Frontier AI systems are being adopted across Africa, yet most AI safety evaluations are designed and validated in Western environments. In this paper, we argue that the portability gap can leave Africa-centric pathways to severe harm untested when frontier AI systems are embedded in materially constrained and interdependent infrastructures. We define severe AI risks as material risks from frontier AI systems that result in critical harm, measured as the grave injury or death of thousands of people or economic loss and damage equivalent to five percent of a country's GDP. To support AI safety evaluation design, we develop a taxonomy for identifying Africa-centric severe AI risks. The taxonomy links outcome thresholds to process pathways that model risk as the intersection of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. We distinguish severe risks by amplification and suddenness, where amplification requires that frontier AI be a necessary magnifier of latent danger and suddenness captures harms that materialise rapidly enough to overwhelm ordinary coping and governance capacity. We then propose threat modelling strategies for African contexts, surveying reference class forecasting, structured expert elicitation, scenario planning, and system theoretic process analysis, and tailoring them to constraints of limited resources, poor connectivity, limited technical expertise, weak state capacity, and conflict. We also examine AI misalignment risk, concluding that Africa is more likely to expose universal failure modes through distributional shift than to generate distinct pathways of misalignment. Finally, we offer practical guidance for running evaluations under resource constraints, emphasising open and extensible tooling, tiered evaluation pipelines, and sharing methods and findings to broaden evaluation scope.
Boosting algorithms enjoy strong theoretical guarantees: when weak learners maintain positive edge, AdaBoost achieves geometric decrease of exponential loss. We study how to incorporate group fairness constraints into boosting while preserving analyzable training dynamics. Our approach, FairBoost, projects the ensemble-induced exponential-weights distribution onto a convex set of distributions satisfying fairness constraints (as a reweighting surrogate), then trains weak learners on this fair distribution. The key theoretical insight is that projecting the training distribution reduces the effective edge of weak learners by a quantity controlled by the KL-divergence of the projection. We prove an exponential-loss bound where the convergence rate depends on weak learner edge minus a "fairness cost" term $δ_t = \sqrt{\mathrm{KL}(w^t \| q^t)/2}$. This directly quantifies the accuracy-fairness tradeoff in boosting dynamics. Experiments on standard benchmarks validate the theoretical predictions and demonstrate competitive fairness-accuracy tradeoffs with stable training curves.
Research on Russian affairs constitutes a significant component of China’s international studies. This article examines existing perspectives in Russian studies, summarizes fundamental viewpoints and prevailing issues within China’s current research on Russian affairs, and analyzes the progress, challenges and potential future directions of this research. Globally, the dominant paradigms in Russian
studies are Westernism and Nativism. The Westernist paradigm advocates examining changes in Russia’s politics, economy and foreign policy through the lens of Western civilizational development, whereas the Nativist paradigm is grounded in an understanding of Russia’s distinct historical trajectory. A key challenge for China’s Russian studies community lies in transcending these two paradigms. Since the end of the Cold War, China’s research on Russia has achieved notable progress, including the formation of a stable academic
community, the establishment of application- oriented research agendas and initial attempts at interdisciplinary integration and paradigm innovation. However, future challenges include strengthening economic research, expanding the subnational-level analysis, and enhancing the study and tracking of Russian public opinion. The key future directions for development include promoting the diversification of research topics, encouraging fieldwork, enhancing the focus on quantitative methods, and ultimately aiming to establish a “Russian Studies” framework with Chinese characteristics, both in terms of academic content and disciplinary methods.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The article analyzes key events in the history of Russian-Japanese relations, the anniversaries of which fall in 2025. Particular attention is paid to important historical milestones, such as the conclusion of the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875, the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, and the Basic Convention in 1925, as well as the surrender of Japan in 1945, which put an end to the Soviet-Japanese War and World War II. These events significantly influenced the development of relations between the two countries and determined the further vector of their interaction.
The article also examines the issue of concluding a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. The author notes that Japan, which for decades followed the tenets of the Cold War and directed its foreign policy in the mainstream of the Japan-U.S. alliance, now faces the need to reconsider its approaches in the context of a changing world order. The author believes that normalization of relations between Russia and Japan and joint efforts to resolve disagreements can not only improve bilateral relations, but also strengthen security in Northeast Asia, contributing to the development of a stable and prosperous region.
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The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Social Sciences
Anupama K Xavier, Oisín Hamilton, Davide Faranda
et al.
