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The consequences of civil war have been widely analyzed. However, one of its important effects, the human cost of the conflict, remains marginally investigated. Indeed, most of recent literature has focused on the numbers of dead and wounded, while little scope has been given to survivors’ health. Given that the survivors are those who bear the burden of reconstruction, it is crucial to evaluate the health costs of civil conflict to develop and implement proper economic policies. This chapter is an attempt in this direction.

The aim is to assess the impact of the Mozambican Civil War on the long-term health of adult women, measured in terms of their height-for-age z-score (HAZ). Toward this end, two sets of data are used: the household survey data derived from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS+ 2003) which provides a set of anthropometric measures combined with an original geo-referenced event dataset of battles and military actions that took place during this war.

I find that women who were exposed to the conflict during the early stages of their lives display weaker health on average than other women, as reflected by their lower HAZ. This negative effect is correlated with age at the time of exposure to the civil war.

Furthermore, this chapter indicates that the use of the medical concept of infancy–childhood–puberty curves is a suitable tool for estimating the impact of age of entry into the conflict and provides some evidence of the channels through which health is affected by civil conflicts.

Raul Caruso, educated in Naples, Leuven and Milan, is currently senior researcher at the Institute of Economic Policy, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy) where he is also serving as adjunct professor of international economics. He is also visiting professor at Warsaw University (Poland). He has also been visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), Hiroshima University (Japan), Kazakh Humanitarian Law University (Kazakhstan) and Novosibirsk State University (Russian Federation). His main research interests are peace economics, international political economy, economics of crime and sport economics. He has published on contest theory, sport economics, economic interpretation of terrorism, economic causes of wars and international economic sanctions. He is the executive coordinator of Network of European Peace Scientists (NEPS). He is also editor in chief of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.

The study of war and peace is nowadays becoming a complex topic drawing from different disciplines and applying different methodologies. This book collects 10 studies on conflict and its pernicious consequences. The appropriate scientific field for this set of studies is the peace economics as defined in Isard (1994), Arrow (1995) and Caruso (2010). In particular, Peace Economics is a sub-field of Peace Science and it is generally concerned with (1) the economic determinants of actual and potential conflicts; (2) the impact of conflict on welfare and on the economic behaviour of societies; (3) the use of economic measures to cope with and control conflicts whether economic or not. Central to this field are analyses of conflicts amongst nations, regions and other communities of the world; measures to control (deescalate) arms races and achieve reduction in military expenditures; programmes and policies to utilize resources thus released for more constructive purposes. Put briefly, the main object of peace economics is the study of conflict and conflict resolution in different forms. In particular, the contents of this book are mainly on the positive ‘side’ of Peace Economics, which emphasizes the study of conflict and its consequences. In particular, in the recent years, a growing economic literature has uncovered both the economic determinants and consequences of actual intra-state conflicts. This book is intended to be a contribution to this literature. It gathers both theoretical and empirical contributions.

Purpose: We critically examine the idea of neurodiversity, or the uniqueness of all brains, as the foundation for the neurodiversity movement, which began as an autism rights movement. We explore the neurodiversity movement's potential to support cross-disability alliances that can transform cultures.

Methods/Approach: A neurodiverse team reviewed literature about the history of the neurodiversity movement and associated participatory research methodologies and drew from our experiences guiding programs led, to varying degrees, by neurodivergent people. We highlight two programs for autistic university students, one started by and for autistics and one developed in collaboration with autistic and nonautistic students. These programs are contrasted with a national self-help group started by and for stutterers that is inclusive of “neurotypicals.”

Findings: Neurodiversity-aligned practices have emerged in diverse communities. Similar benefits and challenges of alliance building within versus across neurotypes were apparent in communities that had not been in close contact. Neurodiversity provides a framework that people with diverse conditions can use to identify and work together to challenge shared forms of oppression. However, people interpret the neurodiversity movement in diverse ways. By honing in on core aspects of the neurodiversity paradigm, we can foster alliances across diverse perspectives.

Implications/ Values: Becoming aware of power imbalances and working to rectify them is essential for building effective alliances across neurotypes. Sufficient space and time are needed to create healthy alliances. Participatory approaches, and approaches solely led by neurodivergent people, can begin to address concerns about power and representation within the neurodiversity movement while shifting public understanding.

