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During the late colonial era, the focus of economic strategies was on supporting the export sectors dominated by cash-crop production and extractive industries. While the empires paid for the postwar reconstruction of the European metropoles, colonies also experienced economic growth. Increasing incomes and changing consumption patterns created some opportunities for local agro-processing, manufacturing, and services, but there were few larger initiatives for diversification of the colonial economies. Growth was extensive rather than intensive, and the reliance on a small number of commodities made the economies vulnerable to fluctuating world market prices. The colonial budgets grew due to increasing tax revenues and more generous grants and loans from the metropoles. Subsequently, there was increasing government spending on administration, infrastructure, and human development. Urbanization led to substantial social transformation with new types of occupations, changing consumption patterns, unionization, and new relationships between the urban populations and the emerging African political leadership. With an expanding wage sector and opportunities for engaging in export-oriented commercialization, there was growing differentiation and increasing income inequality. Finally, living standards also improved through better hygiene and healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and other investments in social development.

The Aḥmadiyya Movement in Islam is a modern Muslim messianic movement established in 1889 by Ghulām Aḥmad in Qādiyān, a town in the Indian Punjab province. The Aḥmadī Movement became one of the most controversial and most active movements in modern Islam. The movement was accused of rejecting the Muslim dogma asserting the finality of Muḥammad’s prophethood, and therefore aroused fierce opposition of the Sunnī Muslim mainstream. After the partition of India in 1947, the Aḥmadī issue became a major constitutional problem in Pakistan. The Sunnī Muslim mainstream demanded the formal exclusion of the Aḥmadīs from the Muslim fold. This objective was attained in 1974: against fierce opposition of the Aḥmadīs, the Pakistani parliament adopted a constitutional amendment declaring them non-Muslims. In 1984, within the framework of the general trend of Islamization in Pakistan, a presidential “Ordinance no. XX of 1984” transformed the religious observance of the Aḥmadīs into a criminal offense, punishable by three years of imprisonment and a fine. Following its promulgation, the headquarters of the Aḥmadī Movement moved from Rabwa (in Pakistan) to London. The article explains the Aḥmadī interpretation of the dogma relating to the finality of Muḥammad’s prophethood, the reinterpretation of the jihād idea and the substantial change that it introduced into the Muslim beliefs concerning Jesus. It also describes the ideological roots of the split between the Qādiyānī and Lāhorī sections of the movement. A substantial part of the article is devoted to the expansion of the movement in numerous countries of the world.

The Ainu people are indigenous to Japan (the term Ainu means “human”). They have lived mainly in Hokkaido (called Ainu mosir by the Ainu people) and the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Previously, they also lived in Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands (including the Chishima Islands). In the early 21st century, aspects of the Ainu people’s social lives were no different from those of other Japanese people because of historical colonization and forced cultural assimilation. However, Ainu religious practices have changed dramatically. The historical influences that have formed the Ainu culture and religion have been debated from various perspectives. There are two main external influences on the historical formation of the Ainu religion. One is Okhotsk cultural influences, since similar designs are found among the Ainu and some ethnic minorities along the Amur River in the Siberian area, and the other is Japanese cultural influence. Admittedly, the term religion is not appropriate to describe the Ainu religion and spirituality, which is based on the Ainu people’s close relationship with the kamuy (gods, deities) world through nature and by performing rituals and reciting sacred narratives. Ainu religion and spirituality was the fundamental principle guiding their lives as hunter- gatherers. At any specific historical moment, Ainu religion represents the accumulated social and historical expressions of the Ainu people accommodating and negotiating with traditional, inherited religious symbols and notions. Aspects of the Ainu religion include domestic rituals of prayer to the goddess of fire, rituals for ancestral spirits, designs of clothes, tattooing, dancing and music, oral narratives, ritual hunting and communal ceremonies, shamanistic practices, and funeral rites. There are gendered aspects of the Ainu life and religion. While the Ainu men were responsible for offering prayers and performing these rituals, the Ainu women were known for shamanism and narrating kamuy-yukar, songs of kamuy, and offering prayers to ancestral spirits. The Ainu religion is known for its ritual killing of a bear, that is, Iyomante in Ainu language. Iyomantemeans “sending it off,” signifying that the ritual sends the soul of the ritually slain animal back to the world of kamuy (deity or spirit). In order to grasp what it means, it is important to pay close attention to the Ainu’s indigenous religious notions about the relationship between kamuy and animals. Animal bodies or animal flesh are gifts for humans which kamuy embodies or wears in visiting the human world. Iyomante is often translated into “bear ceremony” in English or Japanese, but it is important to grasp the significance of the fact that the Ainu people use the term kamuy for both “bear” and “deity or spirit.” The Ainu people use the term Iyomante not only for the ritual killing of a bear, but also for ritual killings of other animals, such as a fox and an owl.

