Este trabajo vincula la evolución del poder de mercado de la banca española con la liberalización financiera entre 1970 y 1990. Se realiza una cronología de las medidas de desregulación y se mide empíricamente el poder de mercado, para lo que se ha elaborado un indicador directo, el índice Lerner. Se comprueba que la desregulación bancaria no fue lineal, y las entidades bancarias compitieron incluso antes de la liberación completa. Se aprecia que el poder de mercado disminuyó en los años 70, por la mayor competencia a través de la red de oficinas, seguido por un aumento en los 80, coincidiendo con un parón en las medidas liberalizadoras. Desde 1988, la competencia se intensificó de nuevo con la consolidación de las medidas liberalizadoras. Además, los resultados permiten descartar la tesis de las reformas financieras consideradas como un pacto entre la banca y las autoridades que no alteró el marco competitivo permitiendo a los grandes bancos cartelizar el sector.

Blockchain technology is emerging as one of the most profound and cutting-edge innovations of the twenty-first century, providing a decentralized, immutable system for recording transactions. It has enabled the tokenization of distinctive digital assets, including art, music and real estate, through non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs enable asset transfers by operating on pseudonymous blockchain networks, thereby preventing the disclosure of the owner’s real-world identity. While it enhances user privacy and innovation, it also creates significant anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing challenges. Fraudsters and other bad-faith actors can use these assets to obfuscate dirty money and illicit financial transactions, given lax or non-existent regulations on NFTs and extremely lax Know-Your-Customer compliance. In light of the above, the authors explore the nexus between NFTs and financial crime (with a particular focus on the legal frameworks of the Sultanate of Oman, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom) in this article. The paper aims to evaluate how each jurisdiction’s response to NFT-related abuse has evolved and been effective in practice. This will be done through a review of existing laws, enforcement, regulations and regulatory gaps. The article ends with specific policy recommendations to enhance regulatory certainty, enforcement effectiveness and international cooperation, supporting an innovation-first approach to the NFT space tempered by necessary measures to prevent criminal abuse.

Nacera Belaza asks a dancer to “be sound.” This is not a metaphor, nor is it a request for the dancer to produce sound, talk, or sing. It is a task given with little explanation but meant to unlock a way of performing without pretending, stirring up questions about the historically racialized possibility of realness, transparency, and transmission, and drawing attention to profound sensory experiences that might never be clear. Here, performing one impossible task (being sound) becomes instructive in doing another (writing dance).

The excavation of the site of Gatwa-sûr in the Zagros region of the Kurdistan region of Iraq has provided valuable insights into Early Christian burial practices in Northern Iraq during the Sasanian period. The discovery of an earthenware coffin adorned with symbols that highlight the presence of Christian oriented groups in the region provides new data on burial customs under Sasanian rule. This archaeological evidence strengthens our knowledge of the coexistence of different religious faiths within the Sasanian Empire. Despite the challenges posed by repeated disturbances to the burial site over ancient and modern times, the recovered skeletal remains offer crucial evidence for understanding the health, lifestyle, and demographic profile of individuals during this era. Anthropological analysis revealed common ailments such as tooth loss, degenerative osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and infectious periostitis. Additionally, the presence of enthesopathies suggests engagement in strenuous physical activities, likely related to agricultural or manual labor. The interdisciplinary approach, involving archaeologists, residents, and media, has raised awareness about the importance of protecting archaeological sites and fostering community engagement in research endeavors. Overall, the Gatwa-sûr excavation contributes significantly to our understanding of religious, cultural, and social dynamics in the Kurdistan region of Iraq in Late Antiquity, emphasizing the need for further exploration and preservation efforts in the region.

This essay examines how Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman draws on and revises key themes from Adam Smith’s moral philosophy. While Smith is often seen as a theorist of sympathy and market society, Wollstonecraft engages with his ideas to develop a distinctive critique of women’s social and moral subordination. I highlight how she reworks Smith’s account of moral development to emphasize the formative role of adversity, independence, and judgment—particularly in shaping female character. In doing so, Wollstonecraft also challenges the ideals of femininity promoted in contemporary conduct literature, exposing how they hinder moral agency and reinforce dependence. The analysis shows how she reimagines the moral conditions of modern society and offers an early feminist response to both commercial and sentimental conceptions of virtue.

