Thomas Filsecker

The Headless Union: Conditional Federalism and the Outsourced Container

The European Union can constrain its members, but none of the ranking authorities proposed for it between 1950 and 1966 was built, and the ranking of defence against other ends has been held outside it. Whether it lacks the capacity to rank ends altogether, to subordinate one pub...

The Headless Sovereign: Effective Separation and the Persistence of the Company-State, 1600–1914

Between 1600 and 1914, a distinctive institutional form reshaped the political geography of the globe. The chartered company-state — a hybrid entity combining commercial enterprise with delegated sovereign authority — flourished in the maritime polities of Northwest Europe, was a...

The Headless Citadel: Governance Without a Chooser

Grand strategy — the hierarchical subordination of means to ends across time and domain — has become structurally impossible in the contemporary United States and European Union. This is not a claim about leadership, ideology, or democratic dysfunction. It is a claim about slack:...

The Chronotope Method: A Structural Representational Framework for Low‑Frequency Archaeological Behaviours

Low‑frequency archaeological behaviours—engraving, ochre processing, notational marking, bone‑tool modification—are typically represented as isolated anomalies rather than components of structured behavioural trajectories. Their manifestations are sparse, unevenly distributed, an...

The Tragedy of the Citadel: Structural Power in Late Modernity

This monograph develops a structural account of institutional decay in the contemporary United States, advancing a different lens on elite coordination and extraction. Rather than treating defense, finance, healthcare, education, and energy as discrete domains, it reconstructs th...

The Tragedy of the Citadel: Structural Power in Late Modernity

This monograph develops a structural account of institutional decay in the contemporary United States, advancing a different lens on elite coordination and extraction. Rather than treating defense, finance, healthcare, education, and energy as discrete domains, it reconstructs th...

How to Outperform China with a Glass-Steagall Act for Defense

The US defense acquisition system exhibits a persistent and widening gap between technological innovation and fielded military capability—a gap China is rapidly closing. This paper argues that the root cause is not insufficient R&D funding or bureaucratic inefficiency *per se*, b...

Neurogenic Rosacea as a Lyapunov‑Stabilisable System: A Control‑Theoretic Framework for Rogue Neuroimmune Loops

Rosacea affects roughly $5\%$ of adults worldwide [1, 2], yet patients with prominent neurogenic features often remain refractory to standard anti‑inflammatory or vasomotor therapies [5, 6]. We propose that this recalcitrant subset is best understood through a control‑theoretic l...

Seed-Triggered Onset of Neoclassical Tearing Modes: A Minimal Bifurcation Model and an Open Empirical Test

Neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) are a principal performance limit in tokamak plasmas: magnetic islands sustained by a helically perturbed bootstrap current, linearly stable yet nonlinearly unstable, and generally requiring a finite "seed" perturbation to trigger sustained growt...

Seed-Triggered Onset of Neoclassical Tearing Modes: A Minimal Bifurcation Model and an Open Empirical Test

Neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) are a principal performance limit in tokamak plasmas: magnetic islands sustained by a helically perturbed bootstrap current, linearly stable yet nonlinearly unstable, and generally requiring a finite "seed" perturbation to trigger sustained growt...

Seed-Triggered Onset of Neoclassical Tearing Modes: A Minimal Bifurcation Model and an Open Empirical Test

Neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) are a principal performance limit in tokamak plasmas: magnetic islands sustained by a helically perturbed bootstrap current, linearly stable yet nonlinearly unstable, and generally requiring a finite "seed" perturbation to trigger sustained growt...

Destabilised Neuroimmune Feedback Loops: A Control-Theoretic Framework and Its Application to Rosacea

The past two decades have witnessed a steady shift in our understanding of chronic inflammatorydisease - from linear cascades to regulated circuits, complete with feedback, amplification, and sus-ceptibility to runaway behaviour. Systems biologists have long emphasised that biolo...

The GABA-B – Substance P–Histamine Axis: A Unifying Mechanism for Neurogenic Inflammation

Neurogenic inflammation—the process by which sensory neurones release neuropeptides that activate immune cells—is increasingly recognised as a pathogenic mechanism in a range of chronic inflammatory conditions, including rosacea, chronic pruritus, and mast cell-mediated dermatose...