Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have become critical tools for analysing the complex interactions within agriculture and food systems, offering valuable insights for evidence-based policymaking. This article reviews 12 widely applied agriculture and food Integrated Assessment Models, categorizing them into four primary sub-groups: Food Security, Land Use, and Socio-economic Models; Hydrological and Water Resources Models; Land, Crop, and Food Production Models; and Food–Energy–Water Nexus Models. The review highlights their respective capabilities, including cost minimization, depth of the food–energy–water nexus analysis, integration with other domains and tools, and spatial and temporal resolution. A comparative assessment underscores each model’s unique strengths, such as resource intensity accounting in FABLE, climate-focused numerical analysis in MAgPIE and IMPACT, resource balance optimization in GCAM, and scenario-based water resource allocation in WEAP. Synergies between models and their integration with other domains, including energy and economic systems, are also explored, demonstrating their potential for producing holistic scenarios addressing climate adaptation, resource constraints and dietary transitions. The findings emphasize the significant role Integrated Assessment Models play in advancing the EU’s sustainability agenda, including the Green Deal and Common Agricultural Policy. These integrated approaches are crucial for crafting strategies that enhance food system resilience, optimize resource use, and support climate goals, positioning IAMs as indispensable instruments for shaping sustainable and equitable food systems worldwide.

Writing histories of world literature was, for the longest time, an almost exclusively European, or in any case Western, enterprise. Moreover, it was overwhelmingly centred on European, or again Western, literature. To do away with such Eurocentrism was the avowed aim of the project upon which an international set of literary scholars embarked in 2006, and which resulted in the four-volume Literature: A World History published in 2022. In the articles to follow, five scholars (Pettersson, Trivedi, Utas, Zhang, D’haen) directly involved with the project look back on their experience and reflect on the pros and cons, the successes and the failures, the achievements and the shortcomings, of the enterprise. As counterbalance, six scholars (Ette, Hajdu, Hawas, He, Larsen, Rydholm) not involved with the project reflect on the (im)possibilities of writing world histories of literature.

Who should decide a scientist’s research agenda? The scientist him- or herself? Superiors, such as science ministries or university management? Sponsors, such as funding organizations or industry? Interest groups, such as churches, political parties, animal rights organizations or patient initiatives? What is the right balance between the scientist’s autonomous decision on the one hand and players’ interests on the other? These questions will not be answered here, but reflected upon with regard to the difficult trade-offs involved and the threats to scientific freedom that can result from them. For this purpose, I propose an analytical framework that conceptualizes the thematic autonomy of science as a gradual interplay of individual choices of research topics made in the context of the respective scientific community, on the one hand, and external constraints, on the other. With regard to them, seven basic levers will be distinguished. This framework will be applied to the current state of German professors’ freedom to choose their research agenda.

Authoritarian populism can be defined by anti-establishment attitudes, exclusionary identity politics and anti-pluralism. It denies and derides diverging opinions. Authoritarian populism rejects the legitimacy of opponents, both political and academic, and is susceptible to post-truth politics often steered by tropes and conspiracy theories. It poses a real danger to academic freedom and scientific standards. This article supports this assertion and describes higher education under the authoritarian populist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He has centralized the authority over higher education, and has in effect created a deep state, nurturing not just cronyism, but efforts to reorient the mindset of a generation of young Hungarians in an attempt to guarantee the populist and traditionalist ideological legacy of his regime. The article notes that forms of hierarchal political control over the universities and research institutes are falsely presented under the facade of the global process of marketizing universities. However, even in authoritarian Hungary, prompted by dissonance and commitments to academic freedom and scientific standards, there have been progressive counter-movements. These counter-movements provide insights into alternative visions of higher education that seek to preserve the integrity of academic standards, deliberation and intellectual plurality.

This article aims to explore the social representations of the Spanish Second Republic and the Transition epochs among university students of various national identities within the Spanish state. A free-association exercise elicited by the words ‘Second Republic’ and ‘Transition’ was completed by 477 university students of the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia, and Madrid, who were also asked about their national identity ideological orientation. Lexical analysis was used to analyse their responses. The results demonstrate how these two periods are strongly anchored in the ideological affiliations and social identity of the participants. Furthermore, we observed that the Spanish identity and right-wing ideology were related to a narrative crafted by the political elites during the inception of the current democratic period. Meanwhile, the peripheral national identities and left-wing ideology were associated with a contentious narrative that responds to the contested narrative. In addition, the results also reveal the current relevance of these two periods through their symbols and transmission, whose senses and meanings differ based on the ideological affiliation and national identity of the participants.

The Optimal Currency Area (OCA) theory is utilized to evaluate if Brexit is supported in the context of economic integration. In brief, the greater the conformity to the criteria motivated by the OCA model, the greater the feasibility of a monetary integration between the UK and the EU. Logically, if conditions are conducive for a monetary integration, Brexit – which is a disintegration – is thus unsupported. On the other hand, if circumstances are unfavourable for monetary integration, further economic integration with the current customs union of the EU is not indicated, hence Brexit is not contradicted.

In this article, I provide a brief account of my first decade of involvement in European science policy, of what I believe are the key structural issues in that landscape, and where I propose possible adjustments to address these issues.

This article reflects on whether and how European communities’ cultural frameworks of seasons are coming to poorly correspond to the climatic conditions they experience, and the implications for how Europe adapts to climatic (and social and environmental) change. It starts from a colder- and drier-than-normal autumn and winter (2023/2024) in Bergen, Norway, and a local researcher’s investigation into why these climatically anomalous seasons were being culturally celebrated as ‘seasonal weather’. He compares studies into the Bergen population’s cultural expectations for weather conditions in each of the four seasons, with the statistical climatic record, and reveals a mismatch. He argues that the four-season framework prominent in Europe poorly describes or anticipates meteorology in Bergen, and that other frameworks could fit better. The article argues that seasonal frameworks continuously evolve with interlinked environmental and social change – from drivers such as climate change, landscape modification, social evolution, and globalization – so that seasonal mismatches are as much about how societies culturally re-conceive of seasons as about physical climate change for instance. This is important because the way European societies divide the year by seasonal expectations affects how they relate to the meteorological conditions they come to face each season.

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Blind peer review has become the gold standard of many scholarly disciplines. However, this seems like a paradox since openness is deeply embedded in the DNA of research. Over the last 30 years changes in the managerial paradigms of academia have also induced so many changes in the ecosystem of scholarly communication that many scholars describe the present situation as a crisis. Therefore, in light of the availability of new technologies and the changes in the scholarly communication ecosystems, it might be time to review how we assess research quality and address the paradox of the blindness of peer review.