Understanding the EU’s Norm and Policy Diffusion in ASEAN through Trade and Security Cooperation: Normative or Normal Power?

This book examines the European Union’s (EU’s) norm and policy diffusion in relation to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). By looking at the EU’ engagement with ASEAN in trade and non-traditional security, the book analyzes the drivers, processes, and effectiveness of the EU’s norm and policy diffusion in ASEAN and explains the EU’s foreign policy and power projection in the context of its relationship with ASEAN. In doing so, it helps to advance knowledge about the EU’ external relations and power projection in relation to regional political entities beyond its immediate borders and affords firsthand empirical material on how the EU’s power in global politics is impacted by external perceptions and responses in different policy fields. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of EU foreign policy, EU–SEAN relations, and ASEAN politics and more broadly to European Studies, Comparative Regionalism, Asian Studies, and International Relation

Crusade, Settlement and Historical Writing in the Latin East and Latin West, c.1100–c.1300

This collection offers a holistic understanding of the impact of both crusading and settlement on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom. The period between the First Crusade and the collapse of the "crusader states" in the eastern Mediterranean was a crucial one for medieval historical writing. From the departure of the earliest crusading armies in 1096 to the Mamlūk conquest of the Latin states in the late thirteenth century, crusading activity, and the settlements it established and aimed to protect, generated a vast textual output, offering rich insights into the historiographical cultures of the Latin West and Latin East. However, modern scholarship on the crusades and the "crusader states" has tended to draw an artificial boundary between the two, even though medieval writers treated their histories as virtually indistinguishable. This volume places these spheres into dialogue with each other, looking at how individual crusading campaigns and the Frankish settlements in the eastern Mediterranean were depicted and remembered in the central Middle Ages. Its essays cover a geographical range that incorporates England, France, Germany, southern Italy and the Holy Land, and address such topics as gender, emotion, the natural world, crusading as an institution, origin myths, textual reception, forms of storytelling and historical genre. Bringing to the foreground neglected sources, methodologies, events and regions of textual production, the collection offers a holistic understanding of the impact of both crusading and settlement on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom

Social Interactions Matter: Is Grey Wolf Optimizer a Particle Swarm Optimization Variation?

Many swarm-based algorithms are proposed using different inspirations from nature with the fact that they perform better than older versions. At the same time, some can resemble similar computational performances regardless of their inspirations. To understand the mechanisms of such similarities, recent works have analyzed and compared swarm-based algorithms via a network based on the information flow shared collectively. Here, we modeled networks of the social behavior of GWO (from wolves) and PSO (from birds) algorithms to investigate the extent of their similarities considering their temporal dynamics. To make sure that both algorithms had similar communication principles, we also designed the KBest topology for PSO that mimics the GWO communication. Using metrics from Network Science such as the Portrait Divergence, Local and Global Connectivity, our results showed that GWO can have different temporal signatures than PSO regardless of using a similar communication topology. Thus, we show that GWO is probably not just a variation of PSO

Virtual witnessing in 'A Harlot's Progress' (1732): Hogarth's Visio-Crime Media in William Hogarth et le Cinéma

William Hogarth’s 'A Harlot’s Progress' (1732) used real-life crime to create a six-part fictional story. The sophisticated techniques of visualization prompted the viewer to reflect and react experientially, like a “virtual witness” (Bender, 2012) at a crime scene reconstruction. This essay investigates the evidentiary value of Hogarth’s re-inscriptions, drawing attention to specific production techniques, criminal process and trial accounts. Understood as early visual criminology, Hogarth’s first serial offers an ascendant of modern crime film as relayed through TV serials like CSI and Court TV

The Narratives of Counter-terrorism and the Prospects of EU-China Security Cooperation

This paper delves into the implications of narratives surrounding China's counter-terrorism policy in Xinjiang on EU-China relations. Economic ties have been affected, leading to the suspension of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Security cooperation has also been hindered as China's counter-terrorism narratives reinforce concerns about its potential threat to European values and security interests. The paper acknowledges the limited substantive security cooperation between the EU and China despite a shared concern for terrorism. It explores the potential for collaboration in a multilateral setting, highlighting the challenges posed by divergent values and the conflation of narratives between counter-terrorism and forced labor. The depiction of China as a threat to the liberal world order further complicates the prospects for EU-China security cooperation. Ultimately, the paper contributes to the discussion on the need for enhanced cooperation amidst the complexities of international security

Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs

This volume focuses on Berkeley’s doctrine of signs. The ‘doctrine of signs’ refers to the use that Berkeley makes of a phenomenon that is central to a great deal of everyday discourse: one whereby certain perceivable entities are made to stand in for (as ‘signs’ of) something else. Things signified might be other perceivable entities or they might also be unperceivable notions – such as the meanings of words. From his earliest published work, A New Theory of Vision in 1710, to those works written towards the end of life, including Alciphron in 1732, Berkeley is at pains to emphasise the crucial role that sign-usage, particularly (but not only) in language, plays in human life. Berkeley also connects sign-usage to our (human) relationship with God: an issue that was right of the heart of his philosophical project. The contributions in this volume explore the myriad ways that Berkeley built on such insights to better understand a range of philosophical issues – issues of epistemology, language, perception, mental representation, mathematics, science, and theology. The aim of this volume is to establish that the doctrine of signs can be seen as one of the unifying themes of Berkeley’s philosophy. What’s more, this theme is one which spans his whole philosophical corpus; not just his best-known works like the Principles and the Three Dialogues, but also his works on science, mathematics, and theology

Computational Philosophy: Reflections on the PolyGraphs Project

In this paper, we situate our computational approach to philosophy relative to other digital humanities and computational social science practices, based on reflections stemming from our research on the PolyGraphs project in social epistemology. We begin by describing PolyGraphs. An interdisciplinary project funded by the Academies (BA, RS, and RAEng) and the Leverhulme Trust, it uses philosophical simulations (Mayo-Wilson and Zollman, 2021) to study how ignorance prevails in networks of inquiring rational agents. We deploy models developed in economics (Bala and Goyal, 1998), and refined in philosophy (O’Connor and Weatherall, 2018; Zollman, 2007), to simulate communities of agents engaged in inquiry, who generate evidence relevant to the topic of their investigation and share it with their neighbors, updating their beliefs on the evidence available to them. We report some novel results surrounding the prevalence of ignorance in such networks. In the second part of the paper, we compare our own to other related academic practices. We begin by noting that, in digital humanities projects of certain types, the computational component does not appear to directly support the humanities research itself; rather, the digital and the humanities are simply grafted together, not fully intertwined and integrated. PolyGraphs is notably different: the computational work directly supports the investigation of the primary research questions, which themselves belong decidedly within the humanities in general, and philosophy in particular. This suggests an affinity with certain projects in the computational social sciences. But despite these real similarities, there are differences once again: the computational philosophy we practice aims not so much at description and prediction as at answering the normative and interpretive questions that are distinctive of humanities research

Higher-order null models as a lens for social systems

Despite the widespread adoption of higher-order mathematical structures such as hypergraphs, methodological tools for their analysis lag behind those for traditional graphs. This work addresses a critical gap in this context by proposing two micro-canonical random null models for directed hypergraphs: the Directed Hypergraph Configuration Model (DHCM) and the Directed Hypergraph JOINT Model (DHJM). These models preserve essential structural properties of directed hypergraphs such as node in- and out-degree sequences and hyperedge head and tail size sequences, or their joint tensor. We also describe two efficient MCMC algorithms, NuDHy-Degs and NuDHy-JOINT, to sample random hypergraphs from these ensembles. To showcase the interdisciplinary applicability of the proposed null models, we present three distinct use cases in sociology, epidemiology, and economics. First, we reveal the oscillatory behavior of increased homophily in opposition parties in the US Congress over a 40-year span, emphasizing the role of higher-order structures in quantifying political group homophily. Second, we investigate non-linear contagion in contact hyper-networks, demonstrating that disparities between simulations and theoretical predictions can be explained by considering higher-order joint degree distributions. Last, we examine the economic complexity of countries in the global trade network, showing that local network properties preserved by NuDHy explain the main structural economic complexity indexes. This work advances the development of null models for directed hypergraphs, addressing the intricate challenges posed by their complex entity relations, and providing a versatile suite of tools for researchers across various domains