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Comparative Regionalism beyond Europe versus the rest

Tobias Lenz, Fredrik Söderbaum

Review of International Studies·2025·1 citations

What is the current state of Comparative Regionalism (CR) as a field of research? Since its inception, CR has suffered from a chasm between those who take European integration as the model for conceptualis- ing, theorising, comparing, and designing regionalism worldwide, and the critics, who reject EU-centrism in favour of more contextualised approaches focusing on the Global South. This paper challenges this characterisation by showing how CR has fundamentally changed in the last decade or so. We detail three ‘silent’ transformations: (i) conceptually, scholars disaggregate regionalism into specific components, rendering systematic comparison more tractable and less individual case-centric; (ii) theoretically, schol- ars develop frameworks that build on general social science theories and actively seek to move beyond EU-centrism; and (iii) methodologically, scholars use more rigorous comparative designs and a broader range of data. These changes, we suggest, indicate a ‘mainstreaming’ of CR, with attendant benefits and costs.

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The Internal Dynamics of Migration Processes: A Theoretical Inquiry

Hein de Haas

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies·2010·367 citations

The migration literature has identified various feedback mechanisms which explain why, once started, migration processes tend to become partly self-perpetuating, leading to the formation of migrant networks and migration systems. However, existing theories on the internal dynamics of migration processes are characterised by three fundamental weaknesses. First, their focus on migrant networks coincides with a neglect of indirect feedback dynamics that operate through the impact of migration on the sending and receiving contexts, changing the initial conditions under which migration takes place. Second, existing theories are unable to explain why most initial migration moves do not lead to network migration and migration system formation. Third, their largely circular logic reveals an inability to conceptualise which migration-undermining feedback mechanisms may counteract migration-facilitating feedback dynamics and which may explain the endogenous decline of established migration systems. By drawing on various disciplinary strands of migration theory and by applying insights from the critical social capital literature, this paper proposes a conceptual framework on the internal dynamics of migration processes by elaborating a set of hypotheses on the various migration- facilitating and migration-undermining feedback mechanisms at play in the various trajectories and stages of migration system formation and decline.

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Spivak%20CanTheSubalternSpeak

Unknown Author

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"The Case of Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua A Step in the International Law o" by Claudio Grossman and S James Anaya

Claudio Grossman, S James Anaya

Digital Commons @ American University Washington College of Law·2002

The people of Awas Tingni did not set about to forge an international legal precedent with implications for indigenous peoples throughout the world, yet that is what they have done. Awas Tingni is one of numerous Mayagna, or Sumo, indigenous communities in the isolated Atlantic Coast region of Nicaragua. The Community has sought simply, but doggedly, to be secure in the peaceful possession of traditional lands. It has achieved a major step toward that end, and more. The Community's identity in the minds of outsiders is now merged with that of a landmark case, The Case of the Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community v. Nicaragua, decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on August 31, 2001. In this case the Court held that the international human right to enjoy the benefits of property, particularly as affirmed in the American Convention on Human Rights, includes the right of indigenous peoples to the protection of their customary land and resource tenure. The Court held that the State of Nicaragua violated the property rights of the Awas Tingni Community by granting to a foreign company a concession to log within the Community's traditional lands and by failing to otherwise provide adequate recognition and protection of the Community's customary tenure. It was not enough that the Nicaraguan constitution and laws recognize in general terms the rights of indigenous peoples to the lands they traditionally use and occupy. The Court admonished that Nicaragua must secure the effective enjoyment of those rights, which it had not done for Awas Tingni nor for the vast majority of indigenous communities of the Atlantic Coast region of Nicaragua. Like Awas Tingni, most of the indigenous communities of the Atlantic Coast are without specific government recognition of their traditional lands in the form of a land title or other official document. In the absence of such specific government recognition, Nicaraguan authorities had treated the untitled traditional indigenous lands-or substantial parts of them-as state lands, as they had done in granting concessions for logging in the Awas Tingni area. The Court ordered Nicaragua to demarcate and title Awas Tingni's traditional lands in accordance with its customary land and resource tenure patterns, to refrain from any action that might undermine the Community's interests in those lands, and to establish an adequate mechanism to secure the land rights of all indigenous communities of the country. This is the first legally binding decision