Atmospheric blocking exerts a profound influence on mid-latitude circulation, yet its predictability remains elusive due to intrinsic non-linearities and sensitivity to initial-conditions. While blocking dynamics have been extensively studied, the impact of geographical positioning on predictability remains largely unexplored. This study provides a comparative assessment of the predictability of Western and Eastern North Pacific blocking events, leveraging analogue-based diagnostics applied to CMIP6 MIROC6 simulations. Blocking structures are identified using geopotential height gradient reversal, with their temporal evolution analysed through trajectory tracking and error growth metrics. Results reveal that Eastern blocks exhibit lower predictability, characterized by rapid error divergence and heightened mean logarithmic growth rates, whereas Western blocks display dynamical stability. Persistence analysis gives no significant difference between eastern and western North Pacific blocking events. Sensitivity analyses across varying detection thresholds validate the robustness of these findings.
This study constructs a fully data-driven and reproducible Southeast Asia Influence Index (SAII v3) to reduce bias from expert scoring and subjective weighting while mapping hierarchical power structures across the eleven ASEAN nations. We aggregate authoritative open-source indicators across four dimensions (economic, military, diplomatic, socio-technological) and apply a three-tiered standardization chain quantile-Box-Cox-min-max to mitigate outliers and skewness. Weights are obtained through equal-weight integration of Entropy Weighting Method (EWM), CRITIC, and PCA. Robustness is assessed via Kendall's tau, +/-20% weight perturbation, and 10,000 bootstrap iterations, with additional checks including +/-10% dimensional sensitivity and V2-V3 bump chart comparisons. Results show integrated weights: Economy 35-40%, Military 20-25%, Diplomacy about 20%, Socio-Technology about 15%. The regional landscape exhibits a one-strong, two-medium, three-stable, and multiple-weak pattern: Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia lead, while Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam form a mid-tier competitive band. V2 and V3 rankings are highly consistent (Kendall's tau = 0.818), though small mid-tier reorderings appear (Thailand and the Philippines rise, Vietnam falls), indicating that v3 is more sensitive to structural equilibrium. ASEAN-11 average sensitivity highlights military and socio-technological dimensions as having the largest marginal effects (+/-0.002). In conclusion, SAII v3 delivers algorithmic weighting and auditable reproducibility, reveals multidimensional drivers of influence in Southeast Asia, and provides actionable quantitative evidence for resource allocation and policy prioritization by regional governments and external partners.
Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Akram Zaytar, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse
et al.
Cropland mapping can play a vital role in addressing environmental, agricultural, and food security challenges. However, in the context of Africa, practical applications are often hindered by the limited availability of high-resolution cropland maps. Such maps typically require extensive human labeling, thereby creating a scalability bottleneck. To address this, we propose an approach that utilizes unsupervised object clustering to refine existing weak labels, such as those obtained from global cropland maps. The refined labels, in conjunction with sparse human annotations, serve as training data for a semantic segmentation network designed to identify cropland areas. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the benefits of the improved weak labels generated by our method. In a scenario where we train our model with only 33 human-annotated labels, the F_1 score for the cropland category increases from 0.53 to 0.84 when we add the mined negative labels.
Sustainable development is an imperative worldwide but metrics and data on poverty and quality of life have remained too coarse and abstract to characterize challenges adequately and guide practical progress. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in Africa where we still know relatively little about the systematic spatial details and scope of development. Here, we leverage a complete, high-precision dataset of building footprints to identify infrastructure deficits and infer informal settlements down to the street level everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify a general pattern of informality with urbanized areas showing, on average, greater access to infrastructure and services than rural and periurban areas, each characterized by a statistically consistent spectrum of uneven local development. We show that our physical measures of informality are systematically associated with many indicators of low human development, and that these form a single principal component predicted by specific functional changes of the built environment. These results demonstrate that the localization of sustainable development is possible down to the street level at a continental scale and provide a general distributed strategy for accelerating progress in infrastructure and service expansion that taps local innovations in a way that is equitable and context appropriate.