The work of Alfonso Reyes represents a watershed in modern Hispano-American literature thanks not only to his contributions to the genres of essays and poetry, but also his role in the process of specialization of the role of the writer and intellectual in the public sphere. His path represents a shift from the 19th-century “man of letters” to the modern intellectual. Alfonso Reyes was part of the Ateneo de la Juventud generation (the first modern intellectual association in Mexico), and after these formative years, he took on (and reformed) the main literary currents of Hispano-American modernism and complemented them with the underlying concerns of his generation, such as the search for professionalization in literature and the creation of modern cultural and educational policies.

The U.S. housing finance system has been characterized by fixed-rate, long-term, and high maximum loan-to-value ratio mortgage loans, with unique support from secondary market entities Ginnie Mae and the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The authors provide a comprehensive review of the U.S. housing finance system, from its structure and evolution to the current continuing policy debate. The “American Mortgage” provides many more options to borrowers than are commonly provided elsewhere: U.S. homebuyers can choose whether to pay a fixed or floating rate of interest; they can lock in their interest rate in between the time they apply for the mortgage and the time they purchase their house; they can choose the time at which the mortgage rate resets; they can choose the term and the amortization period; they can generally prepay without penalty; and they can generally borrow against home equity. They can also obtain insured home mortgages at attractive terms with very low down payments. Perhaps most importantly, in the typical mortgage, payments remain constant throughout the potentially 30-year term of the loan. The unique characteristics of the U.S. mortgage provide substantial benefits for American homeowners and the overall stability of the economy. This article describes the evolution of the housing finance system which has led to the predominant role of this mortgage instrument in the United States.

The global water supply–demand gap is rising with population growth, urbanization trends, and industrialization. This situation is expected to push 40% of the world’s population below the water scarcity level by 2050. As of 2023, 20,000 desalination plants converting more than 40 bm3 of water annually in 150 countries. However, the energy-intensive operation, high desalination cost, and environmental footprint of conventional desalination systems require a technological breakthrough in the field to sustainably cope with the demand. This study presents a comprehensive and innovative approach to hybridizing two established desalination technologies for higher energy efficiency, higher water productivity, lower cost, and improved environmental operation. The proposed system is a hybrid multieffect desalination (MED) with an adsorption cycle (ad). The advantages of the proposed system include low-temperature operation (below ambient), double water production over the same top brine temperature, and high thermodynamic efficiency. A pilot-scale MEDAD with a water production capacity of 10 m3/day has been developed and tested. The study showed that the hybridization of the AD cycle with the conventional MED system decreased the bottom brine temperature to approximately 20 °C compared to 40 °C of the conventional MED system. Meanwhile, the productivity of hybrid systems surged to 2–3 times that of the conventional system. Moreover, the system operates at approximately 20% of the thermodynamic limit, which is the highest for any desalination system hitherto. Therefore, the system can be scaled up for any higher productivity as the most viable solution to desalinate seawater.