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Learning millisecond protein dynamics from what is missing in NMR spectra

Wayment-Steele, H. K., El Nesr, G., Hettiarachchi, R., Kariyawasam, H., Ovchinnikov, S., Kern, D.

bioRxiv·2025

Many proteins biological functions rely on interconversions between multiple conformations occurring at micro-to millisecond ({micro}s-ms) timescales. A lack of standardized, large-scale experimental data has hindered obtaining a more predictive understanding of these motions. After curating >100 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) relaxation datasets, we realized an observable for {micro}s-ms motion was hiding in plain sight. Millisecond motions can cause NMR signals to broaden beyond detection, leaving some residues not assigned in the chemical shift datasets of [~]10,000 proteins deposited in the Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB)1. We made the bold assumption that residues missing assignments are exchange-broadened due to {micro}s-ms motions, and trained various deep learning models to predict missing assignments as markers for such dynamics. Strikingly, these models also predict {micro}s-ms motion directly measured in NMR relaxation experiments. The best of these models, which we named Dyna-1, leverages an intermediate layer of the multimodal language model ESM-32. Notably, dynamics directly linked to biological function -- including enzyme catalysis and ligand binding -- are particularly well predicted by Dyna-1, which parallels our findings that residues with {micro}s-ms motions are highly conserved. We anticipate the datasets and models presented here will be transformative in unlocking the common language of dynamics and function.

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I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Work & Scale

Kevin Scott

Daedalus·2022·5 citations

Abstract Over the past decade, AI technologies have advanced by leaps and bounds. Progress has been so fast, voluminous, and varied that it can be a challenge even for experts to make sense of it all. In this essay, I propose a framework for thinking about AI systems, specifically the idea that they are ultimately tools developed by humans to help other humans perform an increasing breadth of their cognitive work. Our AI systems for assisting us with our cognitive work have become more capable and general over the past few years. This is in part due to a confluence of novel AI algorithms and the availability of massive amounts of data and compute. From this, researchers and engineers have been able to construct large, general models that serve as flexible and powerful building blocks that can be composed with other software to drive breakthroughs in the natural and physical sciences, to solve hard optimization and strategy problems, to perform perception tasks, and even to assist with complex cognitive tasks like coding.

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Digital Mental Health Post COVID-19: The Era of AI Chatbots

Luke Balcombe

2025

Digital mental health uses technology—like the Internet, smartphones, wearables, and immersive platforms—to improve access to care. While these resources quickly expanded post COVID-19, ongoing issues include low user retention, poor digital literacy, unclear privacy rules, and limited proof of effectiveness and safety. AI chatbots, also known as agents and assistants that act as a therapist or companion, support mental health by delivering counseling and personalized interactions through various apps and devices. AI chatbots may boost social health and lower loneliness, however, they may also increase dependence and affect emotional outcomes. Their use remains largely unregulated, with concerns about privacy, bias, and ethics. Experiences vary; some users report positive results while others doubt their safety and impact, especially in crisis response. There is a need to better protect vulnerable users and engage the underserved, with input from various individuals with lived experience on what feels safe, supportive, or harmful when interacting with AI chatbots. Proper evaluation, standardized training by digital navigators, and ethical/clinical guidelines are crucial for safe, engaging and effective adoption of AI in mental health care and support.

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The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy

Valentín Figueroa

muse.jhu.edu

After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. This article shows how the Reformation, which involved the expropriation of the Catholic Church’s assets, set in motion two processes. First, to finance their wars, Protestant rulers used revenue from confiscated assets instead of selling proprietary offices, leading to fewer venal officeholders who resisted administrative reforms. Second, expropriations made churches poorer and reduced the number of plum jobs in the clergy, incentivizing a reallocation of educational investments from religious knowledge to secular skills more useful for state administration. This distinctive Protestant developmental path hastened the demise of the patrimonial state. By 1789, the only major territorial states that were bureaucratic were Protestant.

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Seriec 79 Ing

"The Case of Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua A Step in the International Law o" by Claudio Grossman and S James Anaya

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Learning millisecond protein dynamics from what is missing in NMR spectra

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