Autopoiesis as viability-localized self-production in a topos.

Bound to one another by a single strip of umber ribbon, three pairs of inscribed Atlantic scallop shell-bound pressed seaweed albums rest in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Algae, also named ‘seaweed’, ‘sea moss,’ or the romantic if scientifically inaccurate ‘ocean flowers,’ in the nineteenth-century came to be understood as simultaneously ancient, ubiquitous, divine, and curious. It became a fascinating material for early naturalists to collect and for Victorian coastal visitors to lovingly dry and press into delicate albums. As environmental anxieties over increased industrialization, resource exhaustion, and climatic instability in the Victorian period surface in coastal New England, this small, handheld set of three scallop-bound seaweed albums represent a single group’s position within these webs of theoretical discourse. I argue that ecological practices of algae collection formed spaces where gender boundaries could be both enforced or transgressed, where picturesque coastal tourist activity collided with natural history exploration, and where the boundaries between romantic, deified Nature and middle-class white leisure activity meet an enlightened, colonial taxonomy. As a souvenir of personal sentiment, though, this scallop album trio and its inscriptions reflect the lived reality of the three named women inscribed on its pages: Genie M. Lovell, Mrs. T.R. Green, and M.R. Hinckley. Therefore, I argue that within these layered relations, this portable album of natural illustrations exposes the intimate, affective labor through which oceanic imperialism was naturalized, embedding global regimes of classification within personal memories of a seaside New Bedford in transition.

ABSTRACT This article uncovers a convention on foreign judgments, negotiated between Britain and Italy in 1887. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, saw it as ‘the most practical first step towards the attainment of complete uniformity’: proof that the civil and common law worlds could agree on common private international law rules. It was Britain’s first such agreement with a civil law country, half a century before much narrower agreements with France and Belgium. It remained unratified amid Italian political instability and perceived German influence (similar concerns scuppered negotiations in the 1930s). The convention was the high-water mark of British attempts to take a leading role in pan-European codification. By the 1890s, under Dicey’s influence, Britain had abandoned its grand ambitions for a truly global regime. The common law was left to its own devices for another generation, with Britain standing aloof from the codification projects it had once sought to lead.

In this article, we situate the emergence of a global regulatory regime for marine genetic resources within broader tendencies towards uneven development and expanding extractivist practices. We examine the global distribution of intellectual property assets derived from marine genetic prospecting, how that distribution aligns with diplomatic positions during negotiations for the BBNJ Agreement, and how those strategies shaped the epistemological framework of the final text. Our empirical analysis identifies three interrelated dynamics. First, a marked concentration of patent assets derived from marine genetic prospecting, producing uneven global geographies in which a small IP core controls the overwhelming majority of assets, a limited semi-periphery holds modest portfolios, and a large periphery remains virtually assetless. Second, a geopolitical cleavage between IP core states and peripheral states, each advancing contrasting conceptions of whether marine genetic resources constitute the ‘common heritage of humankind’ or are governed by the freedom of the seas. Third, the consolidation of a resource-centric framework, coupled with codified access and benefit-sharing frameworks. To interpret the results, we mobilise conceptual frameworks and interpretative angles from critical political economy, science and technology studies (STS), and political ecology. This analysis suggests that the BBNJ Agreement underpins a regime of ‘genetic extractivism,’ which renders living organisms as reservoirs of ‘genetic resources’ to be extracted, abstracted into genomic data, and capitalised as IP assets. This analysis foregrounds how technoscientific innovation is embedded within existing political–economic structures, and interrogates the limits of resource-based conservation.

ABSTRACT Historically, war-making and state-making have facilitated resource extraction and capital expansion through colonialism and global food regimes. Weaponization and financialization of food systems perpetuate rural vulnerability amidst violent conflicts, undermining food sovereignty. Yet, despite territorializing logic of state and capital, sovereignty can also emerge ‘from below’ in relational and decentralized ways in contexts of war through insurgent everyday territorialities. Adopting a scholar-activist approach and drawing on experiences from Kashmir, Pakistan, Palestine, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Lebanon, Yemen, and Egypt, we propose the concept of ‘insurgent food sovereignty’ and reflect on building food sovereignty in contexts of war and violence.

