Eric Hobsbawm argued that banditry was an archaic and pre-political phenomenon that emerged simultaneously and with striking intensity in different regions around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While it has often been seen as marginal in global histories, banditry provides an essential gateway to the study of modern history from a global perspective. Drawing on different regional case studies, this article approaches the similarities and connections that ran through different instances of banditry in terms of their inclusion within the global dynamics of imperial expansion, capitalism, and the developing notions of territoriality and sovereignty. It argues that the ubiquitous presence of banditry in this period was propelled by the deep-running changes to local relations of class, economy, and power that resulted from these accelerating global dynamics. Bandits emerged as the expression of rural communities in all their complexity and were able to negotiate their place within the rapidly evolving societies of this period. Far from being victims, bandits were key agents who navigated change, adaptation, and resistance in the modern world. In this sense, banditry was a powerful expression of the different ways in which rural communities interacted, negotiated, and clashed with the global.

This paper considers the relationship between litigants in person (LiPs) and conspiracy theories and seeks to answer two questions: how, and why, do some LiPs come to be conspiracy theorists? The majority of LiPs, of course, do not become conspiracy-minded. There is also no evidence that LiPs are more likely than anyone else in legal proceedings to be conspiracists, only, perhaps, that it is more obvious when they are. But there continue to be individuals who have conspiracist explanations for difficulties or failures they experience throughout legal proceedings. And while it is widely held that some LiPs hold eccentric beliefs about the law, there has been little attempt to understand how and why LiPs may come to acquire or articulate these beliefs. This is presumably because it has not been considered important to interrogate the views of people already often assumed to be ‘difficult’ or eccentric. This paper contends, however, that trying to understand how and why these conspiracist beliefs are acquired matters very much. This is because conspiracy theories can give us a critical insight into how negative experiences of litigation can result in a loss of faith or trust in legal institutions.

The article pioneers the examination of “hustle kingdoms”: illegal cybercrime training academies in West Africa. It explores these entities as innovative and adaptive institutions that emerge in response to systemic socio-economic strain. This article provides a unique analysis of hustle kingdoms by situating their emergence within the region’s socio-economic, cultural and technological trajectories. It does so by assessing the contemporary manifestation of these cybercrime academies with history in mind to understand the past that created them. It highlights how these cybercrime training academies have evolved from earlier forms, thereby showcasing a unique form of deviant innovation. It contributes to existing literature by addressing the critical gap in the scholarly discourse surrounding these entities and their historical evolution. Drawing on Merton’s strain theory, this historical scholarly endeavour examines how systemic barriers to education and employment have fostered deviant innovation, transforming hustle kingdoms from early fraud enterprises into sophisticated, global cybercrime networks. The analysis highlights the structural disparities that sustain their operations by juxtaposing these academies with conventional educational frameworks. The findings offer novel insights into the intersection of inequality, cultural narratives and technological adaptation, positioning hustle kingdoms as both products and catalysts of systemic strain.

Nepal is classified as a low-middle income country (World Bank, 2023), and like other such countries, it is under international pressure to attain gender equality targets in order to receive international aid. However, Nepal is also permeated by widespread perceptions that girls are subordinate to boys, which influences girls’ access to education, information, health and the labour market (Upadhaya & Sah, 2019). Women face restrictions in terms of their basic ability to ‘independently venture outside the household, maintain the privacy of their bank accounts, use mobile phones, or become employed’ (Karki & Mix, 2022: 413). Illiteracy disproportionately affects females, with 58.95% of illiterates being women and girls (UNESCO, 2021). Notwithstanding this, recent years have seen some progress in enhancing gender equality in Nepal, and females currently enjoy higher enrolment rates than males across secondary education (UNESCO, 2023). This article, however, provides evidence that the recent trend to offer English-medium education risks setting back progress made by creating a gender-differentiated system that could yield different outcomes for boys and girls and potentially restrict girls’ future trajectories post school and contribute to broader gender inequality in society.

