London School of Economics and Political Science

This chapter delves into the expanding influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), with an emphasis on defense, aerospace, and telecommunications. It explores Beijing's pursuit of natural resources in the region and its bid to extend its economic sway there, and how this is reshaping regional power dynamics, notably in relation to the United States. It highlights the PRC's recent strides in the global arms trade, in space exploration initiatives, and in advances in telecommunications technology. It is revealed that Beijing's engagement in these sectors is redefining international partnerships, often placing China in the dominant role. This development is acutely observable in South America: Venezuela emerges as a key collaborator with the PRC in military cooperation and arms procurement, while Brazil's involvement in space and telecommunications reveals a combination of overambition and naivety. Moving beyond merely documenting the PRC's growing presence, the chapter also offers policy recommendations for Latin America and the U.S., recognizing the significant shifts in regional relationships. These insights are vital for grasping the evolving dynamics of U.S.-Latin American relations; they signal major changes in the geopolitical landscape of the Western Hemisphere.

The window period for detection of early stage disease (pre clinical detectable phase) is only ~12months. The invivo tumour doubling time is ~2.9 months. This has important implications for diagnostic pathways and developing screening strategies.

This paper explores the process of meaning-making in an Islamic site—The Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI)—where the cultivation of a plural religious space is pursued as an Islamic, rather than a secular, virtue. The study highlights the discourse, spatiality, and praxis of the Friday prayers at IMI, revealing a distinctive non-hierarchical symbolic spatiality, plural congregational practices, shared ritual leadership, and interactive sermons cultivating diversity in congregants’ ethical self-formation. Drawing on these ethnographic experiences, the paper advocates for an expansion of Talal Asad’s concept of the discursive tradition of Islam by proposing a greater emphasis on ‘non-established’ practices, such as IMI’s gender-expansive Friday prayers. Additionally, by questioning the primacy given to reason and argumentation referring to the foundational Islamic texts in Asad’s approach, it highlights how embodied, affective, and phenomenological experiences play a defining role in Islamic discursive traditions. Inclusive Muslims offer an expanded purpose of power within the Islamic discursive tradition, moving away from conceptions of Islamic authority linked with ‘orthodoxy’ to ones demonstrating, what Shahab Ahmed calls, the ‘explorative’ mode of authority. Consequently, the study of non-normative, inclusive Muslim communities, exemplified by the IMI, offers insights into alternative Islamic practices and discourses and challenges conventional anthropological definitions of Islam as a discursive tradition.

Due to complex interactions, changes in any one area of food systems are likely to impact—and possibly depend on—changes in other areas. Here we present the first annual monitoring update of the indicator framework proposed by the Food Systems Countdown Initiative, with new qualitative analysis elucidating interactions across indicators. Since 2000, we find that 20 of 42 indicators with time series have been trending in a desirable direction, indicating modest positive change. Qualitative expert elicitation assessed governance and resilience indicators to be most connected to other indicators across themes, highlighting entry points for action—particularly governance action. Literature review and country case studies add context to the assessed interactions across diets, environment, livelihoods, governance and resilience indicators, helping different actors understand and navigate food systems towards desirable change.

Background Research shows initial COVID-19 lockdowns increased population mental distress. Yet, the mental health impact of repeated lockdowns in England remains unknown. AimsTo: (a) explore changes in population mental health symptoms over the COVID-19 pandemic period (March 2020 to March 2021) in England, comparing this with trends from a decade before (2009–2019) as well as after (2021–2023); (b) compare the mental health impact of each of the three lockdowns in England with periods of eased restrictions, determining who was most affected; (c) examine the impact of demographics and distinct time periods on the prevalence of mental health symptoms. MethodA secondary analysis of a national longitudinal cohort study, utilising data from Waves 1–13 of the UK Household Longitudinal Study and from Waves 1–9 of the COVID-19 Survey. Mental health was assessed using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. Student t-tests and logistical regressions were conducted. ResultsThere was a significant increase in the prevalence of self-reported symptoms of mental health during England's pandemic period, encompassing three lockdowns, compared with the average of rates from 10 years before. Rates of reported mental health symptoms were not significantly different across each lockdown, but were significantly higher than pre-pandemic rates, declining with eased restrictions. Rates from the end of lockdown to May 2023 revealed elevated mental health symptoms compared with pre-pandemic. Elevated symptoms were observed for women, people homeworking, those with health conditions, individuals aged 30–45 years and those experiencing loneliness. Conclusion Repeated lockdowns in England had a substantial impact on mental health, indicating requirements for ongoing mental health support.

