ABSTRACT Finland’s decision to seek membership of NATO in 2022 provides an opportunity to examine the parliamentary role in decision making and to reflect on the key features of the 2019–23 parliamentary session. This article draws on interviews with 22 Members of Parliament (MPs) from that session to qualitatively explore perceptions of security and defence policy decision making and its main parliamentary dimensions: decision making opportunities for MPs, with a focus on the Finnish Government’s report processes; debating possibilities, particularly the opportunity to debate differing viewpoints; and access to information to enable informed decision making. The study contributes to the oral history of security and defence policymaking and offers Finland as a case study, while also engaging with broader debates concerning the parliamentary role in security and defence policy decision making. The findings indicate that parliament held a strong role and that MPs generally considered their rights to debate and to access information sufficient, although the latter partly depended on their position within the key committees related to security and defence – namely the Defence Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee. Furthermore, the study shows that consensus seeking tendencies may limit debate on security and defence matters.

ABSTRACT This article investigates how the small liberal Nordic states – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – have adapted their foreign and security policy roles in the Arctic in response to a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. Departing from the concept of contextually induced role change, we trace the evolution of Nordic national role conceptions before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a turning point that marked the transition from a liberal, rules-based order to intensified great power competition. Prior to 2022, the Nordic states balanced multilateral cooperation and national interests, acting as facilitators of cooperation in the Arctic while also pursuing distinct national roles. The post-2022 context, however, has seen a convergence of Nordic Arctic policies, with a pronounced shift towards prioritising military security, particularly through NATO. The analysis demonstrates that the increasingly hostile Arctic environment has constrained the agency of small states, compelling the Nordics to adopt new roles focused on security provision, while multilateral strategies have become less viable. This contextually induced role change underscores the challenges faced by small liberal states in navigating a more competitive and unpredictable Arctic and highlights the importance of both structural conditions and agency in shaping foreign policy roles.

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.

The COVID-19 lockdown had significant effects on daily life, particularly food security among Australian adults. This study examined the longer-term impact of lockdown measures on food security in Western Sydney, a region more socio-economically challenged within the Sydney area. A total of 548 adults were recruited via convenience sampling at least 6 months post-lockdown (May-August 2022 and January-February 2023). Of these, 523 completed the validated six-item USDA Household Food Security Survey Module and were included in the quantitative analysis. Fifty-four participants took part in 12 focus group discussions (FGDs), including some participants who did not complete the survey. FGDs explored food security perceptions based on its four pillars, both during and after lockdown. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted manually in Excel and verified in NVivo (version 14.23.0). The mean age of survey participants (n = 523) was 25.1 ± 9.7 years, and 63% were women. Among participants with available birthplace data (n = 521), 267 were Australian-born and 254 were overseas-born; birthplace information was missing for two participants. Only 6% reported improved food security post-lockdown. Using the USDA tool, females were significantly more likely than males to report meal size reductions post-lockdown (p = 0.0001)> FGDs revealed that food availability, access, utilisation and stability were affected by rising food prices, fear of virus contamination and shifts in shopping habits during and after lockdown. While the measured food insecurity prevalence was low based on the survey findings, the qualitative findings indicated that some participants continued to experience disruptions or vulnerabilities related to food security at least 6 to 15 months post-lockdown. These findings highlight the need for both crisis-responsive and recovery-oriented food security policies, with particular attention to supporting adult women who appear disproportionately affected.

ABSTRACT Russia’s Food Security Doctrine strives to ensure food self-sufficiency for all people in all regions of Russia. Russia is a geographically diverse country. The article analyzes two dilemmas that arise from current food security policy: (1) Regional diversity in food production capacity, food production, and food demand does not align with policy goals and (2) Not all regions can be food self-sufficient. The Russian Far East illustrates the second dilemma. Nearly half of Russia’s regions have no reasonable prospect of becoming food self-sufficient. The upshot is that a food security policy which aims for self-sufficiency in every region is not realistic.

ABSTRACT Cyber security has shifted from a predominantly technical control function to a strategic management capability that determines organizational continuity, trust, regulatory compliance, and digital competitiveness. Between 2023 and 2025, the threat environment changed substantially because of generative artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service, identity-centered intrusion, supply-chain compromise, cloud misconfiguration, vulnerability exploitation, data-extortion models, and the rapid diffusion of zero-trust and security automation. Data were drawn from 56 recent academic and professional sources, including peer-reviewed studies and global empirical reports published mainly from 2023 to 2025. The analysis compares innovation domains, threat categories, organizational readiness indicators, workforce gaps, breach-cost patterns, and governance implications. Results show that AI-enabled security automation, zero-trust architecture, extended detection and response, software supply-chain assurance, privacy-enhancing technologies, cyber-resilience metrics, and human-centric security programmers are the dominant innovation streams. However, these innovations generate new challenges, including model manipulation, shadow AI, tool fragmentation, skill shortages, board-level accountability gaps, third-party exposure, and unequal cyber maturity across regions and firm sizes. The paper contributes a management-oriented cyber innovation framework linking technological capability, governance maturity, behavioral resilience, and ecosystem coordination. Practical recommendations are offered for boards, chief information security officers, risk committees, human-resource leaders, technology managers, and policy makers.

