This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are sustained and enforced, as well as perceived and navigated at political and social levels. It is argued that Tajikistan’s relations with Russia are explicitly postcolonial without clear-cut colonial precedents in Soviet times. Postcolonialism did not automatically result from the Soviet breakdown. Rather, it has gradually emerged because of the two countries’ very different paths of integration into the global capitalist economy, which subordinated Tajikistan to Russia. In this way, new economic asymmetries exacerbated Soviet-era legacies and reinvented them in a new, hierarchical manner. Overall, the article contributes to the debate on the nature of post-Soviet legacies and what it means to be post-Soviet.

This article explores how relations of both domination and resistance have been involved in the constitution of international hierarchies. Focusing on events arising from the Persian government’s 1932 cancellation of the D’Arcy oil concession, it argues that while Western-dominated international hierarchies have proved resilient, some aspects of these hierarchical relationships have been altered by episodes of resistance such as the one under examination in this article. The case study has been chosen because of its ability to highlight the interwar years as an important period of transition to a new world order, as well as the significance of Persia as one of the few non-Western countries that remained uncolonised at that time. The article revisits detailed historical documents from the BP Archives and the National Archives to show how the events of the 1930s oil dispute contributed to the emergence of shifts in the material, legal, and social hierarchies of the interwar period, while nevertheless reinforcing the existence of hierarchies overall. It shows how multilateral diplomacy replaced overt military intimidation, the framework of international law broadened, and peripheral countries found strength in numbers. Finally, the article considers the longer-term resilience of the hierarchical international system.

Michael Zürn's Theory of Global Governance is an original, bold, and compelling argument regarding the causes of change in global governance. A core argument is that legitimation problems trigger changes in global governance. This contribution addresses two core features of the argument. Although I am persuaded that legitimacy matters, there are times when: legitimacy appears to be given too much credit to the relative neglect of other factors; other times when the lack of legitimacy has little discernible impact on the working of global governance; and unanswered questions about how the legitimacy of global governance relates to the legitimacy of the international order of which it is a part. The second feature is what counts as change in global governance. Zürn reduces change to either deepening or decline, overlooking the possible how of global governance. In contrast to Zürn's map of global governance that is dominated by hierarchies in the form of international organizations, an alternative map locates multiple modes of governance: hierarchies, markets, and networks. The kinds of legitimation problems that Zürn identifies, I argue, can help explain some of the movement from hierarchical to other modes of global governance.

Foulds’ model proposing a four-class hierarchical structure of mental illness represents an interesting dimension of psychiatric research and discussion and probably has a significant potential on diagnosis, taxonomy, therapeutics and theory. Psychiatric symptoms were investigated in a group of 244 schizophrenic patients with the purpose of analyzing Foulds and Bedford’s notion that psychiatric symptoms are arranged hierarchically. To achieve this the R (recent) version of the Delusions, Symptoms, States, Inventory (DSSI) was administered in the form of a constructed interview to these patients. The hierarchical arrangement of psychiatric symptoms was verified since a great majority of the cases (80.8%) produced symptom patterns conforming to the hierarchy model. However, patients with duration of illness longer than 10 years reported conforming patterns in a lower percentage (77%), whereas 84.6% of those with a duration of illness less than 2 years reported conforming patterns. The non-conforming patterns were those in which integrated delusions were absent in the presence of delusions of disintegration, neurotic symptoms were absent in the presence of integrated delusions, and dysthymic states were absent in the presence of neurotic symptoms.

A correction is needed to our paper: to the definition contained within the statement of Lemma 1.5 and thus arguments around it in §3.