Household consumption or income surveys do not typically cover refugee populations. In the rare cases where refugees are included, inconsistencies between different data sources could interfere with comparable poverty estimates. We test the performance of a recently developed cross-survey imputation method to estimate poverty for a sample of refugees in Colombia, combining household income surveys collected by the Government of Colombia and administrative (ProGres) data collected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2019 and 2022. We find that certain variable transformation methods can help resolve these inconsistencies. Estimation results with our preferred variable standardization method are robust to different imputation methods, including the normal linear regression method, the empirical distribution of the errors method, and the probit and logit methods. Several common machine learning techniques generally perform worse than our proposed imputation methods. We also find that we can reasonably impute poverty rates using an older household income survey and a more recent ProGres dataset for most of the poverty lines. These results provide relevant inputs into designing better surveys and administrative datasets on refugees in various country settings.

Considerations of dynamic inconsistency have figured prominently in debates over the rationality of preferences that violate the separability conditions characteristic of expected utility theory. These debates have mostly focused on risk- and ambiguity averse preferences, but analogous considerations apply to preferences for fairness. We revisit these debates in the context of a specific hypothesis regarding the violations of separability by such preferences, namely that they are potentially both explained and rationalised by non-instrumental attitudes to the chances of the various possibilities involved. Our main aim is to argue that, first, when these violations of static separability are motivated by such non-instrumental attitudes to chances, then they need not result in dynamically inconsistent behaviour. Second, and more generally, considerations of dynamic consistency do not, we argue, undermine the rationality of non-instrumental attitudes towards the distribution of chances, despite the fact that such attitudes give rise to violations of the static separability assumptions of expected utility theory.

Debates on reparations for colonial atrocities highlight the relationship between international law, political time, and (in)justice. This paper examines Germany's foreclosure of reparation claims raised by descendants of survivors of its 1904–8 colonial genocide. The analysis draws on parliamentary interpellation records (1989–2021) around the question of German reparations to Namibia's Ovaherero and Nama. I argue that Germany mobilizes temporal rules of international law, especially the non-retroactivity of the Genocide Convention, to deflect from such claims. This strategy first confines the political question of colonial reparations to the international legal realm, only to then invalidate it via the temporal rule of law's non-retroactivity. I argue that this strategy enables a ‘chronopolitics of deflection’, by which Germany has pointed away from colonial reparations while directing attention to development assistance payments to Namibia. The paper relates these findings to theories of political time, arguing that Germany's reliance on the non-retroactivity of the Genocide Convention yields what I call a ‘projection of history as normatively temporalized time’. The paper concludes with critiques of the relationship between international law and colonial reparations, arguing that current invocations of inter-temporal and non-retroactive international law implicitly reiterate colonial law, thereby locking in place an unjust legal past.

Liberal democracies increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs), a trend frequently linked to illiberal governments. But when do ideologically liberal governments resort to such restrictions? Linking research on state traditions, party ideology and crisis governance, we theorize factors enhancing liberal governments' propensity to adopt normatively contentious CSO restrictions. Distinguishing formal‐legal restrictions on CSO voice from those on CSO existence, we show that nearly 90 such restrictions were adopted by 17 cabinets in France and the United Kingdom over the last 2 decades. In line with theoretical expectations, restrictions on CSO existence are more prominent in statist France, while governments in the United Kingdom tend to restrict CSO voice. More right‐wing governments adopt more CSO restrictions, while restrictions go up with government crisis pressure. Overall, understanding how liberal governments use CSO restrictions requires considering contextual opportunity structures and ideological dispositions in conjunction.

The OECD reported that the proportions of students enrolled in 'private schools' have remained stable since 2000. Drawing on the concepts of endogenous and exogenous privatisation, we question this statement, arguing that school privatisation can be disaggregated into four dimensions: private provision, restricted access, school competition and school autonomy. We operationalise these dimensions using indicators from the PISA school questionnaire. We explore changes cross-nationally between 2000 and 2018 in 35 educational systems, revealing increases in secondary school competition dynamics over time and some cases of substantial increases in autonomous school-level decision-making. We also provide an up-to-date landscape of school privatisation for 64 countries in 2018 and highlight the relevance of using a wide set of indicators to report the extent of privatisation, accounting for both endogenous and exogenous sides of the phenomenon. Finally, we discuss ways in which cross-national quantitative data collection on schools might be developed to produce a more appropriate quantification of privatisation.

Subjective wellbeing data are increasingly used across the social sciences. Yet, despite the widespread use of such data, the predictive power of approaches commonly used to model wellbeing is only limited. In response, we here use tree-based Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to provide a better understanding of respondents’ self-reported wellbeing. We analyse representative samples of more than one million respondents from Germany, the UK, and the United States, using data from 2010 to 2018. We make three contributions. First, we show that ML algorithms can indeed yield better predictive performance than standard approaches, and establish an upper bound on the predictability of wellbeing scores with survey data. Second, we use ML to identify the key drivers of evaluative wellbeing. We show that the variables emphasised in the earlier intuition- and theory-based literature also appear in ML analyses. Third, we illustrate how ML can be used to make a judgement about functional forms, including the existence of satiation points in the effects of income and the U-shaped relationship between age and wellbeing.

