In this paper we study the idea of consequentialism in dynamic games by considering two versions: A commonly used utility-based version stating that the player’s preferences are governed by a utility function on consequences, and a preference-based version which faithfully translates the original idea of consequentialism to restrictions on the player’s preferences. Utility-based consequentialism always implies preference-based consequentialism, but the other direction is not necessarily true, as is shown by means of a counterexample. In this paper we offer conditions under which the two notions are equivalent.

Over the past decade or so, ethical recruitment has become increasingly popular as an aspirational standard for addressing labour violations and human rights issues in the transnational recruitment of migrant workers. While multi-national corporations (MNCs) – both international buyers and their Tier 1 suppliers – have been quick to adopt and codify ethical recruitment principles in their company codes of conduct, the same cannot be said for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) further down the supply chain. Grounded in a case study of a small packaging company in Penang, Malaysia, this article explores how SMEs navigate their human resources and financial constraints in their attempt to practise ethical recruitment. We conclude with some brief reflections on the role of recruitment agents and the (in)equitable allocation of costs across global supply chains in making ethical recruitment a realistic and achievable goal for SMEs.

Immersive technologies, such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), allow people to immerse themselves in a complete virtual environment, or enhance the physical world with digital elements. Also referred to as extended reality (XR), these technologies create experiences that feel real, whether fully or partially virtual. The impact of XR on human rights and society is linked to a large-scale consumer breakthrough, which could pose significant human rights risks. This article discusses these risks through the lens of four public values rooted in human rights instruments: privacy, autonomy, non-discrimination and a clean and healthy environment. It highlights the urgency for governments to protect and companies to respect the rights of both XR users and non-users. The aim is to initiate discussions on early interventions, avoiding missteps seen during the rise of social media, when benefits were encouraged, while risks were overlooked.

The 2017 French Law on the Duty of Vigilance of Parent and Lead Companies has been hailed as a pioneering national legislation to hold corporations accountable for human rights and environmental abuses. Most lawsuits brought under this law have faced a plethora of admissibility objections, and so far, only one case has resulted in a decision on the merits. Initial formalistic court decisions on admissibility have now been mostly dismissed. However, critical questions around the role and powers entrusted to judges under the law remain contested.

To those living through them, the Elizabethan and early Stuart years of England’s history seemed unusually riven by plots and conspiracies. Protestants feared the public effects of the private machinations of the Scottish queen and her supporters, of Jesuits, and of perfidious “papists” more generally. Catholic polemicists countered with narratives of dark deeds done by men who subverted rather than served the Crown: “secret histories” circulated that warned of William and Robert Cecil, the earl of Leicester, and others undermining the public state of the realm.1 Very real conspiracies by men such as the Earl of Essex and Guy Fawkes fostered fears of others. From the hard and hungry 1590s, protests against enclosures and lack of food became so common and concerning that the authorities contrived to brand some such riots as the products of treasonous conspiracies that threatened not just particular landlords or grain merchants but the public at large.2 Over the early seventeenth century, fears of covert machinations by both the poor and the powerful only increased, culminating in the fear that King Charles himself had become a pawn in a Catholic conspiracy that endangered the lives and liberties of his subjects.3 Talk of plots and conspiracies—real and imagined—abounded in an increasingly divided and discordant political culture, seen as threatening a “public” they arguably helped to create.

This article explores how late nineteenth-century British socialists theorized the relationship between socialism and democracy through debates about the referendum. At the 1896 London Congress of the Second International, Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw defended parliamentary representation, expertise, and leadership as essential to socialist politics. In contrast, radicals in the Social Democratic Federation, and the Independent Labour Party advanced a theory of “real democracy” centered on direct popular legislation. Rejecting parliamentarism as corrupt, they envisioned referenda, mandates, and recall as tools to secure individual sovereignty and to dissolve the dominance of permanent majorities. This model redefined majority rule as transient, issue-specific, and plural, challenging both plebiscitary leadership and technocratic elitism. Although the International ultimately adopted the referendum only for strategic purposes, these debates reveal an original, if forgotten, socialist account of democracy as a form of pluralist, non-electoral majoritarianism.

An open question about cartography is whether one and the same functional head may iterate on the functional hierarchy. We demonstrate that the stackability of certain modals from the same semantic class in Mandarin offers clear evidence for such a possibility.

In this article we trace a biography of vacuum aspiration in Spain between the 1960s and 1980s. Analysing the local but transnationally connected history of vacuum aspiration during late Francoism and the democratic transition, we argue that this technology was since the mid-1960s reincarnated in mainstream medical discourse as vacuum curettage, presented as a major medical innovation in diagnosis and therapy. While abortion activists working at the end of the 1970s emphasized the group and political components of a technique they called the ‘Karman method’, doctors performing illegal abortions within the family planning network defined vacuum aspiration in terms of safety and medical innovation. As we demonstrate, this technique embodied meanings that at times overlapped, at others conflicted, contingent on whether aspirations were linked to medical innovation, pro-abortion activism, or social justice.

This article attempts to map some of Vietnam’s national identities that were constructed in the early twentieth century (1900s-1930s). Instead of treating Vietnamese national identity either as a monolithic entity or as too fragmented to be considered a useful concept, it shows that at least three interactive and overlapping national identities emerged, each with its own political significance and state institutionalisation. To map them, this article re-traces several key nationalists in the early twentieth century. It situates each of their national imaginations within interconnected global relations, namely, Civilisational relations of hierarchy, cultural relations of equality, and radical relations of exploitation and oppression. This analytical approach to mapping national identity offers a framework that may prove valuable for cross-national comparative studies.

In this paper, we present two corpus-based case studies which cast doubt on the postulation of a distinction between complements and modifiers in pre-head position in the English noun phrase. Based on examples such as medical student, the paper focuses on ordering patterns as an easily observable criterion, rather than more difficult or less reliable criteria such as anaphoric replacement or stress patterns. The conclusion is that the pre-head dependents treated as complements in, for example, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002), should rather be treated as type-dependents. This conclusion, at least as far as ordering patterns are concerned, is in line with the postulation of a “classifier” function in approaches to English noun phrases such as Feist (2009).