In the case of Poiret & Anor v Seychelles Pension Fund & Anor (2022), the Court of Appeal, the highest court in Seychelles, took judicial notice of the fact that “[c]ommon law relationships are more prevalent in our society than those between married persons.” In this chapter, the author discusses the law relating to common law marriages in Seychelles by focusing on the following issues: the right to form a family (as a background to understanding common law marriages); requirements for a valid common law marriage; and the rights of parties in a common law marriage. These rights include “court granted” rights and “statutory rights” such as property rights (parties invoking the claim of unjust enrichment in the 1979 Civil Code and property orders and succession under the 2021 Civil Code at the dissolution of common law marriages). I also deal with the remedy of unjust enrichment in the context of the 2021 Civil Code; marital privilege (in case where one of the parties in a common law relationship is accused of committing an offence); and termination of a common law marriage. The author demonstrates the measures taken by courts and the legislators to protect some of the rights of people in common law marriages. The author suggests ways in which courts can interpret the relevant provisions of the 2021 Civil Code. Where necessary, the author highlights how courts or legislators in some African countries such as Kenya, Mauritius, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, Rwanda, and Uganda have approached some of the issues above.

The purpose of this paper is to show the impact of digital agriculture on food supply chain, research trend, emphasis and implications for future research.

The paper analyzes how the digital technology reshapes the production, assembly, transaction, retail and logistics. Impact from each main technological progress is discussed.

First, digital agriculture develops quickly and changes all parts of the food supply chain. Second, while many technological progresses show their impacts in agriculture and food sector, e-commerce and progress of artificial intelligence show its comprehensive impact on the argi-food sector.

The paper shows the technological trend and progress in food and agriculture sector. Researchers focusing on agricultural economics and agribusiness should pay attention to recent developments in the real world, know the recent developments from other disciplines, get more data for empirical research and show the impact of digital agriculture on consumer's preference and social welfare.

Drawing upon recent interests in Michel Foucault’s anti-essentialist conception of the state, I provide an analysis of state power in colonial slave societies that is attentive to the ongoing processes of “statification” and governmentalization of the state. This approach represents an alternative to classic state theory, which seems inadequate to describe the diverse political context of Caribbean colonial slave societies.

I apply the Foucauldian conception of the state to the empirical case of the Danish West Indies in the second half of the 18th century. Here, I focus on the problem of public order and its formation in relation to growing concerns over general economic, social, demographic, and political risks that the institution of slavery posed to colonial society. I argue that the slave laws of the 18th century can be seen as a governmental strategy to manage the risks of slavery by constituting a public order that would be subject to policing by the state. I also argue, however, that the specific circumstances of colonial slavery shaped the regulative practices toward the necessities of a flexible, adjustable, responsive government. I suggest that this should be interpreted as a governmental strategy calibrated to the realities of the specificities of colonial rule, rather than simply a reflection of incoherence and incompetence on the part of colonial authorities. The larger argument is that actual state practices have to be seen as results of problems of government in a given context, and as a function of the dynamic and reciprocal processes of government.

There is a need to develop the understanding of asset owners concerning the constraints of building information modelling (BIM) implementation, and its subsequent value realisation activities in asset management (AM) cannot be overstated. This is because the life cycle cost of a built asset is three times more than construction costs and five times more than the initial investment outlays. Hence, this paper investigated and identified the key issues and challenges of realising BIM business value in AM.

The study adopted an explorative and deductive approach. A qualitative four-stage research design strategy was adopted using 10 semi-structured interviews and document analysis to collect data. These were analysed through qualitative thematic analysis.

The study identified 15 key barriers and classified them from the perspective BIM governance dimensions, namely people, process and technology. Furthermore, the study identified that more process-based challenges are experienced than people or technology. Of the identified challenges, three are people-related, eight are process-related and four are technology-related.

The analysed results focussed on the development of the understanding of asset owners, policymakers and researchers regarding the complex challenges that hinder BIM utilisation and value realisation in AM. The findings of this paper support progress towards enhanced BIM adoption in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry by highlighting the significance of the identified challenges, their nature (people-, process- or technology-based) and the resultant effect on BIM business value realisation during asset operations.

The original contribution of this study was the exploration and identification of the current challenges experienced by asset owners in implementing BIM during asset operations and how these affect the derivation of BIM business value.

The need to flexibly react to changing demands and to cost-efficiently manage customized production even for lot size of one requires a dynamic and holistic integration of service-based processes within and across enterprises of the value chain. In this context, this paper aims at presenting ODERU, the authors’ novel pragmatic approach for automatically implementing service-based manufacturing processes at design and runtime within a cloud-based elastic manufacturing platform.

ODERU relies on a set of semantic annotations of business process models encoded into an extension of the business process model and notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard. Leveraging the paradigms of semantic SOA and XaaS, ODERU integrates pattern-based semantic composition of process service plans with QoS-based optimization based on multi-objective constraint optimization problem solving.

The successful validation of ODERU in two industrial use cases for maintenance process optimization and automotive production in the European project CREMA revealed its usefulness for service-based process optimization in general and for significant cost reductions in maintenance in particular.

ODERU provides a pragmatic and flexible solution to optimal service composition with the following three main advantages: full integration of semantic service selection and composition with QoS-based optimization; executability of the generated optimal process service plans by an execution environment as they include service assignments, data flow (variable bindings) and optimal variable assignments; and support of fast replanning in a single model and plan.