India generates rapidly growing volumes of electronic waste but struggles to regulate these flows. This article traces the contested control of India’s printed circuit board (PCB) destruction network, examining who controls materials, labor, capital, and profits at each stage — from doorstep collection to international end-refining. Drawing on 25 expert interviews (2022–2023) and site visits in Delhi, we combine industrial ecology’s attention to material flows with political ecology’s focus on power and labor relations. We find that India’s PCB destruction network is not a failing system but a functioning one, even if its logic is not captured by the regulatory framework designed to govern it. Collection is controlled by informal networks whose infrastructure outperforms formal alternatives. Dismantling concentrates through skilled manual labor in dense informal communities that regulation has rendered invisible. End-refining is contested between European smelters, Chinese buyers, and India’s ambitions for domestic critical raw material recovery. Three lenses structure the analysis: the interdependence of formal and informal economies, where selective formalization serves the state, formal recyclers, and international smelters while the workers whose labor constitutes the network remain unrecognized; the power relations of labor and capital, in which control over the upstream stages rests on skilled labor organized through petty capital while global capital controls the profitable downstream stage; and geopolitical competition, in which India seeks sovereignty over materials it can neither process domestically nor prevent from leaving informally. We show how the valorization of secondary raw materials is shaped by informal networks, capital relations, and geopolitical interests.
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities from localized interactions, leading to outcomes such as consensus or fragmentation. This field has grown significantly, attracting interdisciplinary methods and driven by a surge in large-scale behavioral data. This review covers its rapid progress, bridging the literature dispersion. We begin with essential concepts and definitions, encompassing the nature of opinions, microscopic and macroscopic dynamics. This foundation leads to an overview of empirical research, from lab experiments to large-scale data analysis, which informs and validates models of opinion dynamics. We then present individual-based models, categorized by their macroscopic phenomena (e.g., consensus, polarization, echo chambers) and microscopic mechanisms (e.g., homophily, assimilation). We also review social contagion phenomena, highlighting their connection to opinion dynamics. Furthermore, the review covers common analytical and computational tools, including stochastic processes, treatments, simulations, and optimization. Finally, we explore emerging frontiers, such as connecting empirical data to models and using AI agents as testbeds for novel social phenomena. By systematizing terminology and emphasizing analogies with traditional physics, this review aims to consolidate knowledge, provide a robust theoretical foundation, and shape future research in opinion dynamics.
Higher-order interactions that nonlinearly couple more than two nodes are important in many networked systems, and their effects on collective dynamics are increasingly being studied. Here, we provide an overview of this rapidly growing field and of the techniques that can be used to describe and analyse them. We focus in particular on new phenomena and challenges that emerge when non-pairwise interactions are considered. We conclude by discussing open questions and promising future directions on the collective dynamics of higher-order networks. This Review surveys how higher-order interactions, which link more than two units at a time, reshape collective dynamics in complex systems. New synchronization phenomena, analytical frameworks and emerging methods to reduce or infer higher-order structure from data, are highlighted.
This article engages with two prominent defenses of unequal power from the standpoint of social equality, by Daniel Viehoff (2019) and Ryan Cox (2022), which aim to debunk the Constitution Claim, or the idea that equal power is constitutively necessary for social equality. This paper shows that the Constitution Claim is not defeated by the proposals such as the ones mentioned to tease apart power equality and social equality. Adequate social justification of power inequality, understood by Viehoff (2019) as moral-equality-respectful social justification, is not sufficient to ground social equality. If understood as the “best interpretation available,” adequate social justification either collapses into the actual justification of society lacking a normative framework for determining the best interpretation or comes closer to an objective interpretation, which loses the social character of social inequality. Pace Cox (2022), power inequality is not objectionable only because it gives rise to consideration inequality (when it does) or only when it is known about. Relational egalitarians should worry about power inequality even when it is secret because those with lesser power are vulnerable to those with greater power, which can, in certain conditions, raise the worry of domination. I conclude that the Constitution Claim is not proven wrong.
We further investigate the metalogical properties of the ordered fragment. First, we provide a simplified proof of the satisfiability invariance under A. Herzig’s translation of the ordered fragment into modal logic KD . Second, based on the notion of bisimulation developed by B. Bednarczyk and R. Jaakkola, we show that each ordered formula is equivalent to a disjunction of ‘ordered types’. Third, we show that the fragment enjoys uniform interpolation, and that uniform interpolants can be effectively constructed from ‘ordered types’. Finally, we establish the Łoś-Tarski Preservation Theorem for the fragment, and therefore conclude that the ordered fragment is nice.
