Cities and local governments have become both important sites for international development as well as actors which aspire to shape the practice in this field. This paper retraces the emergence of cities and local governments as having this dual character, in order to provide the ground for a more forward-looking deliberation on some of the emerging themes on the role of cities in and for international law and development today. We see in particular a friction between two seemingly competing and broader understandings of global development, in both of which cities play a prominent role: the SDGs as adopted in 2015, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The SDGs are the most important multilateral articulation of ideas of development today. To this extent, they are considerably shaped by the long shadow of the post-Cold War era and the shifting priorities of influential actors like the United States, the European Union, but also increasingly vocal states from the ‘Global South’. The BRI follows a different idea of international development, built around the notions of non-interference and ‘win-win cooperation.’ What unites these two blueprints for global development is that international law, as traditionally understood, does not seem to take center stage. Or rather, we wish to expound, it may be a new type of international law which emerges from these global constellations of international development which comes not only, but also from below.

Commitment to the ‘rules-based order’ (RBO) has emerged as a leading discourse among advocates for stability in global order. Yet, despite the most authoritative rules being those agreed between States to be legally binding, it is primarily political voices that advocate in these terms, often assuming that they also embody lawyers’ commitment to the ‘international rule of law’. Legal scholarship has in contrast remained sceptical regarding both the meanings of the RBO and the perils of uniting legal and non-legal rules within a single normative ideal. This paper defines the RBO in jurisprudential terms in order to interrogate a core strategic assumption driving the discourse: that establishing accessible and pragmatic non-legal rules that are consistent with international law, complements and reinforces legal rules governing the same subject matter. Using the case of the proposed ASEAN-China Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC), the paper demonstrates that the RBO and the international rule of law are antagonistic normative ideals in cases where legal rules have failed to constrain the competitive ambitions of a geopolitically dominant state. In such cases, a lack of distinction between legal and non-legal rules tends to reinforce underlying power imbalances and facilitate interpretations detrimental to the integrity of law. States must instead look beyond substituting one category of rules for another and seek strategies for reconfiguring power itself. Expanding recognition of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ connects the Asia-Pacific and Indian Oceans as a single geostrategic domain, which thereby takes into account considerations of the balances of power necessary for a RBO consistent with international law.

This paper analyzes the extent to which neo-cleavage theory can explain democratic backsliding in the European Union, focusing on the role of the GAL/TAN cleavage and an alternative explanation, populism. It brings together different factors into a causal model based on the willingness-opportunity metatheoretical framework, which is then evaluated empirically using the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The results indicate that both TAN ideological stance and populism provide two alternative motivations for democratic backsliding, but do not produce backsliding in the absence of certain opportunities.

Synopsis:

This essay reflects on the fact that as we learn more about the biological underpinnings of our language faculty, the dominant evolutionary narrative coming out of the linguistic tradition most explicitly oriented towards biology ("biolinguistics") appears increasingly implausible. This text offers ways of opening up linguistic inquiry and fostering interdisciplinarity, taking advantage of new opportunities to provide quantitative, testable hypotheses concerning the complex evolutionary path that led to the modern human language faculty.

The essay is structured around three main themes: (i) renewed appreciation for the comparative method applied to cognitive questions, leading to the identification of elementary but fundamental abstractions in non-linguistic species relevant to language; (ii) awareness of the conceptual gaps between disciplines, and the need to carefully link genotype and phenotype without bypassing any "intermediate" levels of description (certainly not the brain); and (iii) adoption of a "philosophical" outlook that puts the complexity of biological entities front and center.

Synopsis:

The original (1985) edition of this work attempted to cover the main lines of development of phonological theory from the end of the 19th century through the early 1980s. Much work of importance, both theoretical and historiographic, has appeared in subsequent years, and the present edition tries to bring the story up to the end of the 20th century, as the title promised. This has involved an overall editing of the text, in the process correcting some errors of fact and interpretation, as well as the addition of new material and many new references.

In interdisziplinären Forschungsverbünden entstehen häufig implizite oder auch explizite Spannungen um wissenschaftliche Vorgehensweisen, bis hin zu der Frage, was Wissenschaftlichkeit überhaupt ausmacht. Der vorliegende Artikel1 hat zum Ziel aufzuzeigen, dass sich verschiedene Typen wissenschaftlicher Forschung historisch ausgeprägt haben, die gleichberechtigt nebeneinander bestehen. Mit der Darstellung dieser Pluralität von Forschungsformen soll ein Verständnis befördert werden, das Unterschiede im Forschen nicht mehr zu Deutungskämpfen über 'wahre' Wissenschaftlichkeit auswachsen lässt, sondern als Chance zu einer interdisziplinären Kooperation mit Mehrwert.

