources follow.

ABSTRACT Integrating contributions from studies of fascism and political science, the author explores some aspects of the allure of fascistic states of mind from a psychoanalytic point of view. In particular, the author examines the passionate relationship that followers develop with their fascist leader. Mr. Trump’s relationship with his MAGA supporters is explored in this context. Forty percent of citizens in democratic societies have an authoritarian personality. They prefer oneness and sameness and are inclined to be obedient. The diversity, complexities and the constant social changes that mark liberal democracies have exceeded these citizens’ capacity to tolerate democracy. These changes trigger annihilation anxiety in them. When annihilation anxieties are not contained by benign leaders they lead to social trauma. White men without a college education are especially vulnerable to the feelings of loss and anxiety about their diminished status and their declining opportunities. Fascist leaders offer anxious voters such as this group a perverted containment. Mr. Trump uses fascistic rhetorical devices to amplify his followers’ fears, rage, and resentment. He uses splitting and projection to allure his followers into a manic addictive state where they can feel powerful and self-righteous, while hurting and punishing invented enemies without experiencing guilt or remorse.

ABSTRACT The Romanian titles of Dan Lungu’s 2007 novel Sînt o babă comunistă! and the eponymous film from 2013 announce the narrator- and hero’s gender, age, and cultural-historical mindset as the starting point of a satirical tableau of Romania’s historical transformations. A romanticized socialist past (1945–1989) is contrasted with present-day inequalities in a questionably democratic system (post-1989), where brutal capitalism results in invisibility, loss of status and dignity. The protagonist’s nostalgic gaze is towards a utopian system, albeit not a future possible one – but a utopia of her youth. The novel considers the consequences, individual and communal, of banalization, generalization, and lack of social dialogue about complex patterns of the past. Following Boym’s understanding of nostalgia (2001), the paper analyses the intersection of age, gender and narration, and asks questions about personal and collective discourses around memory, nostalgia, their contextualizations and creative potential for literary and film narratives. The ‘Yugosphere’ is taken as horizon of comparison, where re-examining the politics of remembrance about socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991), and post-1991 societies, as well as a reconsideration of gender roles and intergenerational conflict and are also present in cultural production.

ABSTRACT Legitimacy is a foundational concept in political science typically measured through surveys assessing citizen perceptions of political institutions. However, the validity of existing measures is often assumed rather than tested, especially in hybrid regimes where institutional capture blurs distinctions between office and office-holder. Drawing on original semi-structured interviews with Serbian citizens, we find that conflation - the inability to separate office and office-holder - was high for questions on input side institutions such as trust in the president, the prime minister and the parliament, lower for output side institutions, such as the police, court and the tax authority, and most varied between respondents for general system questions. Our analysis suggests two main reasons for this pattern: first, citizens’ evaluations of elected institutions rely more heavily on mediated information sources (e.g. TV, internet, print media), whereas views of bureaucratic institutions are often grounded in direct personal experience; second, respondents showed a weaker understanding of democratic principles than of expectations around public service delivery. These findings highlight potential item bias both between respondents within a hybrid regime and in cross-regime comparisons, calling into question the comparability and validity of standard legitimacy measures in European hybrid regimes.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the development of museum education for schools with mid-twentieth-century Sweden as an empirical example, focusing on the Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet) and the Swedish Museum of Natural History (Naturhistoriska riksmuseet). At the Nordic Museum, more advanced educational practices and outreach activities emerged rapidly during the interwar years, whereas at the Museum of Natural History, comparable changes occurred first in the 1960s. The study analyses how the two museum institutions’ goals, activities and modes of audience engagement shaped their educational programmes and interaction with schools. It identifies how the relation with schools evolved from small-scale, locally supported initiatives in the 1930s and 1940s to broader, state-supported national networks in the 1960s as museums were integrated into a national public education framework to support the realisation of the democratic welfare society.

Purpose: This article examines why profound socio-economic inequality continues to define South Africa more than three decades after the end of apartheid. The article argues that the legacy of colonialism and apartheid remains embedded within contemporary patterns of accumulation and exclusion, limiting the transformative potential of democratic governance. Methodology: The study adopts a qualitative political economy approach informed by Marxist political economy, dependency theory, world-systems analysis, and the theory of racial capitalism. The document analyses secondary data from Statistics South Africa, the World Bank, and the South African Reserve Bank. Findings: The analysis reveals that South Africa’s democratic transition was accompanied by significant political change but far more limited economic transformation. The negotiated settlement that facilitated the transition largely preserved existing structures of ownership and accumulation, particularly within the minerals-energy complex and the broader architecture of neoliberal capitalism. Consequently, economic growth has often failed to generate broad-based employment or meaningful redistribution. The persistence of extreme inequality, high unemployment, and widespread poverty reflects the continued influence of historical patterns of racialized dispossession and labour exploitation. The article further finds that recurrent xenophobic violence is not simply a product of prejudice or cultural intolerance but is closely linked to socio-economic insecurity, exclusion, and competition for scarce opportunities within a highly unequal society. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The article contributes to scholarship by bringing together insights from racial capitalism, dependency theory, and world-systems analysis to provide a historically grounded explanation for the persistence of inequality in democratic South Africa. It demonstrates that political democratization alone is insufficient to overcome deeply entrenched economic structures. For policymakers and practitioners, the findings underscore the need to move beyond market-centred approaches toward a more transformative developmental agenda. The article recommends policies that promote equitable redistribution, labour-intensive industrialization, democratic forms of ownership, expanded economic participation, and a strategic restructuring of South Africa’s position within the global economy. Such measures are essential if the country is to translate political freedom into meaningful social and economic inclusion for the majority of its citizens.

