This article argues that women welfare claimants, particularly lone mothers, were disproportionately targeted by invasive and punitive anti-fraud measures in the post-1945 welfare state because they were considered most likely to commit fraud through their perceived sexual immorality and reckless childbearing. Although the issue of welfare fraud has influenced high-profile policy and legislation, existing historical scholarship is scant and we know little about the form, extent, or consequences of welfare fraud. Here, a mix of correspondence, statistics, and reports produced by the National Assistance Board, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, and National Assistance Board for Northern Ireland are analyzed alongside memoirs and a sample of offenses dealt with by the police to explore the nature and scale of welfare fraud by women alongside an examination of anti-fraud measures employed by the state in Britain and Northern Ireland. It shows that fraud policies risked bringing women into unwelcome conflict with authorities and pushed women into dropping their claims, out of fear of prosecution. In Britain, this approach became intertwined with an embedded hostility toward migrants, while sectarianism underpinned the delivery of state welfare in Northern Ireland. Consequently, these findings suggest new ways of understanding how the welfare state reshaped the relationship between central government and its most vulnerable citizens.

After the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty obliged the German Reich to far-reaching military disarmament. Pacifist journalists who reported in the 1920s and early 1930s on illegal rearmament measures by the Reichswehr were threatened with legal action by the Reichsgericht, Germany’s supreme court, on charges of journalistic treason. Contemporary opponents of the proceedings, as well as modern research, accused the Reichsgericht of siding with the Reichswehr against the republican governments in its ruling in favor of the Reichswehr’s illegal rearmament. However, the rulings of the Reichsgericht were not solely based on legal provisions; they also invoked the official guidelines of German foreign policy. The article demonstrates that the Foreign Office exerted far greater influence than the Reichswehr Ministry for most of the period. It thereby highlights the tension between law and politics in political criminal trials and nuances the so-called “crisis of confidence” in the Weimar judiciary.

This article employs terroir as an analytical framework to examine how a place-specific tea acquired its reputation and contributed to processes of cultural self-fashioning in Song China. Focusing on Fujian’s Beiyuan 北苑 tea—exceptionally well documented in Song sources—it explores the close connections among tea, landscape appreciation, and place-making. Drawing on tea manuals and connoisseur writings, the article shows how literati linked tea quality to both natural conditions and cultural practices, using such associations to articulate refined taste and produce place-based knowledge. The case of Beiyuan tea reveals the emergence of a distinctly Chinese rhetoric of terroir, one that transformed environmental description into a rhetoric that mediated between local expertise and imperial order. Within this framework, place itself came to embody quality, integrating physical environment, cultural identity, and sensory experience.

This article aims to demonstrate that the “Alevi Revival,” commonly described as the sudden increase in visibility of Alevis in Turkey in the early 1990s, was actually the result of a decade-long transformation experienced by Alevis in Europe since the late 1970s. This historical contextualization is not entirely novel but is typically only framed in reference to certain milestone events. The present article substantiates this approach based on an analysis of nine issues of Yurtseverler Birliği, one of the earliest Alevi political journals, published from 1982 to 1989 in Berlin and not yet studied. The evolving discourse surrounding Alevism in this journal’s issues provides the earliest substantial evidence for understanding the emergence and evolution of strategies employed to promote the visibility of Alevism from the 1980s to the 1990s. By the end of this period, the strategy of “making Alevism known” had become dominant in defining Alevism in Europe, in contrast to heterogeneous approaches to framing Alevism in Turkey. In this sense, the “Alevi Manifesto,” an open letter published in 1990 in Turkey, and the first Alevi Culture Week, organized a year before in Germany, should be regarded as outcomes of the preexisting context rather than the Revival’s initiation.

How do ordinary Chinese people circumvent unpopular state policies? The existing literature primarily focuses on resistance against local bureaucrats. Drawing on ethnographic research on the ten-year fishing ban in the Yangtze River Basin, this article finds that fishermen (clients) continue to fish by maintaining patron–client relationships with the enforcers of the fishing ban (patrons). Ordinary fishermen seek the protection of enforcers through bribery. Enhanced state monitoring under the fishing ban facilitates bribery-based clientelism by weakening the fishermen’s everyday resistance, but it also constrains the power of enforcers by increasing the risk that their corruption will be discovered by upper-level authorities. For extremely poor fishermen, who are barely able to afford to pay bribes, their daily acts of resistance are morally justified by the need for subsistence safety, presenting enforcers with a dilemma: they must fulfil their law enforcement duties while also ensuring the survival of these individuals to maintain social stability. Therefore, cultivating a clientelist relationship with impoverished fishermen enables enforcers to manage their noncompliance, thereby balancing these conflicting goals. While clientelism protects people from unpopular policies to some extent, it more fundamentally strengthens the power of local bureaucrats, creating the potential for greater exploitation and larger-scale popular grievances in the long run.

This article examines contemporary expressions of human to more-than-human interaction through the lens of technoenvironments, understood as evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together, shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance. We relate technoenvironments both to multinatural cosmologies recounting mythical origins of human society in Southeast Asia through the union of mountains and the sea, and to modern approaches derived from contemporary feminist political ecology. We explore performative practices which express and shape understandings of the co-becoming of humans and more-than-humans at case studies in Indonesia and Vietnam. The first analyses an art performance in Yogyakarta Indonesia, where participants from different classes, genders, and educational backgrounds co-create mandalas articulating their imaginaries of organic agriculture. Beans, plantlets, soil and plastics became actants in their own right. The second case studies performative protests by diverse citizens of Hanoi - students, families with children, artists, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community - in response to plans to fell more than 6,000 trees. This challenged the hegemony of science-based discourse by affirming the mutual affective relationships between humans and trees. In both cases, living matter such as trees, plants, seeds, and soil becomes agents in the performative representation of people’s entanglements with their more-than-human environment. We compare the performativity of environmental protest and art along the dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations. To conclude, we reflect on how the cosmologies of Southeast Asia inform current multispecies relationships in the context of technoenvironments both in Indonesia and Vietnam.