The regionalization of the October 2023 conflict as a result of the Houthi attacks on commercial shipping at the entrance to the Red Sea created global ramifications, resulting in international intervention. While the crisis was also a reminder of the importance of maritime security to the GCC countries, they have neither adopted a collective response nor joined the international coalition. They have opted for unilateral responses to protect their interests. This was conspicuous, since securing Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) in the vicinity of the Arabian peninsula remains essential to the security and global economic engagement of the GCC states. This article argues that the lack of a collective response by the GCC states to the maritime security dilemmas in the Red Sea partially indicates divergent views on the crisis, and reflects the current security orientation of each. More to the point, at the root of their ad hoc and unilateral responses lies the long-standing inability to devise a common maritime security strategy. Thus, the paper studies five major factors that present major impediments to the adoption of a common maritime security policy at the GCC level.

BackgroundEffective physician-patient communication is essential for building trust and sustaining positive relationships, yet becomes increasingly challenging in China’s tertiary hospitals, where physicians face heavy workloads.ObjectiveThis study explored the barriers and facilitators of physician-patient communication by synthesizing perspectives from Chinese hospital-based physicians and patient relations coordinators.MethodsA qualitative study using semistructured interviews was conducted with 17 participants (11 physicians and 6 patient relations coordinators) from tertiary hospitals in China (April-July 2025). Data were analyzed using thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s framework.ResultsBarriers and facilitators of physician-patient communication were organized into a multilevel framework comprising patient-level, physician-level, and system-level factors. Patient-level barriers included individual background differences, inadequate expression and limited health literacy, and psycho-emotional states with expectation misalignment, whereas facilitators included effective expectation management, good health literacy and communication readiness, and trust in physicians with shared decision-making. Physician-level barriers involved communication style deficiencies, empathy gaps, and time pressure constraints; facilitators included active listening and patient-centeredness, empathy and emotional support, and clear explanations with cultural adaptability. At the system level, barriers included hospital environment and medical visit settings, legal and policy deficiencies, insufficient communication training, and media-driven distrust with digitally mediated information challenges, while facilitators included institutional support and security assurance, educational training and policy promotion, process optimization and patient health education, and artificial intelligence–assisted baseline knowledge.ConclusionsPhysician-patient communication is influenced by multiple factors, necessitating comprehensive intervention measures: enhancing patient education, improving physician communication skills, and strengthening organizational support systems. Notably, special attention should be directed toward addressing the unique challenges posed by digital technologies while concurrently leveraging the opportunities they present to optimize communication outcomes.

Neurologists with disabilities remain underrepresented in the US physician workforce despite decades of legal protections mandating accommodation. Although the Americans with Disabilities Act provides a statutory framework, graduate medical education programs frequently lack structured, operational processes to implement accommodations in residency training. In this case study, a neurology program director and resident—both physicians with spinal cord injuries—describe how they adapted a neurology residency to support equivalent training while preserving educational rigor and patient safety. Before residency began, they identified accessible clinical sites, designed equivalent rotations to preserve educational rigor, and conducted audits of key clinical spaces. When environmental or scheduling demands exceeded feasible modification, they implemented alternative solutions that ensured the resident's educational exposure remained on par with nondisabled peers. Unanticipated barriers—including security policy changes and environmental hazards—further refined a structured workflow emphasizing early engagement, environmental review, and iterative reassessment. This experience informed development of a practical, replicable framework and accompanying Practical Guide. By documenting both anticipated and unforeseen barriers, this case illustrates how neurology training can evolve from ad hoc accommodation toward proactive institutional design that aligns inclusion with educational excellence.