Entrepreneurial affect has emerged as a burgeoning area of study, with a wealth of articles demonstrating that affect, broadly conceptualized, plays an important part in entrepreneurial life. While a few affective phenomena, such as passion and positive and negative affect, are primarily driving the affective revolution in entrepreneurship, a wide range of additional forms of affect, from momentary feelings to enduring affective dispositions, have been found to influence entrepreneurs’ judgments, decision-making, attitudes, and behaviors in distinct parts of the entrepreneurial process. Moreover, entrepreneurs’ affective experiences and displays of these experiences influence entrepreneurial behaviors and investors’ decision-making. Although this is an exciting time for work on entrepreneurial affect, several theoretical and empirical inconsistencies impede further knowledge accumulation. To assess how and why affect is critical to entrepreneurship, to clarify the theoretical inconsistencies, and to provide an integrative framework, we conduct a systematic review of 276 published empirical and conceptual articles on entrepreneurial affect. In doing so, we analyze how various affective phenomena (e.g., emotions, moods, sentiments), along with their discrete forms (e.g., anger, grief, happiness), influence and are influenced by specific stages of the entrepreneurial process. We conclude that while this body of research confirms that entrepreneurship is an emotional endeavor, the collective approach has thus far obscured a more detailed and useful understanding of affect in each stage of the entrepreneurial process. We examine the theoretical and empirical approaches taken to date and lay out an agenda for future scholars, thus bolstering the affective revolution in entrepreneurship.

Background Dementia awareness and education are currently limited among healthcare workers and the general public, contributing towards the generation and propagation of stigma and discrimination against people with dementia worldwide. It is crucial to promote evidence‐based anti‐stigma interventions with a focus on stigma reduction. Method This is a randomized and controlled feasibility trial of a group intervention aimed at improving knowledge and reducing stigma related to dementia among Community Health Workers (CHWs) (Trial Registration: RBR‐10xp637m). The Intervention Group (IG) (n = 70) received a 9‐hour intervention involving reflexive, educational, visual, and social contact activities related to dementia, and the Control Group (CG) (n = 62) was not intervened. Beyond sociodemographic characteristics, we collected data on dementia related stigma. For this preliminary analysis we will present data on: (1) negative attitudes (a composed score from 8 related question – the higher the score the more negative are the attitudes); (2) knowledge on dementia (a composed score from 5 related question – the higher the score the better the knowledge) and (3) a single question on the importance of dementia diagnosis disclosure (the higher the score the more important the participant think this is). The follow‐up questionnaires were reapplied 30 and 90 days after the intervention, using the same set of questions. We estimated and present the Mean Change (SD) in the IG and in the CG, the T‐test (p‐value), and the Mean Difference (95% CI). Result There was no significant difference in any baseline measures between IG and CG. The preliminary results show that, compared to the CG, a significant increase in knowledge was achieved in the IG both at 30‐ (p = 0.007) and 90‐day follow up (p = 0.020), and a significant reduction in negative attitudes in both measure points (p<0.000 and p = 0.000 at 30‐ and 90‐day follow up, respectively). Conclusion The preliminary findings indicate the intervention can lead to a sustained increase in knowledge and a shift in negative attitudes among CHWs over time. Further analysis are being carried out, including a qualitative assessment of the intervention, which will help improve the intervention to be applied in a randomized‐ controlled trial in the future.

Background Some individual‐level interventions for dementia risk factors could be cost saving. We aimed to estimate the cost effectiveness of population‐level interventions for tackling dementia risk factors. We found such interventions for tobacco smoking, excess alcohol use, diet modification to decrease hypertension and obesity, air pollution, and head injury. Method We used published intervention effect sizes and relative risks for each risk factor. We used a Markov model to estimate progression to dementia in populations with and without the intervention, looking at lifetime risk, using the population of England as an exemplar. Result Based on the effects on dementia, we estimated that reductions in excess alcohol use through minimum unit pricing would be expected to produce cost savings of £280 million and 4767 QALY gains respectively. Reformulation of food products to reduce salt and sugar intake and therefore reduce obesity and hypertension would be expected to produce cost savings of £2.4 and £1.1 billion, and QALY gains of 39,433 and 17,985, respectively. Introducing low emission zones in the largest English cities without them, so decreasing pollution and dementia would be expected to lead to £260 million savings and 5119 QALYs gained. Raising cigarette prices by 10% to reduce smoking rates, would be expected to lead to 2277 QALY gains and savings of £157 million from its effect on dementia. Legislating for compulsory bicycle helmets for children reducing head injury and dementia would lead to 1554 QALY gains and £91 million savings. Conclusion We advocate for these population‐level interventions to help tackle lifecourse dementia risk and be cost‐saving.