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Abstract The post-Cold War period has seen the rise of international liberal peacebuilding, as an overarching framework for international interventions in intrastate conflicts. In contrast, the current period is marked by decline of liberal peacebuilding, and a simultaneous rise of domestic illiberal peacebuilding. This has created a gap between the predominant theoretical and policy framework and the actual form of peacebuilding in many conflict-ridden societies. The present article addresses this challenge through a contextual case study of illiberal peacebuilding in Myanmar. The case study shows how a dominant state actor – the military (Tatmadaw) – has used both coercion and co-optation to contain armed resistance against militarized and centralized statebuilding and thereby strengthen the state's territorial control and authority. While the SLORC/SPDC military junta (1988–2011) sought to contain ethnic armed organizations through military offensives, ceasefire agreements and illiberal peacebuilding, the military based USDP-government (2011–2015) institutionalized a hybrid regime as a framework for political transformation of EAOs, and tolerated a degree of dual territorial, administrative and resource control at the local scale. These clientelist measures failed to address the substantive issues behind Myanmar's multiple and protracted conflicts. They were also combined with military offensives against non-ceasefire groups and war by other means in ceasefire areas. Moreover, the case study demonstrates that the Tatmadaw used its tutelary power to obstructs substantive conflict resolution through negotiated state reforms. Myanmar's peace initiatives during the last three decades should thus be understood as illiberal strategies for containing ethnic armed organizations rather than attempts at substantive conflict resolution.

Abstract While European integration has predominantly been addressed in terms of its common market and through questions of European identity, this article explores alternate perspectives of environment in peripheral landscapes as a practice through which European center-periphery relations are negotiated. Drawing on two case studies, namely the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and the arid regions of Almeria in southeast Spain, we highlight how these landscapes have been variously framed as explicitly European spaces through either developmental narratives or environmental activism and advocacy. We argue that European integration is realized and contested through the discursive and material transformation of landscapes. With this, we contribute to an understanding of environmentalism and the politics of the environment as instrumental in addressing broader and parallel political concerns. Combining southern and eastern European perspectives on the political geography of the environment, we show that the landscape functions as an intrinsically political arena that materializes and discursively frames the different meanings and interests of European integration at stake.

This paper introduces an innovative method applied to global (economic) history using the tools of digital humanities through the design and development of the GECEM Project Database (www.gecem.eu; www.gecemdatabase.eu). This novel database goes beyond the static Excel files frequently used by conventional scholarship in early modern history studies to mine new historical data through a bottom-up process and analyse the global circulation of goods, consumer behaviour, and trade networks in early modern China and Europe. Macau and Marseille, as strategic entrepôts for the redistribution of goods, serve as the main case study. This research is framed within a polycentric approach to analyse the connectivity of south Chinese and European markets with trade zones of Spain, France, South America, and the Pacific. GECEM Project (ERC-Starting Grant), ref. 679371, under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, www.gecem.eu. GECEM Project (ERC-Starting Grant), ref. 679371, Horizon 2020, project hosted at UPO https://www.gecem.eu/publications/index.html www.gecem.eu

AbstractPolice verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.

In this paper, I examine progress in the field of mortality over the past 25 years. I argue that we have been most successful in taking advantage of an increasingly data-rich environment to improve aggregate mortality models and test pre-existing theories. Less progress has been made in relating our estimates of mortality risk at the individual level to broader mortality patterns at the population level while appropriately accounting for contextual differences and compositional change. Overall, I find that the field of mortality continues to be highly visible in demographic journals, including

AbstractTo explain single-mother poverty, existing research has either emphasized individualistic, or contextual explanations. Building on the prevalences and penalties framework (Brady et al. 2017), we advance the literature on single-mother poverty in three aspects: First, we extend the framework to incorporate heterogeneity among single mothers across countries and over time. Second, we apply this extended framework to Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, whose trends in single-mother poverty (1990–2014) challenge ideal-typical examples of welfare state regimes. Third, using decomposition analyses, we demonstrate variation across countries in the relative importance of prevalences and penalties to explain time trends in single-mother poverty. Our findings support critiques of static welfare regime typologies, which are unable to account for policy change and poverty trends of single mothers. We conclude that we need to understand the combinations of changes in single mothers’ social compositions and social policy contexts, if we want to explain time trends in single-mother poverty.

Spoofing (canonically: ‘bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution’), once a valued skill in face-to-face trading, has become a crime punishable by jail. Echoing Riles’s call for greater attention to law in research on finance, this article analyzes the interwoven processes of this dramatic shift, including trading’s changing material form, contingencies such as the Congressional response to the global financial crisis, and, above all, the use of criminal (not just civil, administrative) law. Criminal law's particularly strong boundary work – specifically the first criminal indictment and jail sentence for spoofing – rendered earlier ambivalent attitudes and inconsistent enforcement untenable. Nevertheless, drawing a boundary between spoofing and legitimate trading remains work-in-progress, with simultaneously legal, material and moral dimensions.

[ES] La llegada de los españoles y portugueses a América creó un importante comercio de palo brasil hacia Europa. Durante el primer tercio del siglo XVI el brasil americano fue aceptado en los principales centros textiles europeos desplazando al de origen asiático. Este artículo estudio su distribución por los principales mercados europeos así como las pugnas entre distintos grupos de hombres de negocios por hacerse con el control de la importación del brasil traído desde las Indias de Castilla. Para ello se emplea una abundante documentación procedente del Archivo General de Indias, del Archivo General de Simancas y del Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla. [EN] The arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas led to significant brazilwood trading with Europe, where textile industries began using it during the first three decades of the sixteenth century, displacing Asian timber. This article studies its distribution in major European markets, with a focus on the attempts of different groups of merchants to control this American product. The research is based on abundant primary sources found in the Ar-chivo General de Indias, Archivo General de Simancas and in the notarial records of Seville preserved in the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla. Este trabajo se ha realizado en el marco del Proyecto Europeo de Investigación “Connec-ted Worlds: The Caribbean, Origin of Modern World (ConnecCaribbean-823846)”, financiado por el Programa Horizonte 2020 de la Unión Europea; y del Proyecto de I+D “Mercados y tratas de esclavos en el Atlántico ibérico del siglo XVI (HAR2016-78056-P)”, financiado por el Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad del Gobierno de España. Peer reviewed