“Hacktivists”, “patriotic hackers” and “civilian hackers” are today conducting cyber operations in several armed conflicts. While some of these groups work closely with State armed forces to support their operations and harm the enemy militarily, reports suggest that too often, civilian hackers have targeted – and damaged or disrupted – various parts of civilian infrastructures, such as banks, companies, pharmacies, hospitals, railway networks and civilian government services. The growing involvement of civilian hackers in digitalizing armed conflicts raises a number of legal questions. First, we must ask what limits international humanitarian law (IHL) imposes on civilian hackers. Second, it must be assessed what “status” these hackers and hacker groups have under IHL, and in what circumstances civilian hackers risk directly participating in hostilities and therefore losing their protection against attack. Third, the question arises of when a State is legally responsible for the conduct of civilian hackers operating under its instruction, direction or control, and what responsibilities States have to ensure respect for IHL by civilian hackers operating from their territory.

Austria's political year in 2024 was shaped by a dense electoral calendar, including elections to the European Parliament, the National Council, and two regional parliaments. The populist right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) benefited notably, securing first place in three of these four elections (with the region of Vorarlberg being the exception). As a result, the FPÖ gained additional seats in legislatures at all levels, albeit with varying effects on executive power. While the FPÖ entered two regional governments—assuming the governorship in Styria—other parties refused to participate in any coalition involving the FPÖ at the national level. Breaking a longstanding tradition, Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen therefore granted the mandate to form a government to the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). The ÖVP subsequently initiated coalition talks with the Social Democratic Party of Austria and NEOS-The New Austria and Liberal Forum, which were still ongoing at the end of 2024.

This ethnographic study examines the transformation of Italian indie culture under platform capitalism, tracing how digital infrastructures have reconfigured the relationship between independence and mainstream commercial logic. Drawing on fieldwork with musicians, industry professionals, and audiences across Italy, it argues that the semantic and aesthetic coordinates of indie have shifted from oppositional autonomy to a stylised modality compatible with platform logics, where visibility and metric optimisation increasingly dictate artistic legitimacy through commercial imperatives and through the internalisation of platform-mediated evaluative frameworks. The Italian case, rooted in a tradition of politicised independence, reveals how local infrastructures and cultural histories mediate these global transformations. Synthesising grounded, abductive analysis with historical reconstruction, the study identifies three intertwined processes – mainstreamisation, semantic drift, and platform gravity – through which visibility metrics and sponsorship logics recalibrate artistic practice, legitimacy, and audience address, recognising that these dynamics interact with diverse cultural trajectories and do not operate as a uniform homogenising force. The emerging configurations still depend on established intermediaries, informal circuits, and human decision-making embedded in longstanding power structures, even as platform mediation intensifies the circulation and repetition of certain stylistic and organisational practices. To theorise these shifts, the article advances ‘poptimism’ as a structural condition. The analysis shows how this gravitational field is absorbed into existing professional sensibilities, where platform mentalities recur within industry judgements shaped by longstanding organisational logics.

The present paper first distinguishes three different ways in which the logic of parthood and composition on the one hand, and the logic of location on the other might interact. It then goes on to explore several relations between location and composition. In doing so it (i) sheds new light on recent results and (ii) proves new substantive ones along the way.

We construct a family of special cycle classes on the regular integral model of an orthogonal Shimura variety, and show that these cycle classes appear as Fourier coefficients of a Siegel modular form. Passing to the generic fiber of the Shimura variety recovers a result of Bruinier and Raum, originally conjectured by Kudla.

Rather than a widely expected autumn election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called one to be held on 4 July. His Conservative Party were reduced to just 121 seats, and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer became the new Prime Minister. The change in administration led to some significant policy shifts towards the latter half of the year—in particular, the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme to tackle immigration. The new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, held a budget in October that criticised the economic management of the previous government and scrapped winter fuel payments for pensioners.

