Whether young infants can exploit sociopragmatic information to interpret new words is a matter of debate. Based on findings and theories from the action interpretation literature, we hypothesized that 12-month-olds should distinguish communicative object-directed actions expressing reference from instrumental object-directed actions indicative of one’s goals, and selectively use the former to identify referents of novel linguistic expressions. This hypothesis was tested across four eye-tracking experiments. Infants watched pairs of unfamiliar objects, one of which was first targeted by either a communicative action (e.g., pointing) or an instrumental action (e.g., grasping) and then labeled with a novel word. As predicted, infants fast-mapped the novel words onto the targeted objects after pointing (Experiments 1 and 4) but not after grasping (Experiment 2) unless the grasping action was preceded by an ostensive signal (Experiment 3). Moreover, whenever infants mapped a novel word onto the object indicated by a communicative action, they tended to map a different novel word onto the distractor object, displaying a mutual exclusivity effect. This reliance on nonverbal action interpretation in the disambiguation of novel words indicates that sociopragmatic inferences about reference likely supplement associative and statistical learning mechanisms from the outset of word learning.

The 2022 Italian election marked a historic victory for the centre-right coalition. This camp was spearheaded by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FDI), with a solid performance of this radical right party across the country. However, considerable nuance emerges by looking at different aspects of the vote, which we do by leveraging original data from the pre-electoral wave of the 2022 CISE/ICCP survey. After recapping both the build-up to and results of the election, we employ this data on these specific fronts. First, we analyse vote flows between the 2018 and 2022 elections in three big cities in Northern, Central, and Southern Italy: Turin, Florence, and Naples. This analysis shows that FDI becomes more competitive in these traditionally unfavourable contexts, although less so in Naples. Second, we analyse data on the configuration of Italian voters’ preferences, which reveals an increasingly progressive electorate in an apparent contradiction with the election results. Third and final, we go deeper into the demand-side picture by assessing the role of sociodemographic characteristics over vote choice, presenting the voter profile of the five largest parties: the three main centre-right parties, the Democratic Party, and the Five Star Movement. Overall, the findings that emerge from our article enhance a more fine-grained understanding of this crucial election in Italy.

While most intersecting analysis on the spread of COVID-19 and politics so far has attempted to unpack the impact of the pandemic on national, regional and international politics, this chapter argues that there is a reverse influence where regional politics has also shaped the responses of some governments to the pandemic, ultimately affecting the status of their healthcare system. Lebanon serves as a case study. This chapter draws on the regional political settings that affected Lebanon’s policy for battling COVID-19. Although Lebanon was initially lauded for responding effectively to the first wave of the pandemic compared to other countries in the region, its punctured sovereignty through Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, caused more damage than publicly admitted. For instance, Hezbollah twisted the government’s arm into continuing flights to and from Iran despite Iran’s record number of infections. This allowed the virus to spread at a much higher rate. This chapter demonstrates how a regional hegemon burdened the host state of their proxies for the hegemon’s benefit.

Trade policy is generally considered to be a key leverage in the pursuit of labor norms, environmental standards, and human rights. This is even more so for the European Union (EU), which exerts an extensive market power and exclusive competences in trade while lacking a full-fledged foreign policy. In recent years, there has been a growing demand for making sustainable development provisions “enforceable” and for more frequently applying trade sanctions. Taking a post-development perspective, we interrogate the EU’s enforceability discourse around the trade–sustainability nexus. We focus specifically on the conditionality behind the Generalized Scheme of Preferences (GSP). The EU GSP regime bears the “carrot” (reduced tariffs), the “stick” (preferential tariff withdrawals), and increasingly intrusive “monitoring” mechanisms. Drawing on the post-development literature, we problematize the discourses that fundamentally enframe the EU GSP conditionality regime: development through trade, performance of power, and epistemic violence. Empirically, we analyze these frames by looking at public-facing texts produced by policy elites in the EU as well as in Cambodia and the Philippines during the two most recent GSP reform cycles since 2014. We argue that the dominant discursive acts of policy elites in the EU and the two target countries congeal into a global presupposition that there is no alternative to the EU GSP regime, thereby effacing counterhegemonic perspectives and stripping emancipatory notions such as “dialogue” and “partnership” of their radical potential. This formulation demands a genuine commitment to researching with the very people the EU is intent on regulating, reforming, and rescuing to unsettle taken-for-granted views about EU trade sanctions.