Shared resources enhance productivity, yet at the same time open pathways for biological and digital contamination, turning physical or digital hygiene into a cooperation dilemma prone to free-riding. Here, we introduce a game of sequential sharing of common resources, an empirically parameterized evolutionary model of population dynamics in sequential-use settings such as gyms or shared workspaces. The success of the strategies implemented in the model, which involve equipment cleaning before or after use, is based on the trade-offs between cleaning costs, contamination risks and social incentives to mitigate disease transmission. We find that cooperative hygiene can be achieved by lowering the effective costs of cleaning, strengthening pro-social incentives and monitoring population-level noncompliance. Remarkably, the stability of fully altruistic populations is primarily affected by the cleaning costs. In contrast, increasing effective infection costs, for example, through punishment, appears less important in this case. The model's evolutionary dynamics exhibit multi-stability, hysteresis and abrupt shifts in strategy composition, broadly consistent with empirical observations from shared-use facilities. Our framework offers testable predictions and is amenable to quantitative calibration with behavioural and environmental data. Our predictions can be used to inform the design of cost-effective public health and digital security policies. A bird that flies away leaves no trace (Japanese proverb).

Punjab, Pakistan's primary agricultural province, faces mounting pressure from urbanization, groundwater depletion, and climate variability, threatening cropland sustainability and food security. This study quantifies spatiotemporal cropland and built-up area dynamics at the district scale, detects long-term trends in eight climatic, hydrological, and vegetation variables, and attributes cropland change to its dominant drivers across Punjab's 36 districts over 2000-2025. Multi-resolution land cover datasets were integrated with ERA5-Land and GLDAS-2.2 climate reanalyses and processed in Google Earth Engine. District-scale Mann-Kendall trend analysis and Random Forest (RF) regression were applied to 288 district-year observations. Punjab lost 15,302 km2 of cropland (- 12.30%) between 2000 and 2025, while built-up area expanded by 180.31%, more than twice the global average rate. The provincial-scale Mann-Kendall test for cropland returned a non-significant trend (p = 0.387), reflecting high inter-annual variability that masks the spatially concentrated, structurally driven signal at the district level. All 36 districts recorded urban expansion, and cropland loss was concentrated in 13 peri-urban districts. Groundwater storage declined significantly by 12.16% (p = 0.035), while actual evapotranspiration nearly doubled (+ 91.02%, p = 0.002), indicating a tightening agricultural water balance. The RF model explained 92.96% of absolute cropland variance (cross-validated R2 = 0.59 on the change target), with change in built-up area and year emerged as co-dominant predictors (MDI = 0.212 each), followed by precipitation variability (0.170). These findings provide a district-scale, spatially explicit evidence base for land governance, groundwater regulation, and food security policy in Punjab and analogous South Asian agricultural systems.

ABSTRACT This article presents a qualitative analysis of the EU's approaches to human rights violations in selected states’ ‘troubled pasts’, employing insights from and critiques of the interdisciplinary field of ‘transitional justice’. By viewing the EU's approaches to troubled pasts through the lens of transitional justice, it is possible to trace a complex web of external and internal policies that have been invoked to address them. Whilst in the Common Foreign and Security Policy, there is express engagement with the notion of transitional justice, its engagement with its own Member States’ troubled pasts is more obscure, involving creative use of its ‘competences’ on citizenship to pursue policies of ‘remembrance’ as well as hosting significant debates in the European Parliament about the adoption of European-wide symbolic measures of commemoration. That these policy areas would be invoked in the way that they have been is not self-evident, and so by employing a comprehensive understanding of the EU's complex institutional structure, the article explains both how they were identified and then the range of measures adopted through them. This then facilitates a novel and extensive appraisal of the EU's measures to address the selected states’ troubled pasts through its patchwork of transitional justice interventions.

The rapid expansion of digital payment systems in India, particularly the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), has transformed the country’s financial landscape and created a strong behavioral foundation for future digital currency adoption. The Reserve Bank of India’s introduction of the Digital Rupee (e₹) as India’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) represents a significant milestone in the modernization of the monetary system. This study examines consumer perception toward CBDC adoption in India with special focus on the transition from UPI-driven payment systems to the Digital Rupee framework. Based entirely on secondary data drawn from RBI reports, NPCI statistics, BIS publications, IMF working papers, and peer-reviewed literature, the study employs thematic, comparative, and trend analysis methods to identify the key factors shaping consumer readiness toward Digital Rupee adoption. The findings indicate that while India possesses strong technological and institutional infrastructure for CBDC implementation, consumer acceptance remains contingent upon trust, security, digital literacy, privacy protection, and sustained policy support. The study highlights both the opportunities and challenges associated with CBDC adoption and offers practical suggestions for policymakers and financial institutions to ensure a successful and inclusive transition toward the Digital Rupee economy.

