In 1964, Mao Zedong wrote that history education should ‘make the past serve the present’ and ‘make the foreign serve China.’ Today, under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is radically reassessing several important periods of Chinese history, the better to serve the country’s new ambitions on the world stage.
As government pressure on major technology companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for technical solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. Automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools – what we define here as algorithmic moderation systems – are increasingly being deployed to conduct content moderation at scale by major platforms for user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Why did Uruguay become the first country in the world to legalise marijuana in 2013? Based on extensive original research and unprecedented review of secondary sources, the article assesses alternative explanatory accounts through a unique combination of process tracing and counterfactual analysis. By tracing cannabis reform in Uruguay both as it was and was not but could have been in the absence of hypothesised explanatory factors, the article assesses the role of these factors in the causal story.
A.J.P. Taylor often observed that great events can have very small causes. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is fresh evidence for this proposition. The cause is in all likelihood tiny and accidental: a genetic mutation in a virus, which then spreads into the human population. Like earlier epidemics throughout history, it could have happened with no human intentionality. Its consequences are already momentous and will be even more so before it is over.
In response to rising urban water demand, some regions have reallocated water from irrigation to more valuable uses. Groundwater over-exploitation, however, continues to degrade aquifer quality, and states rarely succeed at stopping overuse. This study asks whether growing urban requirements enable the reallocation of groundwater from irrigation to higher value added uses in domestic and industrial consumption. The paper is based on a series of interviews with policy makers and academics in Jordan, combined with data from remote sensing
Theories of decision-making grounded in political psychology have experienced a dramatic rise in the study of International Relations. There is widespread recognition of the benefits of incorporating insights from the behavioural sciences into analyses of political behaviour. However, some scholars have argued that the theoretical and empirical scope of these perspectives remains hampered by an unresolved issue: aggregation.
What causes civilian victimization in conventional civil wars and in conventional wars that experience insurgencies? Vulnerability is a function of informational and logistical challenges: when the front line is moving, incumbents face increased informational uncertainty and unstable supply chains that augment their vulnerability.
