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All politics is local. This is the title of the book that describes the political trajectory of Democrat Tip O'Neill, the only US politician to serve consecutively during five legislatures (1977-1987) as Speaker of the US House. In his political biography, O'Neill says he heard from his father, "All politics is local. Don't forget that." when he lost the first election he ran for. His father could not have been more correct. Political participation and influence, as well as coming to power, exercising, and maintaining it depend on articulations and human relationships established at the local level, whether represented by a house, an office, a family, a neighborhood, or a city.

Theories of civil war usually theorize the choices of civilians and combatants without considering the institutional context in which they interact. Despite common depictions of war as chaotic and anarchic, order often emerges locally. Institutions vary greatly over time and space and, as in peacetime, shape behavior. In this article, I propose a research agenda on local wartime institutions. To this end, I present original evidence on conflict areas in Colombia to illustrate the scope of variation, propose the concept of wartime social order and a typology, and discuss several ways in which research on wartime institutions can contribute to our study of civil war both at the micro and macro levels.

Over the last fifteen years, the development of blockchain technologies has attracted a large volume of professional expertise, capital investment and media attention. This burgeoning sector of technology practices has coalesced around a few major initiatives (Bitcoin, Ethereum), but it is still moving at a fast pace and its configuration is evolving. If this sector is marked by a variety of technological protocols, financial arrangements and organizational forms, it is also, we would argue, a site of social effervescence. Parties, meet-ups, and the sorts of informal socializing which gather around events and networks of all kinds function to endow the blockchain sector with the characteristics of what, in cultural analysis, are often called "scenes". The aim of this special issue is to examine the interest of the notion of scene for the analysis of blockchain practices. We argue that the notion of scene may be mobilized as a useful analytical framework not only for the study of blockchain practices, but for that of technology practices more generally. In this introductory article, we ask the following questions: how can the notion of scene contribute to the understanding of blockchain practices? And what sort of research agenda does the notion point to? In the following sections we first identify some "scenic" components in blockchain phenomena. Then we review how media discourses and academic scholarship have framed these phenomena to show that the scene perspective is undertheorized in the context of technology-related social groupings. Finally, we propose a framework to analyse the main dimensions of blockchain scenes, before presenting the contributions to the special issue. With this special issue, we aim to establish a research agenda around technology scenes at the junction of STS and cultural analysis.

In light of this contemporary challenge for public policy, on the 16th November 2010 a highlevel group of experts in dementia research convened at the European Parliament, to discussthe dementia research agenda. The purpose of this report is to present the opinions, viewsand knowledge expressed at the meeting and to serve as a platform for further actions andinitiatives at the EU and Member State level. This forms the latter section of the report. The first part of the report aims to set the scene to the dementia research environment, by exploringthe scale of the challenge ahead, the current funding environment and recent EU policydevelopments in this regard.