ABSTRACT We examine how U.S. trading-session returns are incorporated into Taiwan index futures prices under time-zone mismatch. Using daily TAIEX futures (TX), E-mini S&P 500 futures (ES), and E-mini Nasdaq 100 futures (NQ) from 2011–2025, we decompose returns into close-to-close, close-to-open, and open-to-close components and construct a 3 × 3 session map. Robustness checks use global controls, VARX specifications, HAC inference, and regime analyses. The main decomposed session channel runs from the previous U.S. daytime return to Taiwan’s subsequent close-to-next-open interval, whereas Taiwan’s daytime OC return responds weakly to prior U.S. information. After Taiwan introduced night-session trading in 2017, price incorporation occurs mainly during after-hours price formation rather than in the true non-trading gap. The findings show that U.S.–Taiwan futures spillovers are not merely cross-market correlations, but timing-specific price-incorporation channels that are relevant for interpreting after-hours trading and overnight risk exposure.

Lifespan and dormancy type affect post-fire seed germination strategies: evidence from a multispecies experiment in a temperate grassland.

ABSTRACT Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are recognised in the study of international relations for their influence in the UNFCCC. Yet, despite this success, they have increasingly pursued their climate agenda through alternative institutional avenues. This article examines this shift through the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (COSIS), which sought an advisory opinion from ITLOS in 2023. Using data from semi-structured interviews with key officials and analysis of legal proceedings, this article argues that COSIS is strategically contesting the status quo of climate politics and expanding the global climate regime complex through a process of ‘climatisation’. By bridging the ocean-climate nexus at ITLOS, COSIS established an important foundation for trans-regional approaches to ocean governance. As scholars examine spatialisations of power in the Indian Ocean and beyond, they must also consider how external dynamics, such as the judicialisation of the ocean-climate nexus, are shaping the evolving governance landscape of the oceans.

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the reconfiguration of decolonial discourse within global academic spaces, arguing that its institutional uptake can reinforce, rather than dismantle, existing epistemic hierarchies. While decoloniality emerged as counter-hegemonic praxis, its circulation through global education, publishing, and funding regimes has rendered it susceptible to instrumentalisation, symbolic branding, and professional reward. Drawing on Spivak, Ahmed, Bourdieu, and Santos, the article conceptualises gatekeeping as a multi-layered structure encompassing epistemic filtering, institutional prioritisation, and affective normalisation. It advances four analytical moves: theorising gatekeeping as an epistemic-affective mechanism, examining the political economy of citation, funding, and career capital, analysing the ambivalent role of mobile Southern scholars, and proposing a situated ethic of knowledge production grounded in redistribution, reflexivity, and co-theorisation. It shows how mobile Southern scholars, through symbolic capital accumulated in Northern or Northern-accredited institutions, may become positioned within mechanisms that validate, translate, and regulate what becomes recognised as authentic Southern knowledge. Rather than reinforcing the centre – periphery binary, the article foregrounds intra-South asymmetries, horizontal solidarity, and reflexive citation as central to decolonial praxis. It calls for a contextually grounded and structurally redistributive approach committed to dismantling the architectures of recognition that sustain academic gatekeeping.

