This article considers issues of reading and writing before, during, and after medieval pilgrimages, as well as the methodological and historical issues at stake for both pilgrim writers and modern scholars. In particular, the articles address the vexed issue of where — and how much — reading and writing took place around historically attested pilgrimages.

This article argues that elite purges in consolidated dictatorships have a different purpose and logic. Dictators, who have consolidated their position, seek to maximize the efficiency of rule by making the elite obedient through purges. For this purpose, dictators carefully select the purge target by considering various factors. To test this theory, the article examines the pattern of elite purges in North Korea based on an original individual-level dataset, which contains the personal background of 367 North Korean elites and their purge records between 1948 and 2019. Findings suggest that coup-proofing is not the only purpose of elite purges but that ensuring the leader’s political superiority is another purpose of elite purges in consolidated dictatorships.

Article providing an explanation as to why citizens of some states differ from others in their role conceptions, especially those states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. The authors offer a novel theoretical explanation that accounts for variation in roles, based on each country’s historic relationship with Russia, its emerging relationship with the West and China, and domestic ethnopolitical conditions.

Article studying racial and gender disparities among school re-openings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article considers positional shift and rotation angle deviation of the laser scanner and the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and presents a new method for calculating the incident angle based on the rigorous geometric measurement model for airborne light detection and range (LiDAR).