ABSTRACT This article explores the evolution of deliberative practices in French parliamentary assemblies from the Revolution to the present day, examining the political, institutional, and material factors that have shaped the meaning and function of speaking in parliament. Drawing on both historical and legal sources, it shows how parliamentary speech has oscillated between two competing logics: the expression of a popular will conceived as pre-existing, and the construction of a rational general interest through deliberation. The article retraces how procedures, architecture, and the transcription of debates have been mobilized to give legitimacy and structure to speech, while also showing how the rise of political parties, majority dominance, and procedural rationalization have progressively diminished its deliberative role. Ultimately, this article argues that parliamentary speech in France remains a key component of the democratic imaginary, even as its legal and political efficacy has eroded. It contributes to debates on deliberative democracy by demonstrating the institutional mechanisms through which speech is shaped, channelled, and, at times, neutralized. In doing so, it offers a historically grounded reflection on how the act of speaking in parliament continues to embody both the promises and limitations of democratic representation.

The development of modern constitutional law has primarily focused on guaranteeing and institutionalizing human and civil rights. Throughout the evolution of international human rights standards and national constitutions, the scope of rights protection has expanded considerably, and legal mechanisms designed to protect individuals from excessive state interference have become increasingly sophisticated. However, this process has also contributed to the relative neglect of the concept of civic duties and their legal and institutional status. As a result, scholars have increasingly pointed to the emergence of an imbalance between rights and duties within contemporary societies. From a theoretical perspective, rights and duties are inherently interdependent and inseparable. In practice, however, the prevailing tendency has been to expand the scope of rights while limiting or overlooking civic obligations. Such an approach may create an imbalance of responsibility in the relationship between the state and citizens, potentially undermining the foundations of constitutional governance and social cohesion. Civic duties should not be understood as the antithesis of rights; rather, they constitute an essential element that conditions, supports, and guarantees the effective realization of rights. Duties provide the normative and institutional framework within which rights can be exercised and protected. Consequently, the study of civic duties from theoretical, legal, and practical perspectives is of particular importance for ensuring social stability, the effective implementation of the rule of law, and the sustainability of democratic governance. A comprehensive understanding of civic duties therefore contributes not only to constitutional theory but also to the strengthening of responsible citizenship and the preservation of a balanced relationship between rights and obligations in a democratic society.

This article examines the essence and content of the concepts of secularism and the secular state, their role in social development, and their legal and political significance. It analyzes the importance of the principle of secularism in ensuring human rights and freedoms, as well as the organization of relations between the state and religion on the basis of mutual independence. Furthermore, the article discusses the main characteristics of a secular state, including the rule of law, freedom of conscience, and equal rights for all citizens. Through this analysis, it is possible to gain an understanding of the implementation of secular state principles in Uzbekistan and their importance in building a democratic society.

This article examines the role of fundamental rights, access to justice, and the rule of law in Georgia’s EU accession process, focusing on the challenges identified in the European Commission’s 2023 assessment and related reform priorities. Using doctrinal legal analysis and a policy-oriented approach, the study evaluates Georgian constitutional and legislative frameworks, judicial and prosecutorial practices, and the findings of European and international monitoring bodies. It analyses key problem areas affecting compliance with EU standards, including delays in judicial proceedings, inadequate reasoning in court decisions, restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly, and association, shortcomings in anti-discrimination and personal data protection, ineffective execution of European Court of Human Rights judgments, and broader institutional deficiencies in judicial governance, prosecutorial independence, migration policy, and anti-corruption mechanisms. The article demonstrates that, despite the formal adoption of certain reforms within the European integration process, many changes remain fragmented and do not adequately address systemic governance issues. It concludes that Georgia’s genuine progress towards EU membership depends not only on formal legislative alignment but also on substantive institutional reforms capable of ensuring effective human rights protection, judicial independence, and accountable democratic governance.

ABSTRACT How elected representatives depart the legislature, either voluntarily or involuntarily, shapes perceptions of the legitimacy of representative institutions. Yet parliamentary exit has been neglected in research on political careers. Seeking to address this gap, this article analyses parliamentary exit in terms of its fit with democratic values. It begins by recasting the process of exit as an ‘institution,’ which opens the door to institutionalist lines of inquiry including the main question we consider here: what principles should inform the design of parliamentary exit arrangements? We argue that the design of these structures should be rooted in the ideals of representation, qualified by the values of economic equality and individual welfare. Assessing various models of exit in these terms, we demonstrate the special merits of a model defined by moderately generous transition funding for departing MPs but tailored to their personal circumstances; generous and also tailored support in counselling and other forms of non-financial assistance; and highly restrictive lobbying regulations that prohibit MPs from engaging in lobbying activities following their departure from parliament. Democracies that set up parliamentary exit with care and reflection are more likely to avoid the many serious pathologies associated with the terminal stage of political careers.