Studies of the Jing Ke lore in early China have focused on three major texts: the “Yan ce” 燕策 (Stratagems of the Yan) in Zhanguo ce 戰國策 (Stratagems of the Warring States), “Cike liezhuan” 刺客列傳 (The Biography of Assassins) in the Shi ji 史記 (Grand Archivist’s Records), and Yan Dan zi 燕丹子 (Prince Dan of Yan). Most discussions have centered on the similarities and differences among the three accounts—e.g., how the main characters are depicted, and different interpretations of Jing Ke’s motivations and Prince Dan’s plot. However, a myriad of transmitted and excavated materials on the Jing Ke lore have not been sufficiently discussed in the context of the culture of early China. This article adopts a multidisciplinary approach, combining literature, history, philosophy, fine arts, and archaeology, to examine Pre-Qin and Han dynasty accounts of the Jing Ke lore. In addition, this article comprehensively investigates the iconography of the Jing Ke lore found in burial paintings and huaxiang shi 畫像石 (pictorial stones) dating to the Han dynasty which have been found throughout China. It delves into the disparities between these visual representations and the records of the Jing Ke lore in transmitted texts and explains the likely underlying reasons behind these disparities. By analyzing both transmitted texts and excavated materials, this article traces the construction of this influential and controversial figure in early China, and in elite discourse as well as in folk culture and art, and in so doing provides a glimpse into the transformation of the socio-political, literary, and intellectual history of early China.

Ferula sinkiangensis K.M. Shen is a threatened medicinal plant endemic to Xinjiang, China, with a small population size and a narrow distribution range. We assessed the status of this species with respect to its population age structure, the level of threat and extinction risk. Only one population remains, in Yining County, Xinjiang. We conducted field surveys of the population in 2022 and 2023, counting 2,033 and 1,515 individuals, respectively, in 144 sample quadrats. We assessed the age structure of the population by counting the number of basal leaves of each individual. The frequency distribution had an inverted J-shape, indicative of a relatively stable age structure. However, the number of mature individuals was small, raising concerns about the risk of genetic drift and inbreeding. This species is also threatened by habitat destruction and inappropriate collection practices. We recommend that F. sinkiangensis is categorized as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List on the basis of criteria B2ab(iii), C2a(i) and D.

This essay endeavors a correlation between Bernard Lonergan’s ‘four-point hypothesis’ – a theological proposal integrating trinitarian theology and the supernatural order of ‘created grace’ – and the sacraments of initiation. The same formal structure that Lonergan discerned in the experience of grace, itself a means of participation in the life of the Trinity, is replicated in the sacramental reception of that grace in those ritual acts whereby one is made a Christian. This at once serves as a ‘proof of concept’, lending credence to the Lonerganian proposal, and provides a speculative framework for understanding how it is that the sacraments introduce Christians into the divine life.

With brightly colored papel picado (cut paper banners), tissue flowers, and Latin American flags festooning the performance area at San Francisco's Z Space, David Herrera Performance Company's September 2023 event, ÓRALE!, promised fun and festivity. On its surface, the performance resembled a typical dance program, with an ensemble of ten dancers performing eleven separate pieces choreographed to songs from the catalog of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, but an exciting hybrid form of movement theatre emerged through the interplay of live music, dance, and El Vez. Built around the music and performances of Robert Lopez, who has performed as El Vez for more than thirty years, ÓRALE! offered an opportunity for an intergenerational community of artists to find themselves in El Vez's work, and for Lopez to see his own vision reflected in the interpretations of the young dancers and choreographers involved. This article considers how ÓRALE! harnesses the creative possibilities of resisting the implied disciplinary borders that too often separate music, dance, and theatre performance. We begin by discussing the creative invitation that El Vez offers, to make clear how he uses his art as a form of world building, using popular culture to critique US American society, make visible the disparate cultural traditions that exist within US American cultural forms, and to envision new ways of being. We then discuss ÓRALE! following two different through lines: process and product. The collaborative process of ÓRALE! was a site of cultural, intergenerational, and geographic exchange, inviting both performers and audience into a genre-defying performance that raised critical questions around intermediality and transtemporality in the arts. As a process very much in development, the collaboration experimented with learning through doing that led to a performance event that was at times messy and at times magical. Following Elizabeth Ellsworth, ÓRALE! was an example of “knowledge in the making,” a fluid experience through which “the self is understood as a becoming, an emergence, and as continually in the making. This . . . moves us beyond a contemporary politics of difference based in semiotics and linguistics toward an experimental ‘pragmatics of becoming’ based on making and doing.” The event embodied a Muñozian process of disidentification to bring into being a utopian present, residing in this space of becoming and of knowledge in the making to reveal the complexities of Latinx subjectivity while rejecting essentialist understandings of race, ethnicity, and culture.