The purpose of the study is to conceptualize the erosion of the universal climate regulatory regime as a process of structural replacement of the universal regulatory logic by a localized one and to theoretically substantiate the concept of taxonomic multiplicity as a structural phenomenon of contemporary climate policy. The article argues that the transformation of the global climate regime during the decade following the adoption of the Paris Agreement cannot be adequately explained through categories of institutional weakness or insufficient political will. Instead, it should be interpreted as a systemic replacement of the universal regulatory logic by a localized one, within which climate policy functions according to the rationality of economic competition and redistribution of gains rather than collective coordination. The research methodology relies on structural-logical analysis, comparative method, conceptual differentiation, typological analysis, and theoretical generalization.The study demonstrates that the Paris Agreement formally retains its status as the central instrument of the global climate regime, while the practical implementation of climate policy increasingly shifts to the space of national and regional policies, including the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism of the European Union, the European Union Emissions Trading System, the Inflation Reduction Act of the United States, and the dual carbon control mechanism of the People's Republic of China. These parallel regulatory spaces do not aggregate into a universal system but instead reproduce competing architectures of sustainable activity classification, green finance eligibility, and cross-border carbon accounting. It is established that the coexistence of more than two dozen sustainability taxonomies is not a temporary dysfunction but a structural characteristic of the new regulatory order. The scientific novelty lies in developing a theoretical framework that interprets the proliferation of sustainability taxonomies and the deliberate ambiguity of key terminological categories as structural features of the new regulatory environment rather than as technical problems of harmonization. On this basis, the article advances the concept of taxonomic multiplicity and formulates the central paradox of the contemporary climate regulatory order as a persistent gap between the declarative level of multilateral commitments and the operational level of their implementation.

This special issue explores the intricate relationship between mobility and uncertainty as co-constitutive phenomena. Human movements are increasingly shaped by structural inequalities and intersecting crises—economic, environmental, and political—while also punctuated by sudden events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the embeddedness of (im)mobilities in uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic research, the introduction situates uncertainty not as a given but as socially and politically produced through global mobility regimes, infrastructural arrangements, and governance strategies that arbitrate human (im)mobilities. Uncertainty emerges as both a constraint and a catalyst for action, fostering creativity, resistance, and speculation about the future. The issue addresses three core questions: How are mobilities employed to navigate uncertain circumstances? How does uncertainty act as a limitation or driver of movement? And how is uncertainty negotiated across mobility trajectories? By examining diverse cases—from clandestine migration along the Balkan route and precarious journeys from West Africa to Europe, to post-socialist road infrastructures in Russia, tourism labor in the Swiss Alps, and bureaucratic hurdles faced by skilled migrants—the contributions reveal uncertainty as a governing mechanism and a lived experience. Ultimately, embracing uncertainty can become a deliberate strategy for transformation, challenging structural constraints and opening new possibilities for the future.

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the primacy of ‘freedom of movement’ in critical migration studies, proposing instead the ‘right to homeland’ as a more adequate political horizon for confronting contemporary forced displacement. The paper argues that refugeehood is defined not primarily by restricted mobility but by dispossession – the expropriation of people's collective capacity to shape the social conditions of the places where they live and labor. Situating this analysis within the organic crisis of global capitalism and the ensuing counter-revolution of property, the paper demonstrates how the assault on republican premises such as popular sovereignty and substantive citizenship has generalized the core aspects of refugeehood across broader populations. The right to homeland emerges as both an analytical framework and a strategic imperative: it invites to reappropriate citizenship and sovereignty from their hollowed-out forms, offering a unifying ground for struggle that transcends the citizen/refugee divide and addresses the shared dynamics of dispossession.

ABSTRACT The right to play, framed within human rights rhetoric, is often seen as an emancipatory principle aimed at liberating children’s bodies in the pursuit of global educational justice. Yet this universal framing obscures the historical contingencies and governing rationalities embedded in its formation. Drawing on Foucault’s history of the present, this article critically examines how the right to play with joy has been constituted as a global object of knowledge, operating as a technique of affective governance that regulates children’s bodies in education. It traces the philosophical and historical legacies underpinning the right to play, revealing its embedded exclusionary principles and techniques of governance. The analysis further unpacks the historical conditions that enabled play with joy to be captured by human rights discourse and institutionalized as a global regime. The CDC’s ‘Learn the Signs. Act Early’. program is examined as a global condensation illustrating how play and joy are transformed into developmental indicators that normalize childhood and reproduce exclusions. The paper offers critical insights at the intersection of affect theory, human rights discourse, and constructions of childhood, and concludes by calling for a reimagination of education from the affective boundaries and limits of the present.

