The state’s role in the perpetration or tolerance of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is not inevitable, even in conflicts where the state may lack the capacity to prevent such violence or protect populations effectively. Prevention and protection by state institutions, including the military, requires reform that addresses not only CRSV behaviour and crimes but also gendered norms that condone this violence in existing legal and social frameworks of state institutions. This paper examines the development of the Joint Communiqués (JCs) as a rare example of an international-led security sector reform initiative between the UN and signatory states to implement reforms and practices to prevent CRSV. We examine the JCs signed to date with states that have militaries that have committed CRSV crimes. Our study of the JCs provides an opportunity to explore how reform to state-level institutional norms and practices proceeds in an environment with heavy dependence on the military state sector to cooperate in preventing CRSV. However, our findings call into question the conditions under which JCs should be promoted, especially when a signatory state refuses or resists including measures in JCs that address their institutional culpability for perpetrating CRSV and adopt survivor-centred gender-inclusive reforms.

Will rising temperatures from climate change affect labour markets? This paper examines the impact of temperature on hours worked, using panel data from Peru covering the period from 2007 to 2015. We combine information on hours worked from household surveys with weather reanalysis data. Our findings show that high temperatures reduce hours worked, with the effect concentrated in informal jobs rather than in weather-exposed industries. These results suggest that labour market segmentation may shape how climate change affects labour outcomes in developing countries.

This article offers a forensic analysis of one key archive of sexual violence: The official record of a congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan and federal trials of Klan members in the years immediately after the American Civil War. The 13 volumes constitute the single most important source of victim testimony on white supremacist violence and are used widely by historians. It also presents daunting problems of interpretation particularly with respect to sexual violence. This analysis challenges historians’ traditional accounts of the Klan as overly reliant on the Republican party narrative that it constituted the terrorist arm of the Democratic party intent on suppressing black men’s new constitutional right to vote.

As I argue here, the Klan’s campaign of terror aimed at something far more, as the routine deployment of sexual violence against women reveals. Sexual regulation was the very core of white supremacy. The representation of the Klan in the official record—its signature acts, motives, and victims—was shaped not by the patterns of the violence itself but by the objectives of the investigation in the battle over public opinion and political strategy. In time and place, I argue, the narrow framing of Klan violence around electoral politics involved real costs to black women victims of the Klan with respect to the protection of their civil and political—or human—rights.

As part of the seventeenth colonial conflagration, known as “Wars of the Three Kingdoms,” incidents of sexual violence—stripping, castration, mutilation, rape, gang rape, and reproductive violations—occurred against women and some men across Ireland. The historical and legal evidence for this violence was recorded in witness statements that form part of an archive, known as the “1641 Depositions.” This article examines this extraordinary archive, now housed in Trinity College Dublin and published online, especially the witness testimony provided by Protestant women. It explores how sexual violence was reported and then politicized. Though testimony that related to sexual violence was rarely used in the courtroom, Protestant propagandists—from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries—manipulated these accounts to instill fear and justify retribution.

The prevalence of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) has increased. MASLD notably increases after menopause in women owing to the drastic reduction in estrogen, which regulates lipid metabolism. While prenatal undernutrition leads to hepatic steatosis after birth, whether prenatal undernutrition affects the onset of postmenopausal MASLD remains unknown. Therefore, we examined the impact of early prenatal undernutrition on the predisposition to postmenopausal MASLD in a rat model of menopause. Pregnant female rats were assigned to the control (CNTL) group, while the undernourished (UN) group was fed 40% of the diet of the control group. Furthermore, both groups were assigned to the ovariectomized (CNTL-OVX/UN-OVX) and sham-operated (CNTL-Sham/UN-Sham) groups at 12 weeks of age. Two-way analysis of variance revealed significant main effects of ovariectomy and prenatal undernutrition on body weight and hepatic triglyceride content. Triglycerides accumulated in the liver at 12 and 24 weeks after ovariectomy, while hepatic steatosis was histologically observed at 24 weeks after ovariectomy in UN-OVX rats. Hepatic gene expression analyses showed an interaction effect between prenatal undernutrition × ovariectomy in ESR1 expression; however, PPARα, RXRα, RARα, Raldh1, and Raldh3 expression was not affected by prenatal undernutrition and ovariectomy. These results suggest that early prenatal undernutrition predisposes postmenopausal women to MASLD by uncovering aberrant estrogen signaling, which may be influenced by estrogen reduction.

