Volume 6 Issue 6, June 2022

Having fled Ukraine owing to the war, Tamara Martsenyuk is reflecting on her experience as a refugee scholar. Ukrainian studies should become more visible within Eastern European studies, she argues.

When academics ‘westplain’ Russia’s war against Ukraine, they reinforce a culture of detachment. We must not ignore the embodied knowledge of war, writes Darya Tsymbalyuk.

Korrine Sky, a British Zimbabwean student who fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion, writes about the racism and discrimination against people of colour fleeing Ukraine.

In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a broad swathe of countries have imposed a bevy of sanctions aimed at Vladimir Putin and his supporters. However, the future success of sanctions in curbing Russian aggression is unclear and, despite being targeted, they may harm average Russian individuals and affect prices worldwide.

On 24 February 2022, Russia’s attack on Ukraine shook the world. Among many issues forcibly raised by the war, the question of information manipulation has been particularly important for the public and scholars alike. How did Vladimir Putin’s regime manage to convince the Russian public to support the invasion?

Russian disinformation exploits social problems in foreign states to undermine people’s trust and breed conspiracy theories. Tackling it is difficult but feasible.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine showcases substantial challenges, especially to international humanitarian and criminal law and human rights. It also calls for an urgent revisiting of the role of the United Nations Security Council in the maintenance of international peace and security, and of the security architecture in Europe and worldwide.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought into stark relief the role that fossil fuels can play in conflict. Leading Ukrainian climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska talks of the terrors of the war in Ukraine and how divesting from fossil fuels will bring humanity onto a safer path towards a sustainable future.

A natural experiment in the environmental domain shows how attempts to increase prosocial behaviours like recycling using monetary rewards can be counter-productive, and how this effect depends on underlying pro-environmental motivation.

Yoo et al. introduce a model that predicts a person’s overall attentional functioning from functional magnetic resonance imaging data and show that this is generalizable across five different datasets.

Using electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, Graumann et al. examine where, how and when representations of object location and category emerge in the human brain.

The human brain estimates task controllability by comparing the reliability of internal models predicting future events using only past events, or a mixture of past events and past actions. Exposure to uncontrollable stressors distorts this process.

How do brain networks encode naturalistic affective behaviours? Bijanzadeh et al. show that positive and negative affective behaviours are associated with increased high-frequency and decreased low-frequency activity across the mesolimbic network.

Using detailed data on credit and debit card transactions, Lai et al. show an inverted U-shaped relationship between temperature and consumption in the short run. Adaptation moderates the relationship in the long run.

Bruneau et al. show that a five-minute video intervention is able to effectively promote support for the reintegration of former Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces combatants into Colombian society.

Using monthly water billing data for 1.5 million accounts in Singapore, Agarwal et al. show that nationwide efficiency improvements reduce residential water use by 3.5% for at least ten years but find no evidence of benefits from a nationwide peer-comparison nudge.

Eble and Hu show how a common stereotype—the belief that boys are innately better at mathematics than girls—transmits across generations through children’s peers and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing maths scores up for boys and down for girls.

Including participants from 45 countries, Bago et al. find that the situational factors that affect moral reasoning are shared across countries, with diminished observed cultural variation.