Abstract The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and public governance has introduced unprecedented challenges to data privacy. AI systems rely on vast quantities of personal and sensitive data to train, optimize, and deploy predictive models, creating complex tensions between utility and individual privacy rights. This comprehensive review explores the intersection of AI capabilities and data privacy obligations, examining the technical mechanisms through which privacy can be compromised, the regulatory frameworks that govern data handling, and the emerging technologies designed to reconcile AI performance with privacy preservation. The paper surveys Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) such as federated learning, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation. It further examines the adequacy of global regulatory regimes including GDPR, CCPA, and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and critically evaluates their enforcement in AI-driven environments. The findings highlight persistent trade-offs between model accuracy and privacy guarantees, scalability barriers in cryptographic approaches, and the need for standardized privacy metrics. Future directions include privacy-aware AI architectures, explainable privacy controls, and unified international governance frameworks. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Data Privacy, Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, GDPR, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, Homomorphic Encryption, Trustworthy AI

Abstract This article examines heritage-led urban transformation in Bursa, Turkey, as a contested process through which space, memory, and justice are actively produced. As a former imperial capital that later emerged as a major center of Republican-era industrialization, Bursa provides a critical case for analyzing how post-imperial urban identities are selectively reconstructed under contemporary heritage governance frameworks. Drawing on an integrated analytical lens that brings together Lefebvre’s production of space, Halbwachs’ politics of collective memory, and Harvey’s concept of spatial justice, the study investigates how imperial, religious, rural, and industrial pasts are differentially mobilized and valued. Focusing on key sites—the Hanlar District, Ulu Mosque, and Cumalıkızık village—and juxtaposing them against the Merinos Woolen Factory, the article demonstrates how UNESCO designation and neoliberal heritage policies foreground monumental Ottoman legacies while marginalizing and sanitizing Republican-era industrial heritage and everyday urban practices. Based on visual, spatial, and policy-based sources, the analysis reveals how heritage governance reshapes urban space through processes of commodification, selective remembrance, and symbolic exclusion. By foregrounding the tensions between preservation, modernization, and social equity, the article contributes to critical heritage studies and broader debates on urban memory and spatial justice in post-imperial cities shaped by global heritage regimes.

This article, through close reading, examines Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West as a developmental narrative mapping the transition from governmental immunopolitics to an emergent and sustainable nomadic communitarianism. Whereas the concept of immunopolitics refers to practices of systemic segregation based on a self-nonself schemata, nomadic communitarianism alludes to the gathering of stateless people into sporadic and metastable communities, which are shaped by interstitiality and mobility. The article contends that Hamid represents the migrant-subject as a figure of persecution whose dispossessed status is constituted around a segregationist governmentality. Subsequently, the presence of transnational doorways alongside other digital and sensory modes of communication engenders an anti-immunological turn in the novel. These gateways are examined as strategic-symbolic space-times enabling the migrants to circumvent an oppressive global border regime that divides the planetary population into citizens and non-citizens. These passages of becoming also transform a xenophobic geopolitical order into a sustainable space of mobility leading to the emergence of cross-border subjectivities that construe migration as foundational to lived experience. Such increased occurrences of border-crossing facilitate the conglomeration of trans-ethnic strangers around localities of cohabitation. Instead of race or national identity, these nomadic communities endure together through shared experiences of (in)security and interstitiality.