Images can help us to better understand how the laws of war and international humanitarian law have developed. As images transmit several messages simultaneously, they can reveal contextual, ideological, political and emotional dimensions that legal texts may not fully capture. This article aims to be an exercise seeking to demonstrate how a painting can serve not only as a historical source but also as a trigger for curiosity, prompting deeper exploration into the past and into the history of the laws of war. The painting in question, an 1881 piece by the Mexican artist Francisco de Paula Mendoza entitled The Pardon of the Belgians or The Exchange of Belgian Prisoners, will transport us to a mid-nineteenth-century exchange of prisoners of war (PoWs) and will remind us of the long-forgotten chapter of the Belgian volunteer force in what is known as the French Intervention in Mexico (1862–67). Drawing on primary and secondary sources, the article will offer new perspectives on the status of PoWs, the practice of the exchange of PoWs, and the doctrinal underpinnings of these ideas, and will reveal the entanglements between the laws of war, the principle of equal sovereignty, self-determination, non-intervention and republicanism in nineteenth-century Latin America. It will also reveal the interest of Latin American republics like Mexico in formalizing and standardizing the practice of the laws of war.

We argue that scholars involved in debates on Kant’s writings on race and racism are deeply entangled with a tacit methodological debate about the use of a ‘priority principle’. We identify three variants of the priority principle in Kant scholarship. To illustrate, we focus on interpretations of Kant’s Physical Geography. The methodological approaches we analyse offer three opposite and mutually exclusive interpretative recommendations. We articulate a taxonomy of methods commonly employed and suggest that focusing on individual texts reveals value-laden methodological assumptions guiding the debate. To address substantive issues surrounding Kant’s raciology, we suggest commentators should carefully justify their methodological choices.

This essay studies gender in medieval heresy by focusing on an inquisitorial trial in Milan in 1300. The inquisitors investigated a small group of devotees of a deceased penitent woman named Guglielma for venerating her as the Holy Spirit. A noble Humiliati nun, who would become Guglielma’s pope in a coming new age, and a wealthy layman cooperated as the devotees’ leaders. On the surface, the devotees seemed to have reversed gender roles, which late medieval male clergy-female mystic partnerships exemplified. Through an analysis of the surviving records, this article demonstrates that, instead of inverting gender expectations as the inquisitors assumed, the devotees’ vision of a new age – somewhat infused with Joachimism – and the co-leadership of the nun and the layman developed out of transcending the gender binary. As a result, the devotees saw Guglielma not as a co-redeemer with Christ but as the Holy Spirit who comforted them, would convert non-Christians, and had helped unite the devotees, even those of opposing political factions, into a family. Rejecting violent rupture as well as binary gender roles, their future age, which would begin with the nonviolent replacement of the Roman Church, would both preserve Milan’s social hierarchy and eschew binary gender roles.

In July 2023, drag artist Pura Luka Vega’s Ama Namin (Our Father) performance in “Jesus drag” went viral across the Philippine archipelago. Many deemed Luka’s performance blasphemous, and they were declared persona non grata and imprisoned twice. This kanalization is a process where Christian fundamentalists, conservative publics, and state officials tag bakla (often conflated with being gay or transfeminine) as kanal (canal or sewer), deserving imprisonment and even death. By queering worship, bakla communities challenge anti-bakla regimes.

The Shamash Gate of Nineveh is one of the major gates that leads into the city from the east. Archaeological work at the gate has been on hold since the early 1970s, when the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage embarked on excavations and reconstruction of the gate. A preliminary investigation of the Shamash Gate in 2020 by the Iraqi–Italian Nineveh Expedition (NINEV_E), under the directorship of Nicolò Marchetti, revealed both the considerable extent of the damage and destruction wreaked on this important and historic landmark of ancient Nineveh and Mosul during the period of ISIS control and the urgent need to stabilise the surviving remains of the gate. This investigation also confirmed that the core of the gate complex remains intact and would benefit greatly from a carefully planned and judiciously implemented research program. In this paper we provide a summary report on three seasons of work at the Shamash Gate, including mapping, stabilising, and excavation.