This article examines the mobilisation of minority groups along ethnic and national lines through social media, an area that has not been fully explored. The study analyses the case of Russian‐speaking minority members who were mobilised in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 via the messaging app Telegram. By taking a bottom‐up perspective, the article reconstructs the pathways of the actors in these mobilisation processes and draws upon diverse literature in digital nationalism, social movements and media studies. The study suggests that social media facilitates minority mobilisation through three primary functions: It allows for the reproduction of ethnicised and racialised boundaries and homogenisation within ethnicised echo chambers and provides a ‘window of opportunity’ for micro, meso and macro levels of actor engagement in facilitating offline mobilisation. Overall, this article provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how social media enables and enhances minority mobilisation and introduces novel empirical data on the emerging pro‐war movement prevalent on Telegram and in offline networks of the Russian‐speaking minority in Germany. The study contributes to the developing field of user‐generated nationalism and highlights the need for more bottom‐up research on emerging patterns of online ethnicised mobilisation.

The growing prevalence of cyberwar highlights rapidly shifting conceptions of geopolitical space in global politics. However, critical geographical engagement with the topic remains limited, leaving the geopolitical spaces of cyberwar critically unexamined. To facilitate greater geographical engagement with cyberwar, this paper proposes a spatiality of power model to examine how political space and power might manifest in cyberwar. The model proposes four ways in which political space and power manifest offline and how the model can be applied towards cyberwar. The utility of the model is then applied as a framework for examining three well-known cyberwar case studies: the Estonia–Russia 2007 cyberwar, the Georgia–Russia cyber and kinetic war in 2008, and the U.S.-Iran cyberwar from 2010 to 2013 with a focus on the Stuxnet malware.

What are the origins of humans’ capacity to represent social relations? We approached this question by studying human infants’ understanding of social dominance as a stable relation. We presented infants with interactions between animated agents in conflict situations. Studies 1 and 2 targeted expectations of stability of social dominance. They revealed that 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. To do so, infants need to infer that one of the agents (the dominant) will consistently prevail when her goals conflict with those of the other (the subordinate). Study 3 and 4 targeted the format of infants’ representation of social dominance. In these studies, we found that 12- and 15-mo-olds did not extend their expectations of dominance to unobserved relationships, even when they could have been established by transitive inference. These results suggest that infants' expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Infants’ demonstrated understanding of social dominance reflects the cognitive underpinning of humans’ capacity to represent social relations, which may be evolutionarily ancient, and may be shared with nonhuman species.

This article uses the alba collected by three travellers from the Habsburg Netherlands to Constantinople in the 1570s and 1580s to explore the purposes of collecting and what they reveal about being part of an integrated imperial mission that represented Habsburg territory abroad. The first album was gathered by the imperial ambassador’s physician Arnold Manlius between May 1571 and November 1574. Manlius’s humanist project is filled with over ninety signatures from his fellow housemates and local notables, accompanied by explanatory annotations in Latin. The article contrasts this large collection with the alba of Lambert Wijts of Mechlin and Johann Huenich of Antwerp, both of whom spent two months in Constantinople as members of tribute-carrying delegations. Wijts (who was in Constantinople between July and August 1572) and Huenich (January through March 1586) gathered eclectic collections of signatures alongside sets of costume album images. Taken together, the three alba reveal a range of collecting practices and purposes – intellectual, documentary, and personal – of men from the Southern Low Countries working in the service of Habsburg emperors in Ottoman Constantinople.

We use firm-level data from Hungary to estimate knowledge spillovers in importing through fine spatial and managerial networks. By identifying from variation in peers' import experience across source countries, by comparing the spillover from neighboring buildings with a cross-street placebo, and by exploiting plausibly exogenous firm moves, we obtain credible estimates and establish three results. (1) There are significant knowledge spillovers in both spatial and managerial networks. Having a peer which has imported from a particular country more than doubles the probability of starting to import from that country, but the effect quickly decays with distance. (2) Spillovers are heterogeneous: they are stronger when firms or peers are larger or more productive, and exhibit complementarities in firm and peer productivity. (3) The model-implied social multiplier is highly skewed, implying that targeting an import-encouragement policy to firms with many and productive neighbors can make it 26% more effective. These results highlight the benefit of firm clusters in facilitating the diffusion of business practices.