Arts & Humanities
The dispute settlement crisis in the World Trade Organization: Issues, challenges and directions
On December 11 2019, one of the two members of the Appellate Body (AB), the appeals board of the World Trade Organization (WTO) retired, an on-the-face-of-it innocuous event, but one which may lead to the disruption of the global economy in the near future. Professor Julien Chaisse at The City University of Hong Kong explores this issue. He examines the […]
What makes Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet what it is? An unexpected meeting between Aristotle and Schumann
What makes a great work of music what it is? What integrates a given piece as one coherent whole? It may help to step back and ask what makes any given thing essentially itself. Fortunately, Aristotle can help us understand this question and its surprising ramifications. No less surprising are the parallels between Aristotle’s ideas and what Robert Schumann says […]
Hate speech regulation on social media: An intractable contemporary challenge
Catherine O’Regan and Stefan Theil of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford investigate initiatives to regulate hate speech online. They highlight the difficulties of finding a widely agreed definition of hate speech and assess the legislative initiatives in four major jurisdictions to inform those engaged in the policy debate concerning […]
Fractured Knowledge: “Fake News”
Prof Jagdish Hattiangadi, York University, Canada explores how a common or shared knowledge base, including specialised secular science, helped bring peace to warring religious factions in modern liberal democracies. This interreligious peace is threatened by a philosophical backlash, with claims and counter claims of fake news, thus fracturing the common knowledge base needed for dispute resolution. Populist political movements have relied […]
Ethical political economy lessons from the Malay world through the Hikayat Abdullah 1849
Alan Chong of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, examines the social and economic viewpoints of indigenous people about the positive and negative impacts of the colonial experience and good governance on the maritime silk route. He uses the quasi-autobiographical book Hikayat Abdullah as a lens to examine an outsider’s view of the colonial experience in Southeast Asia and the effects of […]
How virtual reality is helping to rebuild a community devastated by the Fukushima disaster
The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, and the accompanying tsunami that led to the meltdown of Fukushima’s nuclear power plant, was one of the most powerful the world has seen and killed thousands of people. Thousands more were displaced and still don’t know if they will ever return to towns like Namie which they once called home. A new project […]
Political systems and economic growth: The democracy myth
Democracy is often held to be the ideal political system, conferring growth and prosperity on nations’ citizens; however, this paradigm of thought has come under increasing debate. While many studies show a positive correlation between democracy and growth, others have observed neutral or even negative impacts. Dr Thomas Osang of the Southern Methodist University, Texas, and Dr Jeffry Jacob of […]
Solidarity and the study of migrants and refugees
The study of 21st century migrants and refugees is leading academics to challenge historic assumptions about citizenship and nationalism. The increasing number of people taking perilous journeys across land and sea in search of better lives attracts global media coverage. Seen as “illegals” and rejected by some, they are helped by others, for example on transit routes in Europe and […]
Splendid or melancholy isolation
With masterpieces guaranteed to pull in the crowds, museum curators pay close attention to how these works are displayed, whether grouped together or in isolation in a specially conceived room. In her research for the École du Louvre and the University of Neuchâtel, Professor Cecilia Hurley explores the notion of the masterpiece, the utility of museums and how this effects […]
China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative: its strategic, trade, and fiscal implications
The ’Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) aims to create the infrastructure necessary to connect China to Europe, with the ultimate aim of creating a new Free Trade Area between China and Europe. To all intents and purposes, this enormous project intends to recreate for the modern, digital age the Silk Road that once connected China with Europe during the time […]