Discussions around the essence, status and prospects of such a phenomenon as cryptocurrency have been conducted by scientists and practitioners around the world for more than ten years. Some see it as a threat to the security of the national economy, others as new financial opportunities. The legal regime of the crypto industry varies greatly across countries and is still uncertain in many of them. While some states have allowed transactions with cryptocurrencies, others have banned or restricted them. For example, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation believes that the circulation of virtual currency in the country should be regulated and taxed, and not prohibited. The Bank of Russia has long considered cryptocurrency an unequivocal threat to the domestic financial system and advocated its complete ban. However, in the context of sanctions’ pressure and blocking of Russian foreign currency accounts, the Bank of Russia just recently started to think seriously to use cryptocurrency in international settlements. A number of experts and officials of the Russian Federation propose to use the experience of Japan, one of the most advanced countries in the development of the crypto industry, to regulate the cryptocurrency market in Russia. Along with the practice accumulated by the Land of the Rising Sun in this area, the article discusses the possibility of applying some of its achievements in the Russian Federation.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
This publication is a review of the book of memories by E.V. Kobelev called “65 years with Vietnam”. The prominent Russian expert on Vietnam writes about his path to the profession, including his studies at the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University, an internship at Hanoi State University and work as a TASS correspondent in Vietnam during the Indochina War. He also recalls his work at the apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1968–1991 and his functioning as an expert in academic institutions after the collapse of the USSR and the dissolution of the CPSU. The author was a witness and a direct participant in many historical events related to the foreign policy of the USSR/Russia in Indochina. The book contains the portraits of a number of political figures and experts in science and culture of the Soviet Union and Vietnam. These memoirs may serve as an important historical source, contributing to the understanding of events and processes from the 1960s to the present day.
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This review is based on the materials published in January – March 2022 in various media of
East Asian countries, which cover the most relevant topics for the region during this period. Among them
are: administrative changes in Indonesia and Thailand, the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Vladimir
Putin’s visit to China, the presidential election in South Korea
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
According to the position of the Russian Federation, in order to prevent the emergence of a pro-fascist militaristic state near its borders, aimed at the physical extermination of Donbass residents who disagree with Kiev's aggressive policy, which is actively supported by the “collective West”, Moscow was forced to launch a special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. Its beginning united the members of NATO and the EU in their confrontation with Russia. The same cannot be said about the Russia's allies, including those from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The purpose of this article is to analyze the relations of the Central Asian SCO members with Russia after it launched a special operation in Ukraine and the nuances of their foreign and domestic policy. The author comes to the following conclusions. Western leaders are trying to convince the leadership of the Central Asian members of the SCO to condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine and change the
balance of power in the post-Soviet space. Despite their pressure, these states take a neutral position towards Russia, as it still remains their main economic partner and successfully develops humanitarian and military cooperation with them. Some of these republics are ready to act as a platform for Russia to obtain the necessary raw materials and equipment, bypassing the Western sanctions regime. They expect that in the future the Russian authorities will successfully complete this operation on favorable terms for the Russian security, without involving for that the CSTO forces. In case of failure of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, the authorities of these countries may reorient the national vectors of geopolitical and economic development to other actors.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
This paper makes an assessment of how far the African Union (AU) has gone in exercising the mandate of use of force as one of tools for upholding democracy and constitutionalism within the continent. The key intention of this assessment is to scrutinize the suitability of the use of force in the AU’s framework as one of the channels for safeguarding democracy and constitutionalism. The work has employed qualitative research methods, relying on both primary and secondary data. Parallel to that, four case studies from selected AU missions in Africa have been relied upon (Burundi twice, Comoros, Mali and the Gambia). Findings reveal that generally the AU has made significant strides in utilizing its mandate in the use of force in upholding democracy and constitutionalism in Africa by restoring peace, rule of law, stability, human security and in safeguarding people’s will. The AU has also proved to be a reliable first responder in African constitutional crises given the fact that intervention by the UN system takes too long to be engaged and that the UN does not deploy peacekeeping forces where there is no comprehensive peace agreement. Despite that encouraging development, critical challenges still exist. The AU has not succeeded in addressing one notorious vice in Africa which largely contributes to recurrent constitutional crises, namely bad governance. Bad governance exists in various forms such as disrespect of presidential term limits, nepotism and willful disregard of the will of the people in general elections. Other challenges include financial constraints to adequately fund large scale operations, excessive reliance of donors for its peace operations, lack of political will from some African states, and difficulties in harmonizing interests of all parties to conflicts. In order to address these challenges, the AU should achieve its financial autonomy. It should explore further on the lead nation approach and put in place a more formal system on terms and conditions of participation of those nations and anchoring peace support operations. The UA should also make more efforts to instill upon African leaders the culture of good governance because it will greatly reduce constitutional crises which necessitate the use of force in addressing them. Lastly, the AU should discourage procuring of peace deals without the free consent of all the key actors in constitutional crises. Free consent is crucial in ensuring that the peace deals will be adequately respected. The overall outcome of this assessment therefore serves as an encouragement of the AU to continue working tirelessly in improving the mechanism of use of force because it has proved to be a potential tool for upholding democracy and constitutionalism in appropriate circumstances.