The concept of dominance is used in the behavioral and biological sciences to describe outcomes in a variety of competitive interactions. In some taxa, a history of agonistic encounters among individuals modifies the course of future agonistic encounters such that the existence of a certain type of relationship can be inferred. If one is to characterize such relationships as dominance, however, then they must be distinguished from other kinds of interaction patterns for which the term tends to be used, as well as from factors such as territoriality and "trained" winners and losers, which may also influence the expression of agonistic behavior. Operational definitions based on causal, functional, evolutionary, and ontogenetic considerations have been proposed. Reliability and validity problems have been discussed, but the dominance concept has proved useful despite methodological difficulties. The confusion of dominance relationships (which involve two or more individuals) with dominance ranks (which are assigned to a single individual) has obscured the possible evolutionary basis of dominance relationships. If benefits accrue to dominant members of pairs, then those attributes which allow an animal to establish dominance can be selected. Dominance per se and dominance ranks, on the other hand, cannot be genetically transmitted since they constitute relationships with other individuals rather than absolute attributes. Dominance rankings in particular may be useful for describing behavioral patterns within a group, but they may reflect our own ability to count rather than any important variable in social organization.

This is the second paper in the series on shape decompositions and their use as shape approximations. This time we investigate hierarchical and topological shape decompositions or hierarchies and topologies. We showed earlier that bounded decompositions behave the same way as shapes do. The same holds for hierarchies and topologies, which are special kinds of bounded decompositions. They are distinguished by their algebraic structures, which have many important properties to facilitate their application as shape approximations. We provide an account of their properties with an emphasis on their application.

As already 2-monotone R-automata accept NP-complete languages, we introduce a restricted variant of j-monotonicity for restarting automata, called sequential j-monotonicity. For restarting automata without auxiliary symbols, this restricted variant still yields infinite hierarchies. However, for restarting automata with auxiliary symbols, all degrees of sequential monotonicity collapse to the first level, implying that RLWW-automata that are sequentially monotone of degree j for any j ≥ 1 only accept context-free languages.

The focus of the article is on the activities of the European Union and the United Nations in the fields of peace and security, human rights and democracy. These represent not only crucial issues uniting both the EU and the UN in their external actions, but are also founded upon, or at least affected by, fundamental principles of international law. It is argued that a coherent strategy for achieving long term peace and stability in regional and international relations must be based on respect for these fundamental principles as well as rules of international law derived from these principles. Such principles are not just abstract legal constructs but are a reflection of the values that international actors – states, organisations and others – have held since the UN Charter ushered in a new world order in 1945. Situating both organisations within the international legal order should enhance the legitimacy and arguably the effectiveness of the two organisations whether they act singly or together. Increasingly, the activities of the EU and the UN overlap in matters of peace, security, human rights and democracy. This overlap has the potential to result in confrontation, as well as what would normally be aspired to – co-operation. It is therefore essential to identify the underlying principles and rules governing the organisations and their activities. It is argued that these principles and rules should be recognised and reinforced if we are to have organisational activity that is more than discretionary or arbitrary.

It is known that the weakly monotone restarting automata acceptexactly the growing context-sensitive languages. We introduce ameasure on the degree of weak monotonicity and show that thelanguage classes obtained in this way form strict hierarchies forthe various types of deterministic and nondeterministic restartingautomata without auxiliary symbols.

In recent years the gap between archaeological theory and practice has been closing, but although there have been calls for ‘reflexivity’, there has been little critical examination of its meanings. Proposed reflexive methodologies still perpetuate many traditional hierarchies of power, and fail to consider the creative nature of excavation and post-excavation. Much archaeological work in Britain, Europe and North America also takes place within the commercial sphere, and post-processual ideas cannot advance archaeological practice unless they can be implemented in contract archaeology. This paper examines theoretical considerations of reflexivity, representation, subjectivity and sensual engagement to highlight their relevance to everyday archaeological practice, and their political potential to undermine existing hierarchies of power within commercial archaeology.

In this paper, N particles el, · ··, eN occupying positions in finite state spaces S1, · ··, SN, respectively, are considered along with an element of a finite space S N+1 of hierarchies which describe the organization of the particles into pairs, pairs of pairs, etc. A stochastic process {Xt: t 0} on a probability measure space (Ω, , P) is a hierarchic process if it is a right-continuous Markov jump process taking on values in the state space Sj and having the property that the (N + 1)th component of Xt can jump from a hierarchy to a successor or antecedent of that hierarchy. Asymptotic distributions of perturbed hierarchic processes, bilateral processes, and unilateral processes are determined in terms of an interaction function and the asymptotic distributions of the particles in the absence of any interaction.