Do unintended pregnancies have implications for children’s cognitive outcomes, and does this vary by gender? We address this question using rich longitudinal data from Indonesia − a country where nearly 3 million in every 8 million annual pregnancies are estimated to be unintended. Exploiting the random assignment of child gender, we identify a significant girl penalty specific to children born after an unintended pregnancy. Although girls in Indonesia generally outperform boys on cognitive tests, girls born after an unintended pregnancy show lower numerical and language abilities during adolescence compared to boys born under the same circumstances, a gap not observed among intended children. This penalty is robust to a wide range of household and child characteristics and to checks for selection on unobservables. Potential mechanisms point to lower parental investment in girls relative to boys within the unintended group, reflected in reduced private school enrollment and poorer early childhood health.

Existing studies on secularization-religious market doctrines largely presume—often implicitly—that forms of religious communication, organization, and authority are fundamentally territorially bounded and mediated by stable organizational structures. Thus, we develop a framework that simultaneously re-examines the secularization thesis and the religious market hypothesis with digital connectivity as a structural mediator at the nexus of development, the state, and religiosity. Using a panel of 78 countries and data from the World Values Survey, International Religious Freedom, and the Religion and State Project between 2001 and 2022, we estimate a structural equation model with full information maximum likelihood. The results show that development through digital connectivity is negatively associated with religious beliefs and not religious participation, partially confirming the secularization thesis. At the same time, we find robust support for the religious market model: state intervention consistently suppresses both participation and belief, and digital connectivity does not fully offset these constraints. These findings make three contributions. First, they demonstrate that new media modifies the mechanisms underlying both secularization and religious market dynamics. Second, they reconcile competing theories by showing that development produces dual effects: weakening doctrinal belief while sustaining participation through digitally mediated supply. Third, they advance a revised framework in which religiosity persists not despite modernization, but through its technological transformation.

Attention problems (AP) remain relatively stable across childhood and adolescence, but shift in adulthood, with declining hyperactivity but persisting impulsivity. This pattern suggests that adult AP reflect both continuity of earlier symptoms and changes in their underlying expression. We used longitudinal twin data (N = 944, 474 females, 470 males; 91.9% White) to examine continuity of AP from childhood (ages 7–14) and adolescence (age 17) to adulthood (age 29), and whether impulsivity in adolescence (age 16) and adulthood (age 29) explains unique variance in adult AP beyond earlier AP. Childhood and adolescent AP significantly correlated with adult AP (rs = .15–.31), indicating moderate developmental continuity; however, adult impulsivity uniquely predicted adult AP (β = 0.43) beyond earlier AP and adolescent impulsivity. Twin models suggested that adult AP reflected both continuity of earlier genetic influences and novel genetic influences (rA = 0.29–0.62), whereas nonshared environmental influences showed minimal continuity across time (rE = −0.06–0.08). The partial association between adult impulsivity and adult AP, controlling for earlier measures, was primarily driven by nonshared environmental influences (89.1%) in adulthood, with smaller genetic overlap (10.9%). These findings indicate that adult AP reflect both stable developmental liability and adult-specific influences, and identify impulsivity as an important component of adult AP.

Despite a recent shift towards Global South-centred histories of development, women in and from Asia and Africa remain largely neglected in the historiography. In response, this Arenas issue examines the implications of situating the roles and experiences of women at the centre of historical analysis in this field. Bringing together scholars with diverse research expertise, the discussion reflects on the gendered meanings of development in twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial societies and emphasises the need for an expansive definition that takes in social welfare activities alongside industrial and economic projects. The forum explores some of the ways in which researching Asian and African women’s histories of development present particular challenges while at the same time offering conceptual and methodological insights that are relevant to the wider field. ‘Chronologies’ considers the question of periodisation and offers nuanced correctives to established narratives of continuity and rupture in the historiography of development.

Despite a recent shift towards Global South-centred histories of development, women in and from Asia and Africa remain largely neglected in the historiography. In response, this Arenas issue examines the implications of situating the roles and experiences of women at the centre of historical analysis in this field. Bringing together scholars with diverse research expertise, the discussion reflects on the gendered meanings of development in twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial societies and emphasises the need for an expansive definition that takes in social welfare activities alongside industrial and economic projects. The forum explores some of the ways in which researching Asian and African women’s histories of development present particular challenges while at the same time offering conceptual and methodological insights that are relevant to the wider field. This co-authored Arena also offers a model for collaborative global history writing that is rooted in fruitful cooperation and exchange across ‘area studies’ boundaries.

Despite a recent shift towards Global South-centred histories of development, women in and from Asia and Africa remain largely neglected in the historiography. In response, this Arenas issue examines the implications of situating the roles and experiences of women at the centre of historical analysis in this field. Bringing together scholars with diverse research expertise, the discussion reflects on the gendered meanings of development in twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial societies and emphasises the need for an expansive definition that takes in social welfare activities alongside industrial and economic projects. The forum explores some of the ways in which researching Asian and African women’s histories of development present particular challenges while at the same time offering conceptual and methodological insights that are relevant to the wider field. The ‘Afterword’ draws together the above themes and poses methodological questions that histories of global development must grapple with.

