Famine responses in the world food crisis 1972–5 and the World Food Conference of 1974

In the early 1970s, there was scarcity in the world grain market, soaring prices and famines in several countries of Asia and Africa. The commercial grain trade was expanded at the expense of food aid. After a brief look at policies addressing the situation in terms of modernised methods of agricultural production for small producers, the article sketches how such policies also affected relief efforts, from the low availability for food aid, the provision of food that was not useful and late deliveries through efforts to tie food aid to local changes in agricultural production and settlement patterns. In part, food aid thus reinforced processes of social differentiation that had contributed to causing the famines in the first place.

Humanitarian intervention and the issue of state sovereignty in the discourse of legal experts between the 1830s and the First World War

This article discusses the tensions between the principle of state sovereignty and the idea of a "humanitarian intervention" (or a intervention on humanitarian grounds) as they resulted from the debate of leading legal scholars in the 19th and early 20th century. While prominent scholars such as Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns or Aegidius Arntz spoke out in favour of a form of "humanitarian interventions", others such as August Wilhelm Heffter or Pasquale Fiore were much more critical and in many cases spoke out in favour of absolute state sovereignty.

The Transnational World of the Cominternians

The 'Cominternians' who staffed the Communist International in Moscow from its establishment in 1919 to its dissolution in 1943 led transnational lives and formed a cosmopolitan but closed and privileged world. The book tells of their experience in the Soviet Union through the decades of hope and terror.

Evolutionary history and global spread of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing lineage.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains of the Beijing lineage are globally distributed and are associated with the massive spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis in Eurasia. Here we reconstructed the biogeographical structure and evolutionary history of this lineage by genetic analysis of 4,987 isolates from 99 countries and whole-genome sequencing of 110 representative isolates. We show that this lineage initially originated in the Far East, from where it radiated worldwide in several waves. We detected successive increases in population size for this pathogen over the last 200 years, practically coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, the First World War and HIV epidemics. Two MDR clones of this lineage started to spread throughout central Asia and Russia concomitantly with the collapse of the public health system in the former Soviet Union. Mutations identified in genes putatively under positive selection and associated with virulence might have favored the expansion of the most successful branches of the lineage.

Plant diversity moderates drought stress in grasslands: Implications from a large real-world study on 13C natural abundances

Land-use change and intensification play a key role in the current biodiversity crisis. The resulting species loss can have severe effects on ecosystem functions and services, thereby increasing ecosystem vulnerability to climate change. We explored whether land-use intensification (i.e. fertilization intensity), plant diversity and other potentially confounding environmental factors may be significantly related to water use (i.e. drought stress) of grassland plants. Drought stress was assessed using δ13C abundances in aboveground plant biomass of 150 grassland plots across a gradient of land-use intensity. Under water shortage, plants are forced to increasingly take up the heavier 13C due to closing stomata leading to an enrichment of 13C in biomass. Plants were sampled at the community level and for single species, which belong to three different functional groups (one grass, one herb, two legumes). Results show that plant diversity was significantly related to the δ13C signal in community, grass and legume biomass indicating that drought stress was lower under higher diversity, although this relation was not significant for the herb species under study. Fertilization, in turn, mostly increased drought stress as indicated by more positive δ13C values. This effect was mostly indirect by decreasing plant diversity. In line with these results, we found similar patterns in the δ13C signal of the organic matter in the topsoil, indicating a long history of these processes. Our study provided strong indication for a positive biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship with reduced drought stress at higher plant diversity. However, it also underlined a negative reinforcing situation: as land-use intensification decreases plant diversity in grasslands, this might subsequently increases drought sensitivity. Vice-versa, enhancing plant diversity in species-poor agricultural grasslands may moderate negative effects of future climate change.

Weishenme Zhongguo zai diyi ci shijie dazhan zhong juyou zhongyao zuoyong 为什么中国在第一次世界大战中具有重要作用 (Why China Played an Important Role in the First World War)

Aufbauend auf dem analytischen Tool des Totalen Krieges (vgl. den Artikel des Autors zu Controversy Total War in 1914-1918-Online) werden im vorliegenden Beitrag die Anstrengungen Chinas im Ersten Weltkrieg zu denjenigen anderer nicht europäischer Länder wie Australien, Südafrika oder Indien in Bezug gesetzt. Dabei wird das Ziel verfolgt, den globalen Charakter eines Konfliktes deutlich zu machen, der zurecht als erster Weltkrieg bezeichnet wird und in welchem China sicherlich eine weit bedeutsamere Rolle spielte, als es gemeinhin in der Historiographie dargestellt wird. Ursprünglich wurde der Beitrag als Antwort auf die Frage konzipiert, warum nicht nur China für eine Globalgeschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges von Bedeutung war. Im Verlauf der Übersetzung wurde der Titel dahingehend angepasst, dass stärker die Bedeutung von Chinas Rolle im Ersten Weltkrieg betont wurde.