This essay suggests that there are three crucial contexts that have been overlooked in the scholarship on Andrei Zviagintsev's film, Leviathan. First, there is the ecclesiastical history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the years following the election of Kirill (Gundiaev) as Patriarch of Moscow in 2009. The article demonstrates that Zviagintsev was keenly aware of Kirill's growing partnership with the Putin regime and that he was especially dismayed by the patriarch's response to the Bolotnaia protests and Pussy Riot affair. The second context is more theological and considerably lesser known. It concerns the notion of the church's “dark double”, a concept developed in the mid-twentieth century by an obscure Gulag survivor and lay theologian named Sergei Fudel΄. My main contention in the essay is that Fudel΄'s conception of the “dark double” is the foundational theological idea in Leviathan—the idea that structures and underpins all of the film's religious scenes. Finally, the third context recovered is the religious thinking of Andrei Zviagintsev himself. For it turns out that the celebrated auteur director is comfortable discussing not only scriptwriting or cinematography. He also has much to say, both onscreen and off, about the clerics and faithful of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church.

Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization. Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

California has historically been imagined as larger than life – a place of excess and grandeur. The organizing power of the myth of the American West is especially evident in the work of Ferenc Szasz, which has helped historians think about the distinctiveness of religion in the region. In the years since Religion in the Modern American West was published, the region has emerged as a productive test site for exploring religion’s relationship to colonialism, the formulation of diverse racial and ethnic groups, and the role of place and space in scholarly analysis. The work of Jonathan Ebel and Lloyd Barba adds to this literature by uncovering the religious dynamics hidden in California’s non-coastal cities. Located in an area known as the Central Valley, cities like Bakersfield, Tulare, and Wasco are bordered by mountain ranges that separate the interior from coastal metropolises and beach towns. Far from the Pacific Ocean breeze, these cities are hot, and their reputations as “rural” towns propped up by an agrarian-based economy have historically fueled stereotypes about the people who live there. As such, the region has tended to be dismissed as a site of serious study.

In the late 1930s, the activist and journalist Carleton Beals reported on the religious lives of recent migrants to California. His observations of these destitute new arrivals showcased the prejudices of the era and displayed his Menckensque style

The present article examines the particular role that cities have played, and should play, in global social history. It notes that many of the historiographical discussions that in the past years have addressed the reach and limits of the bourgeoisie and the middle class as a globalized social formation have implicitly focused on cities. It also notes that these discussions have often not been very forthcoming in explicitly acknowledging this urban focus. From this starting point, the present article ponders the implications and ramifications of making this focus more explicit. What do we conclude from the observation that the ‘global bourgeoisie’ or the ‘global middle class’, inasmuch as they existed at all, were quintessentially urban formations? And what do these conclusions, conversely, entail for the field of urban history? Highlighting density and differentiation as key traits of the urban form, the article ultimately argues for greater attention to the spatiality and to the built environment of class formation in global history.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst to build a stronger European Health Union to protect the health of Europeans and to develop a new Global Health Strategy to contribute to global health security. In positioning itself as a key player in global health governance, the EU seeks to assert its responsibility as a global health actor and deepen its leadership in global health law.