The impact of maternal nutrition during the peri-conception period on offspring sex remains unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the association between maternal nutritional intake around conception and offspring sex. Data were collected from the Japan Environment and Children’s Study, which enrolled 97,510 mother–child pairs. The effect of maternal intake of fats, proteins, and fatty acids on offspring sex was analyzed, adjusting for maternal demographics and lifestyle factors. Overall, maternal intake of total fatty acids, saturated fatty acids (SFAs), polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), n–3 PUFA, n–6 PUFA, and protein and the ratios of n–6/n–3 and SFA/energy showed no consistent associations with offspring sex.

However, further analyses revealed notable patterns related to maternal age and energy intake. Among mothers with high energy intake (≥4,000 kcal/day), higher residual protein intake was associated with increased odds of having a male child (aOR, 1.87; 95% CI, 1.17–2.98). In mothers aged under 20 years, increased n-3 PUFA intake was linked to higher odds of male births, while a higher n–6/n–3 ratio was associated with lower odds of male births. Additionally, among mothers aged 20–35 years, higher n−3 PUFA intake was associated with decreased odds of having a male child (aOR, 0.89; 95% CI, 0.82–0.98).

These findings indicate that while no consistent overall relationship was observed, certain maternal nutritional patterns may influence offspring sex, highlighting the need for further research on maternal diet and reproductive outcomes.

The rise of neoliberal statism in Turkey, where the state acts as a developer in both urban and rural contexts, illuminates the multi-scalar, negotiated, and power-laden nature of frontier-making in the twenty-first century. The expansion of export-oriented sweet cherry production in western Turkey’s peri-urban landscapes exemplifies the uneven, non-linear, and contested trajectories of contemporary agrarian capitalism. This paper examines how a niche-commodity frontier is produced not only through shifts in political–economic and socio-ecological relations of production, but also through articulations of nationalism and moral authority grounded in religion. Among the various actors involved in this process, smallholders occupy a paradoxical position: structurally subordinated within export value chains yet discursively mobilized as key agents of frontier expansion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that the ideological hegemony underpinning the frontier hinders the formation of smallholder class consciousness. Instead, the articulation of agrarian capitalism with nationalist and developmental imaginaries, expressed through the party politics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), secures widespread allegiance to Turkey’s current iteration of neoliberal development.

While previous scientific literature has found evidence that warming winters result in a loss of crop yields, recent studies suggest that temperature alone may not be the sole factor in determining yields. In this study, we investigate multiple climatic factors (freezing degree days (FDD) and snow cover fraction) to evaluate the heterogeneous impact of snowpack insulation on winter wheat yields in China. We find that a unit increase in FDD causes a loss of 2.37 kg/hectare in winter wheat yields. Furthermore, our results show that snowpack insulation has a statistically significant negative effect on winter wheat yields at lower and middle quantiles, but a statistically significant positive effect at higher quantiles of the winter wheat yields distribution, suggesting that snowpack insulation is important in maintaining higher winter wheat yields.

For each prime $p$, this paper constructs compact complex hyperbolic $2$-manifolds with an isometric action of $\mathbb{Z} / p \mathbb{Z}$ that is not free and has only isolated fixed points. The case $p = 2$ is special, and finding general examples for $p=2$ is related to whether or not complex hyperbolic lattices are conjugacy separable on torsion.

The most accurate confidence intervals for estimates of heritability are based on Fisher’s Z-transformation. Using these methods, Loehlin and Nichol’s (1976) analysis is confirmed, viz., that it is pointless to estimate heritabilities from the classical twin method unless one is prepared to recruit upwards of 800 twin pairs for study. Even then the assumptions of that method are so improbable as to leave reasonable doubt about the true value of H. Estimates of H from the correlation of monozygotic twins reared apart (MZA twins), on the other hand, is remarkably more stable than that obtained by comparing MZ with DZ correlations. Moreover, estimates of H based on the MZA design rest upon more reasonable (and often testable) assumptions.