ABSTRACT Uzbekistan’s post-2016 foreign and domestic policy trajectory offers a revealing case of how states facing acute geopolitical precarity convert vulnerability into strategic agency. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amid China’s expanding institutional and economic presence in Central Asia, Uzbekistan has been exposed to growing external pressure that might ordinarily lead to authoritarian consolidation or democratic backsliding. Yet the country has continued a cautious programme of institutional reform while simultaneously intensifying regional cooperation with its Central Asian neighbours. This article argues that Uzbekistan has managed these pressures through what Azmanova and Korosteleva [2026. The precarisation of politics in times of war and crisis: from paralysis to transformative resilience. Contemporary Security Policy] describe as transformative resilience—a form of political agency that moves beyond merely withstanding crisis and instead enables forward-oriented institutional adaptation. In practice, this resilience has taken the form of what we describe as sovereign regionalism, a strategy that combines gradual political opening at home with intensified regional cooperation abroad. Through border settlements, water diplomacy, and expanding regional economic integration, Uzbekistan has sought to reduce external vulnerability while preserving domestic reform momentum. The Uzbek case demonstrates how regional cooperation can function as a form of security infrastructure that sustains governance capacity under conditions of geopolitical precarity. Rather than retreating into authoritarian retrenchment, the state has pursued a dual logic of diplomatic accommodation and structural diversification that preserves room for institutional reform. The article concludes by outlining implications for understanding democratic resilience and regional security strategies in geopolitically exposed regions.

This conversation piece examines how Canada navigates the challenges of national and human security. Drawing on insights from experts in defence studies, foreign policy, international law, and human rights, it explores the financial and institutional costs of sovereignty, the fragility of multilateral alliances, and the prospect of American ambivalence or aggression. Shifts toward ad hoc coalitions, total defence models, and domestic resilience are highlighted, while showing how border regimes, securitization practices, and selective legal enforcement reproduce racialized violence and erode humanitarian norms. The article argues that Canada's security cannot be outsourced or pursued solely through military preparedness; it must be grounded in justice, equity, and the primacy of human rights. Protecting the state, it contends, is meaningless if people within its borders are not safe and free, and security policy must therefore integrate national defence with robust commitments to human security.

The role of digitalisation in supporting farmers and strategic policies for food security and sustainability in Europe: A review

Addressing the double burden of malnutrition in Bangladesh: Evidence from National Policy Documents and gaps in policy integration.

Understanding how the grain trade redistributes environmental burdens across regions is critical for designing equitable food security and environmental stewardship policies. Using grain production, trade and environmental data from 1980 to 2020, we quantify environmental spillovers embedded in China's interprovincial grain trade, identify their socio-economic and climatic drivers, project future scenarios and estimate ecological compensation schemes. Interprovincial grain trade increased more than fivefold (from 22 to 128 million tonnes), and production shifted northwards, generating a 196% increase in virtual cropland displacement, a 415% rise in virtual water consumption and more than a 217% increase in embodied nitrogen losses and greenhouse gas emissions in China. Irrigation, mechanization and urbanization were the key drivers of these shifts, outweighing climatic influences. Continued reliance on northern grain exports could escalate environmental costs, and climate-induced yield declines may shrink trade networks. Addressing these inequitable regional ecological burdens may require south-to-north transfers of up to US$12.5 billion by 2060 under Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2-4.5.

VideoCignium: Desktop application for automated analysis of surveillance videos using AI

Community pharmacies face substantial exposure to workplace violence. However, pharmacy robberies remain critically under-studied. No robust investigation has examined robbery risk in community pharmacies in Jordan or the broader Middle East region, representing a significant research gap. To quantify robbery exposure in community pharmacies, identify perceived pharmacy-level risk factors for robbery, and compare risk perceptions between pharmacists with and without robbery exposure. Analytical cross-sectional survey. A self-administered questionnaire with demonstrated content validity (CVR≥0.74) and internal consistency (Cronbach's α>0.70) was used. Data from 975 respondents were analyzed using chi-square tests with Cramer's V and multivariable logistic regression; ethical approval was obtained from the institutional review board. Robbery exposure was reported by 4.3% of respondents and was significantly more frequent among men and pharmacists aged >30years (p<0.01). The most frequently endorsed pharmacy-level robbery risk factors were late opening (81.2%), single staffing (77.3%), dispensing narcotics (77.2%) and absence of surveillance cameras (72.6%). In adjusted analyses, agreement that robbery risk depends primarily on offender-related personal factors (OR 6.28, 95% CI 2.48-15.90) and prior experience with aggressive customers (OR 3.11, 95% CI 1.25-7.76) emerged as the strongest independent correlates of robbery exposure. Encounters with customers perceived as dangerous (72.1%) or aggressive (68.0%) were also common. Robberies, alongside widespread dangerous and aggressive customer behavior, pose meaningful risks in community pharmacies. Differences between pharmacists exposed and not exposed to robbery in how they evaluated pharmacy-level robbery risk factors, together with the strong influence of offender- and behavior-related factors on robbery exposure underscoring the need for evidence-informed security policies, minimum staffing standards, and training to recognize and manage high-risk customer interactions.