National Red Lists are useful tools in establishing local conservation priorities. The threat status of Estonian lichens based on the IUCN system has been assessed twice, in 2008 and 2023. In the latest Red List, the proportion of species of elevated conservation concern, that is taxa belonging to the Near Threatened and threatened categories or having become regionally extinct in Estonia, was high (58%) while Least Concern (LC) species represented one-third (36%) of all taxa. Macrolichens were more threatened than microlichens. The Red List Index (RLI), illustrating the trends of species in their projected extinction risk, was calculated. The values were low (< 0.7 in 2023), thus indicating a heightened risk both for the set of all species and for macrolichens. More than half of all Estonian lichens are associated with woodlands and 54% of these species are of elevated conservation concern. Lichens preferring broad-leaved deciduous trees included more threatened than LC species, while among lichens preferring other deciduous or coniferous trees the proportion of LC species was higher than that of threatened taxa. Lichens inhabiting calcareous grasslands had the highest share (69%) of taxa of elevated conservation concern. Comparisons of national red-listed data with four selected countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland and Sweden) revealed that the biggest overlaps of Estonian taxa of elevated conservation concern were with the Czech Republic and Finland.

South Africa has seen a surge in child offending. Child offenders commit violent crimes such as armed robbery, housebreaking, rape and murder. Conversely, not all child offenders commit violent crimes. Many child offenders are detained for minor charges such as shoplifting, theft and possession of illegal substances. Most of these children face numerous levels of adversity, including poverty, dysfunctional households and limited parental involvement. Responses to child criminal behaviour accentuate rehabilitation through measures such as diversion. Narrative accounts of children in conflict with the law who underwent mentorship programmes, as a diversion initiative, are scarce and underrepresented. Through a qualitative inquiry, 13 children who completed the National Youth Development Outreach (NYDO) Centre’s Mentoring Diversion Programme were interviewed and data were analysed thematically. Findings provided insight into the participants’ background and context, the mentor–mentee relationship, responsibility, effectiveness of the programme, and aftercare support. This paper contributes to scientific research and is conducive to curtailing child offending.

Royals abound in global history. Kings were served at court by domestic, administrative, and military elites who connected the centre to the provinces. Contemporary observers as well as modern historians have often stressed the contrast between oriental despots and limited monarchs in the West, downplaying structural resemblances. This article moves beyond clichés commonly ascribed to East and West, and asks to what extent social practices of court life were shared across early modern Eurasia. Then it reviews the profound changes in European court life during the long eighteenth century. Can parallel reform movements be found in other parts of Eurasia? Finally, it moves from comparisons to connections, by tracing fundamental shifts in the relationships between European royals and royals across the globe from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. This longue durée examination questions common views about European exceptionalism and corrects persistent clichés about rising middle classes and declining nobilities.

Given how thoroughly the history of quantum physics has been excavated, it might be wondered what these two hefty volumes by a physicist (Duncan) and a historian (Janssen) bring to the table. Aside from their inclusion of a wide range of recent work in this area, including some notable publications by themselves, the answer is twofold: first, as they state explicitly in the preface to the first volume, derivations of the key results are presented ‘at a level that a reader with a command of physics and mathematics comparable to that of an undergraduate in physics should be able to follow without having to take out pencil and paper’ (vol. 1, p. vi). In response to those who might raise Whiggish eyebrows, I shall simply play the ‘you-try-reading-Pascual-Jordan's-groundbreaking-work-in-the-original’ card. As the authors suggest, by using modern notation and streamlining derivations whilst also, they maintain, remaining conceptually faithful to the original sources (ibid.), the book is rendered suitable for classroom use, albeit at the higher undergraduate or graduate levels.