Over the first quarter of the 21st century, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda became established as the most important policy framework linking gender issues to peace and security problems. WPS work has proceeded along two tracks: a nongovernmental track comprised of women’s rights activists and gender scholars; and a policy track directed by national governments and intergovernmental organizations (Brown and de Jonge Oudraat 2025). Both tracks have been instrumental in advancing the WPS agenda, including the adoption by the UN Security Council of ten WPS resolutions—starting with Resolution 1325 in October 2000. The 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 is an appropriate occasion to assess WPS accomplishments to date and define WPS priorities for the years ahead.

It has been a long time since political scientists have taken measure of our political engagement in the United States. Drawing on data collected from political scientists in Summer 2024, this article assesses the extent and type of political engagement, finding three alliterative dimensions into which we tend to fall: partisans (who engage in partisan politics), public scholars (who share political science logic and findings), and pedagogues (who engage through teaching and event sponsorship). This effort may represent the first time we have tried to measure individual beliefs about how personal participation should intersect with professional responsibilities. Our dimensions of engagement tend not to differ substantially by demography, institution, or rank. However, we do have different beliefs about the propriety and the likely effects of different types of engagement with politics that give structure to our presence in the public sphere.

In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador. This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.

Since the 1970s, Japan has occupied a position of political, economic, and technological power. The article argues that Japan’s rise during this period resulted in increased European East-West cooperation. Firstly, it demonstrates the threat posed by Japanese competition in sectors such as automobiles and electronics encouraged the expansion of Western European companies into Eastern Europe. Secondly, by examining the case of Poland, it shows how Japan’s rise served as a model for opening socialist economies. Viewing the increase in East-West European cooperation through Japan’s ascent offers a fresh perspective on this phenomenon. It illustrates how the emergence of new global powers facilitated the fragmentation of Cold War divisions, enabling a more balanced understanding of the political and economic motivations behind this cooperation in capitalist and socialist countries. It also suggests that East-West European cooperation was shaped by a broader global transformation that escapes a purely Cold War logic.

Cancer, a multifactorial and heterogeneous disease, poses a significant global health challenge. Despite current treatments such as surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, tumour recurrence and treatment side effects are common. These pitfalls necessitate a dire need for alternative therapeutic strategies with minimal side effects. This necessity has broadened the horizons of drug discovery into the marine domain, an exciting frontier for novel therapeutic agents. The marine ecosystem serves as a hub of diverse chemical groups with potential anti-cancer properties. Few marine-derived drugs are approved for cancer, and preliminary studies show that marine lead compounds can inhibit cancer cell growth and induce apoptosis. In this context, this review encapsulates an overview of ‘the current state of marine biodiscovery’. It explores the ‘potential of marine natural products in combating cancer’ with a particular focus on glioblastoma multiforme as a case study. Additionally, it discusses the ‘key strategies for advancing marine-derived anti-cancer compounds from the research stage to clinical use’. By tapping into the vast, unlocking the hidden treasures of the ocean, marine natural compounds could offer a hopeful perspective in the fight against cancer.

This study argues that trans-contextual migration experiences can lead to various changes in self-identification among multiethnic and multiracial Japanese individuals. This case study examines in-depth interviews with six participants with roots in Japan, Thailand, and Germany through a narrative-based approach. The author discusses the dynamic relationship between contextual and individual factors in influencing self-identification. Through thematic analysis of participant narratives, this exploratory case study identifies four recurring themes; migration can trigger significant changes in self-identification; migration can lead to unresolved mismatches between self-identification and societal categorisation; migration can result in the development of hybrid identifications that transcend rigid ethnic boundaries; and migration to a third cultural context can validate self-identifications in new ways. By examining themes that emerged from participant narratives, this case study illuminates the fluid and complex nature of multiethnic and multiracial self-identifications, particularly how racialisation processes intersect with ethnic identity formation across different national contexts. The study contributes to the growing scholarship on mixedness by emphasizing the importance of a biographical understanding of multiethnic and multiracial self-identifications through the lens of trans-contextual migration experiences.

This article examines one of thousands of reports describing murder trials that are stored in the archives of the Habsburg ruler in Vienna. The monarch was required to evaluate every civilian death sentence in his realm, including the Kingdom of Hungary, and he alone could decide if the execution should proceed or be commuted. But it was the relevant justice minister who composed the reports and framed the decision for the monarch. Through these reports, the minister shaped what would happen through persuasive narrative and expert advice. After evaluating seven hundred reports, we selected one specific case: a murder conviction in Budapest in 1915. We show how the justice minister, an expert in criminal justice reform and an opponent of the death penalty, directed the emperor towards clemency and contributed to the steady decrease in the use of capital punishment.

This article reassesses the relationship between the British government and British commercial interests during the Spanish civil war. It has often been argued that British economic interests inclined the government toward non-intervention, effectively favouring Franco’s insurgents over the Spanish Republic. However, records from the Spanish Emergency Committee (SEC) – a little-known and hitherto unstudied committee formed by British insurers operating in Spain – reveal a more nuanced picture. Initially, the SEC pursued ‘mercantile neutrality’, avoiding state involvement and playing little if any role in the British government’s policy of non-intervention. But as their efforts to protect their interests failed under increasing Francoist pressure and a worsening European political context, they turned to the British government for support. The SEC’s experience highlights the complexities of state–capital relations during the inter-war period and the difficulty of defining ‘national’ interests in times of crisis, showing how business archives can provide new insights into key debates in international history.

As elected officials and citizens struggle to understand the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States, some have pointed to the introduction of “gavel-to-gavel” camera coverage in legislative bodies as driving the downward trajectory of these institutions. Advocates of increased transparency suggest cameras empower voters, producing more moderate behavior among legislators, whereas opponents suggest cameras encourage partisanship and dysfunction. Previous research offers mixed conclusions, in part, because of a focus on national legislatures where the introduction of cameras occurs only once. Using an original dataset of the adoption of gavel-to-gavel coverage in state legislative chambers, we examine whether cameras are associated with a range of chamber- and individual-level outcomes. The findings suggest that there are no systematic impacts from the introduction of gavel-to-gavel coverage. Normative concerns about cameras in legislatures may be overstated, an important finding given their proliferation in public proceedings since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Liber Lynne, a fifteenth-century manuscript in the archive of the City of London Corporation, is a puzzle. Catalogued among the City of London’s collections of written custom (formerly Guildhall MS Cust. 15), it is generally defined as a cartulary. In this article, I study the Liber Lynne as a book that was both about family and for family. Its chance survival, a consequence of its acquisition by the Hanseatic Steelyard in London before the end of the fifteenth century, offers an unusual opportunity to explore the concept of family in the medieval English town. I situate the Liber Lynne in a distinct place and time, and argue that the book is a distinctively urban manuscript, the outcome of urban interests, ambitions, and anxieties. It also reveals the persistent and ubiquitous presence of plague, which exposed the fragility and precarity of families, but helped to give them different shapes. These shapes, or structures, were fluid because of the mutable nature of ideas about family and its voluntaristic qualities. Family, the Liber Lynne suggests, was a choice and a practice.