Despite a recent shift towards Global South-centred histories of development, women in and from Asia and Africa remain largely neglected in the historiography. In response, this Arenas issue examines the implications of situating the roles and experiences of women at the centre of historical analysis in this field. Bringing together scholars with diverse research expertise, the discussion reflects on the gendered meanings of development in twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial societies and emphasises the need for an expansive definition that takes in social welfare activities alongside industrial and economic projects. The forum explores some of the ways in which researching Asian and African women’s histories of development present particular challenges while at the same time offering conceptual and methodological insights that are relevant to the wider field. ‘Sources’ addresses methodological, theoretical, and ethical considerations in researching women’s development histories and offers pathways for identifying and analysing marginalised perspectives in and beyond the archive.

Despite a recent shift towards Global South-centred histories of development, women in and from Asia and Africa remain largely neglected in the historiography. In response, this Arenas issue examines the implications of situating the roles and experiences of women at the centre of historical analysis in this field. Bringing together scholars with diverse research expertise, the discussion reflects on the gendered meanings of development in twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial societies and emphasises the need for an expansive definition that takes in social welfare activities alongside industrial and economic projects. The forum explores some of the ways in which researching Asian and African women’s histories of development present particular challenges while at the same time offering conceptual and methodological insights that are relevant to the wider field. ‘Scales’ grapples with the multi-scalar nature of development history and develops insights on the contextual workings of power and agency.

In 1950, as global Cold War battle lines became crystallized, Tunisia’s nationalist trade union center, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), pulled out of the Communist-led World Federation of Trade Unions and joined the Western-oriented International Confederation of Free Trade Unions a year later. This would prove to be a shrewd maneuver, as the UGTT soon forged a valuable alliance with the anti-communist leaders of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Viewing Tunisia’s national liberation struggle through a Cold War lens, the AFL-CIO believed it was critical to support the UGTT’s cause and keep it within the anti-communist, international “free” trade union movement lest the workers of Tunisia fall into the pro-Soviet camp. Later, after Tunisia gained independence in 1956, the AFL-CIO and a cadre of US development experts and diplomats held up the UGTT and its noncommunist, worker-centered “nation-building” efforts as a shining model for labor movements in other Third World countries to follow. But as the exigencies of development collided with union demands, a conflict emerged between UGTT and the Tunisian government in 1965—a conflict the government would win by imposing direct control over the supposedly “free” trade union center. This essay highlights both the opportunities and challenges that the Cold War presented to Third World workers’ organizations in the era of decolonization and underscores the tensions between the politics of Cold War anti-communism, the ideals of liberal democracy, and the urgency of economic development in postcolonial states.

Climate impacts extend beyond physical destruction to include widespread financial distress. This article explores the role that debt relief policies – particularly personal insolvency or bankruptcy law – might play within a range of measures to raise the capacity of individuals to withstand climate-related shocks. Through the cancellation of unpayable debt, personal insolvency acts as a form of insurance against the unavoidable risks inherent in a volatile and unpredictable economy. Reviewing the links between climate impacts, debt and default, and the inevitable gaps in supports to victims of these impacts, the paper makes a case for personal insolvency as a rules-based system for stabilising chaotic financial distress associated with disasters and crises. As an extraordinary exception to the law’s usual orientation toward upholding past obligations and facilitating market allocations, bankruptcy might represent an internal means of accommodating the disruptions and contradictions with which climate change confronts the legal system.

In this paper, I argue that meaning of the main kinds associated with human life can be described and illuminatingly discussed by atheists who reject all things religious and embrace evolution. Indeed, by considering the different forms evolution can take and with sensitivity to how distinctive meaning-related facts emerge at different stages of macroscale human development and also to the fact that meaning itself evolves, atheists are in a position to show that the evolutionary considerations available to them, rather than an obstacle to a robust and satisfying account of meaning, can be its source.

Across a fractured geopolitical landscape, the Global South faces renewed constraints on its capacity to pursue sovereign development. Rather than treating these pressures as symptoms of a ‘new Cold War’, this article returns to the original Cold War as a decisive moment in the consolidation of the legal and epistemic foundations of today’s global economy. It argues that the Cold War was a pivotal phase in a longer history of disembedding, through which economic governance was separated from social and political life and reorganized through juridical, financial, and metrological techniques. While the Soviet project often advanced more solidaristic visions of development, both socialist and Western frameworks ultimately relied on technocratic and growth-centred models that narrowed the space for postcolonial demands for redistribution and structural reform. Through a longue durée analysis of the colonial, Cold War and post-Cold War periods, the article traces how international law and development co-evolved as interlocking techniques that rearticulated imperial hierarchies into global economic norms and institutions. Revisiting this history reveals the juridical infrastructures that continue to reproduce global inequality and the legal imaginations and material sites through which the Global South continues to contest its fate.