Early modern Atlantic Africans developed similar canoe-making and canoeing traditions. Rather than treating water as physical and mental barriers, Africans wove fresh-waterways, salt-waterways, and adjoining landscapes together to create seamless waterscapes of social, cultural, spiritual, political, and economic meaning and belonging. Waterscapes and aquatic fluencies expanded Africans’ cultural horizons by tens of thousands of miles, as they swam and canoed across their surfaces, dove into their depths, and surfed their waves. African maritime architecture developed to allow dugouts to negotiate particular hydrographic challenges. African dugouts differed from those crafted by Amerindians, Europeans, Oceanians, and Asians. Accounts suggest that the general shape of dugouts has remained fundamentally unchanged for hundreds of years. However, this does not indicate technological stagnation, as designs continuously evolved with important innovations significantly informing performance and usage, as reflected by surf-canoes. Surf-canoes were innovative watercraft designed to navigate surf-zones—the dynamic space where waves break—that remained off limits to European and American vessel and mariners, forcing them to rely on African expertise to link African and Atlantic markets. In an age with few energy sources—when most societies harnessed wind, animal, and, perhaps, river power—Atlantic Africans used wave power to slingshot surf-canoes laden with fish or tons of cargo ashore, even as the surf threatened to capsize and destroy surf-canoes. While Oceanians rode waves in outrigger canoes, Atlantic Africans are the only known peoples to bridle waves’ energy as part of their daily productive labor. African dugouts on both sides of the Atlantic were crucial to transatlantic trade and European expansion. Little scholarship has been devoted to African dugouts. Green coastal waters important to many Africans’ experiences cannot be separated from the deep blue seas traversed by Western mariners, as it is not enough to describe how Europeans crossed oceans without considering how they got ashore. Traditional lines of inquiry have relegated African-descended peoples and their ability to shape the historical processes to the background, assuming they were passively affected by European circumstances. Virtually all the goods and many of the 12.5 million enslaved people exported out of Africa were transported in canoes to awaiting merchant and slave ships, with surf-canoes bearing much of this load. In the Americas, enslavers quickly realized that African canoe-making and canoeing traditions could be profitably exploited. Most plantations were constructed along broad shallow waterways, similar to African waters, to facilitate the shipment of slave-produced cash crops to seaports. Hence, many planters employed captives as canoe-makers and canoeists to link their plantations to overseas markets.

The Canaries were the only Macaronesian archipelago to have had a stable population before the European expansion in the Atlantic in the late Middle Ages. North African indigenous populations occupied the Canary Islands in the first centuries of the 1st millennium ce and formed island communities whose historical definition amalgamates traditions from their continental origin, local adaptations, and the social dynamics generated by periods of isolation, yet also includes occasional migratory events that affected some of the islands. This shaped populations with a particular development in each part of the archipelago that is manifested in different archaeological expressions. Thus, while some traits can be regarded as held in common, such as the agropastoral resources on which subsistence depended and certain domestic models and funerary practices, other materialities reflect autonomous sociocultural processes. The European conquest and colonization of the Canary Islands in the 15th century led to the sudden disappearance of those Insulo-Amazigh cultures, even though a few aspects have survived, such as some traditions, linguistic elements, foodstuffs, and a genetic footprint that can still be identified in the modern Canary population.

Drawing upon academic sources and policy reports of nongovernmental organizations, the UN, and other bodies, it can be shown how most of these studies have often adopted a gender-binary approach, contributing to an over-focus on and to the stigmatization of “refugee women” as a self-standing category of analysis and a homogeneous social group, while differently gendered bodies on the move have been under-investigated. Although fluid understandings of gender have long since informed gender and sexuality theories, the binary approach, when coming to the field of forced migration, remained the most common way of framing displaced gendered bodies. In this framework, the leading discussion revolves around how the women-focused literature in the Middle Eastern context has scarcely intertwined with the LGBTQ+ literature. The regional-based critical review, while noticing a refugee masculinity-focused literature on the rise, evidences an anachronistic compartmentalization between women-focused and LGBTQ+-focused research, which contradicts the performative interpretations of gender debated since the early 1990s while reinforcing a monolithic understanding of gendered experiences of displacement. As a result, to some extent, it can be argued that humanitarian and migration practices and policies tend to reflect the gender binarism underlying the related academic research.

The transition from manual to service-oriented and information-based work, driven by technological advancements, has reshaped the modern economy, demanding more analytical and cognitive skills. This change challenges traditional management strategies, as knowledge work’s intangibility requires approaches that are the opposite of those that successfully manage manual work. While early artificial intelligence (AI) applications streamlined manual tasks, applying AI to knowledge work revealed complexities in less structured environments. As AI capabilities improve, there is the potential to enhance knowledge-based work by enhancing collective intelligence (CI). At the intersection of management literature and intelligence research are opportunities for AI to improve the three essential functions underlying intelligence in any system—memory, attention, and reasoning. AI augments these functions in human systems, thereby opening the possibility of elevating CI in workplaces. Because of the most pressing research gaps, future exploration is needed in order to understand AI’s role in fostering a collaborative, efficient, and equitable workplace in ways that balance technology optimization with human-centric considerations.