Asia and Eurasia, Africa, Pacific Area, and Antarctica
Across the ANET GNSS network, decadal mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet drives elastic uplift rates of up to 20 mm/yr. We explore, for the first time, the viability of using elastic deformation observed in the ANET GNSS network to constrain ice mass changes in Antarctica. We begin by estimating which regions of ice mass loss contribute to the elastic deformation observed at each ANET GNSS site. This is done using an observer-centric model of elastic deformation, which we call a Load Sensitivity Kernel (LSK). Using this approach, we find that the elastic deformation at the majority of ANET sites is dominated by far-field mass change. Over 70% of ANET sites require ice mass change within a radius of 200km or greater to be included before 90% of the site's elastic deformation is recovered. We show that the difference between LSKs of a pair of neighboring GNSS receivers can be used to localize the near-field mass change responsible for the differential displacement. Finally, we generalize this in a novel approach that uses an arbitrary number of GNSS sites. In this approach, LSKs of each site are weighted and added in a linear series. These weights are optimized such that the elastic deformation from mass change outside a Region of Interest is minimized. We demonstrate that 7 ANET GNSS sites in the Amundsen Sea region can isolate the elastic deformation, in both the vertical and horizontal components, that results exclusively from PIG's mass loss and/or the losses of the PSK glaciers. With the current GNSS receiver distribution, the east component of elastic deformation due to mass change at Thwaites can be expressed relative to mass changes at PSK. Our results demonstrate that the current ANET configuration can use elastic deformation to constrain ice mass changes in Antarctica, especially in regions with relatively dense clusters of GNSS.
Today, cooperation between Russia and China is actively developing in the field of Arctic
exploration, since both countries are interested in the development of navigation along the Northern Sea
Route and the extraction of hydrocarbons in the region. Russia is interested in attracting Chinese investments and technologies, and can provide China with access to resources and the northern transport artery. The article examines the view of Chinese experts on the possibilities of using the Northern Sea Route for the organization of transit transportation of goods from the Asia-Pacific countries to Europe within the framework of the Belt and Road project. They note the attractiveness of the «Polar Silk Road» in terms of a significant reduction in the distance of Eurasian container transportation and fuel economy when choosing the Russian Northern Sea Route. However, in their opinion, the development of container transportation will become a matter of the future, since today it is impossible to organize a full-fledged linear service in the Arctic due to unfavorable factors – weather restrictions (difficult ice conditions), underdevelopment of the Russian port infrastructure, increasing the likelihood of Arctic risks and, as a result, Arctic freight rates. Chinese experts are confident that Russia and China should quickly reach a concrete agreement on cooperation in the region within the framework of the Chinese megaproject «Belt and Road». Moreover, the involvement of the Russian side, in addition to budget expenditures and private capital investments, as well as Chinese technologies and investments, will allow the Russian Arctic infrastructure to meet the requirements of the international transport transit corridor in 10 years
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Poverty has been one of the most acute social issues in the history of mankind. After the
founding of the People’s Republic of China (the PRC), the Chinese Communist Party and the government
adopted the eradication of poverty and the pursuit of common prosperity as their mission and goal. The
practice of poverty eradication has gone through three stages, i.e. relief based poverty alleviation, system
reform based poverty alleviation and targeted poverty alleviation. This article aims to provide Chinese
wisdom and Chinese solutions for the world and especially for developing countries by reviewing the history of poverty eradication since the founding of the PRC and summarizing the great achievements in this sphere since the 18th National Congress of the CPC.
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Basing on the Chinese primary sources, the Chinese presidents’ reports at the CPC congresses, five-year plans and some bylaws related to the stated topic the Authors consider the shift of the megaregions place in the economic state policy. The article highlights not only positive developments in this direction but problematic aspects as well. For example a large-scale regional policy ignores the differences within each territory, so the differentiation of megaregions increases
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