In this paper, we examine campaign spending on Facebook during the 2020 U.S. congressional elections. We draw conclusions based on data from the Federal Election Commission and the Facebook Ad Library. This is one of the first articles on this topic. We point out and show how this data differs and how other researchers should treat it. Specifically, we focus on U.S. Democratic congresspeople who lost elections. Indeed, during the Democratic Party debate, voices were raised that its progressive wing was to blame for the loss of seats; in contrast, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star of the wing, argued that the lack of Facebook advertising was a factor in why seats were lost. The article concludes that the really well-known Democratic figures who lost the elections spent very little on Facebook ads compared to Ocasio-Cortez. We also compare Republican opponents with Democrats. In addition, we highlight how the Ocasio-Cortez campaign and the others differed with respect to the timing of campaign spending and the targeting of Facebook ads to specific states. Further, we compare data regarding campaigns available through the Federal Election Commission and Facebook and underscore the importance of the transparency of the Facebook Ad Library.

Gun violence has been a prevalent phenomenon in the United States for decades. The article investigates the extent to which the reality in the Midwestern states reflects empirical assumptions regarding the impact of gun laws on firearm mortality rates. It proceeds according to a coherent framework constructed from synthesized scholarly findings. Based on the conducted comparative analysis of five Midwestern states, selected according to the Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD) approach, the findings indicate that while firearm suicides operated as predicted, firearm homicides failed the empirical assumptions as the state with the most robust gun laws fell remarkably behind others. The article concludes that implementing alternative measures addressing the availability of guns and development programs in disadvantaged communities, alongside traditional gun laws, may help decrease firearm homicides in American states.

The last days of the Yugoslav Federation and the nationalist decade that followed brought to the fore negative categorizations and ‘ancient’ geographies of belonging. Since 2012, the ruling elite have sought to contain nationalism and to rebuild the image of a modern nation using consumption as a political tool by bridging (again) East and West. This contention is grounded in two entangled theoretical perspectives on consumption and national identity building. Adopting a historical narrative scheme, the original material collected in this study from 45 semi-structured customer and problem-centered expert interviews and extensive ethnographic fieldwork contributes to contextualizing and problematizing consumption routines towards McDonald’s restaurants, Simit Sarayi, and Starbucks coffee shops. This paper highlights that, daily, individuals have developed their own interpretative space within which to operate, exhibit their identity, and express to whom their affinity goes, leading to cultural paradoxes in certain situations.

The article deals with the core area of the Just War discipline, which is the set of criteria for deciding whether the start of war can be regarded as just or unjust. It presents the six most frequently mentioned criteria and offers a critical commentary on the content and meaning. By thoroughly studying over forty selected sources of Czechoslovak origin, it captures the current state of discussions in the area and simultaneously documents the fragmentation of fundamental terminology. Therefore, it also presents an argument-based proposal for the most appropriate Czech language terms of the mainstream criteria, aiming to unify the lexical field of the Just War discipline in the Czech academic discourse.