Dieser Band versammelt die Beiträge des Workshops: "Gender, Autorschaft und Kanonisierung", der im Januar 2020 an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand. Das Thema, das die Studientage anregte und die Beiträge dieses Bandes verbindet, ist das des Diebstahls/furto als literarischer Mechanismus. Die hier vorgeschlagenen Analysen zeigen auf, wie Gendergrenzen überwunden werden können, wenn die Aufmerksamkeit auf die aktive Teilnahme von Frauen an kulturellen und literarischen Diskursen gelenkt und ihre Anwesenheit als Autorinnen und Protagonistinnen wahrgenommen und untersucht wird. Berücksichtigt werden ausgewählte Erzähltexte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts aus Italien und Hispanoamerika, in denen die subversive Praxis des Diebstahls/furto zu einem Instrument der (Wieder-)Aneignung von Ausdrucksräumen, zu einem Treffpunkt zwischen Texten und Autor*innen und manchmal sogar zu einer treibenden Kraft des Schreibens wird. Untersucht wird dieser Aneignungsmechanismus in seinen verschiedenen Deklinationen des materiellen Diebstahls (Alberica Bazzoni) und des Identitätsdiebstahls (Monica Biasiolo, Thea Santangelo), des intertextuellen Dialogs (Siria De Francesco, Beatrice Manetti, Linda Schmidt) und der intermedialen Auseinandersetzung mit hegemonialen Diskursen (Oleksandra Rekut-Liberatore, Ana Nenadović, Elena von Ohlen, Alan Pérez Medrano). Dabei offenbart sich der Diebstahl/furto als besonders produktives Interpretationsinstrument, als Impuls für multiple Forschungsperspektiven im Bereich der Literatur- und Geschlechterstudien.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniqueness, definiteness, maximal interpretation (exhaustivity), kinds and subkinds, bare nominals, multiple determination, quantification, demonstratives, possessives, complex measure nouns, and the NP/DP parameter. The set of object languages comprises Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Torlak Serbian. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic linguistics. The original analyses prove that substantial progress has been made in major fields of research.

This book addresses the complexity of Russian verbal prefixation system that has been extensively studied but yet not explained. Traditionally, different meanings have been investigated and listed in the dictionaries and grammars and more recently linguists attempted to unify various prefix usages under more general descriptions. The existent semantic approaches, however, do not aim to use semantic representations in order to account for the problems of prefix stacking and aspect determination. This task has been so far undertaken by syntactic approaches to prefixation, that divide verbal prefixes in classes and limit complex verb formation by restricting structural positions available for the members of each class. I show that these approaches have two major drawbacks: the implicit prediction of the non-existence of complex biaspectual verbs and the absence of uniformly accepted formal criteria for the underlying prefix classification. In this book the reader can find an implementable formal semantic approach to prefixation that covers five prefixes: za-, na-, po-, pere-, and do-. It is shown how to predict the existence, semantics, and aspect of a given complex verb with the help of the combination of an LTAG and frame semantics. The task of identifying the possible affix combinations is distributed between three modules: syntax, which is kept simple (only basic structural assumptions), frame semantics, which ensures that the constraints are respected, and pragmatics, which rules out some prefixed verbs and restricts the range of available interpretations. For the purpose of the evaluation of the theory, an implementation of the proposed analysis for a grammar fragment using a metagrammar description is provided. It is shown that the proposed analysis delivers more accurate and complete predictions with respect to the existence of complex verbs than the most precise syntactic account.

Das System des deutschen Bevölkerungsschutzes hat sich in weiten Teilen über Jahrzehnte weiterentwickelt und überwiegend bewährt, es weist aber nicht erst mit der Corona-Pandemie auch teils gravierende Schwächen auf. Im Folgenden skizziere ich „lessons to learn“ aus Forschersicht: Dazu werde ich zunächst die Ausgangslage erörtern und schreiben über 2. das Schutzziel des Bevölkerungsschutzes, 3. Gesellschaften im Wandel und veränderte Gefahren, 4. Stärken und Schwächen des Bevölkerungsschutzes in Deutschland und 5. Reformbedarfe. Im 6. Kapitel, dem Hauptteil dieses Berichtes, folgen dann konkrete Schlussfolgerungen mit „lessons to learn“. Der Bericht endet mit einem Vorschlag für ein „Nationales Forschungszentrum Resilienz und Schutz der Bevölkerung“.