The halal industry has evolved into a global economic regime that demands governance based not only on normative compliance but also on the ability to guarantee process integrity and business sustainability. However, in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector, halal certification is still dominated by administrative compliance that has not been integrated into operational systems. This study aims to analyze the implementation of halal certification policies in SMEs by integrating the maqāsid al-sharī’ah (Islamic principles) and risk-based governance perspectives. This study employed a qualitative case study design and used document analysis, in-depth interviews, and observations in Padang Panjang City. The results revealed a structural gap between policy design and implementation practices. This gap is reflected in the low halal certification rate of 3.9% (520 out of 13,183 SMEs), the prevalence of self-declaration schemes (93.8%), and weak halal literacy and underdeveloped risk-based control systems in the production process. These conditions suggest that halal compliance remains largely symbolic and has yet to yield substantive outcomes in line with the maqāsid. This study contributes to the field by developing an integrative analytical framework that connects maqāsid, as the normative basis, with risk-based governance, as the operational mechanism. The framework emphasizes the need to shift from rule-based compliance to system-based governance in halal policy. This study introduces the Maqāsid-Based Risk Governance Index (MRGI), an integrative model that uses operational indicators such as safety, traceability, and transparency to measure the achievement of maqāsid outcomes.

ABSTRACT Achieving a world without nuclear weapons requires a transition from today’s nuclear non-proliferation regime to a durable nuclear-zero regime. Separating (i) legal and institutional functions of a legal framework from (ii) enabling conditions beyond treaty design, including cooperative geopolitics and conflict mitigation, this article critically evaluates to what extent the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) provides, or could evolve to provide, legal and institutional functions required for a future durable global nuclear-zero regime, constructively identifying issues to be addressed going forward. It finds that, while the TPNW powerfully codifies the delegitimization and comprehensive prohibition of nuclear weapons, important legal and institutional design gaps remain. On the legal aspect, the treaty does not prohibit production of fissile material, is silent on delivery systems, and affirms an inalienable right to peaceful nuclear activities without reservation. Institutionally, its verification provisions are underspecified (both for nuclear-armed states and for non-nuclear-weapon states), no enforcement architecture is provided, and withdrawal rules may be too permissive and, in some scenarios, destabilizing. The article concludes with an agenda for treaty operation and reform to bridge the gap between normative movement and required legal and institutional functions.

ABSTRACT Sexuality among Indonesian migrant domestic workers has largely been framed through vulnerability-centred paradigms that emphasise exploitation, moral regulation, and labour precarity, often positioning women's bodies as sites of injury rather than negotiated meaning. This article argues that Global South domestic labour regimes expose the geographical limits of dominant postfeminist models of sexual agency, which are grounded in visibility, consumer autonomy, and neoliberal self-fashioning within Western media cultures. Drawing on Teun A. van Dijk's critical discourse analysis of nine YouTube testimonies by Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the study examines how sexual subjectivity is discursively reconstructed through refusal, boundary-making, strategic distancing, and reflexive reinterpretation of pleasure. These narratives show that agency does not operate as unrestrained choice but as negotiation embedded in labour conditions, moral scrutiny, and employer-dependent hierarchies. By positioning Indonesia as an analytical vantage point, the article demonstrates that visibility-centred postfeminist frameworks do not fully account for migration regimes structured by contractual dependency and moral governance and advances a recalibrated account of sexual agency within feminist media studies.

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the role of merit as a criterion for allocating public and social goods, with particular emphasis on immigration and citizenship regimes in the Global North. Although portrayed as a vehicle of de-ethnicisation/-racialisation, merit in practice operates through implicit and indirect mechanisms of ethnicisation and racialisation – which I term 'neo-racialisation'. As such, merit proves both legally and normatively problematic, perpetuating historical ‘blood hierarchies’ under a modern and ostensibly neutral guise. Analysing citizenship-by-investment (CBI) and residency-by-investment (RBI) programmes in the European Union, the Article reveals a paradox at the heart of meritocracy critiques: while merit-based selection schemes are embedded in ethno-racial hierarchies, opposition to such schemes is itself frequently embedded in such logics – an aspect largely neglected in existing scholarship. This tension calls for deeper examination of the neo-racialisation entrenched in the broader global citizenship regime. Focusing on the European Union as a case study, the article advances the argument that, despite their flaws, CBI and RBI schemes might represent the ‘lesser evil’, justified on four grounds: being egalitarian, anti-racist, anti-colonial and human rights-based.