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Relations between the United Kingdom (UK) and Hong Kong have become more complicated and contested following a number of recent developments. Even so, bilateral investment and trade continues to surge.

This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls' agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women's emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South.

Libya's fossil fuel wealth has dominated its political economy and state institutions since the 1960s and paid for large-scale, centralized water and energy infrastructures. Since the 2011 revolution, these infrastructures have been at the center of Libya's protracted conflict. Unlike other protracted conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa in which water and energy were directly and extensively targeted, we find that warring parties in Libya have largely not sought to destroy but rather control and disrupt Libya's rentier state institutions. The oil and gas infrastructure, along with the National Oil Company and the central bank that processes oil revenues, are at the heart of elite rivalries over political authority. We find relatively infrequent attacks on centralized water infrastructures. The toll of protracted conflict on water-energy systems has been cumulative, with looting, lack of repair and investment, and departure of qualified personnel. We draw upon an original dataset, qualitative interviews with humanitarian actors, policymakers, and Libyan experts, and a review of extant literature to show how and when local communities, armed militias, former army units, and aspiring warlords sought to capture and leverage water and energy infrastructures. The article highlights the consequences of infrastructure targeting for broader human security.

In this article, we chart the conflicting standards of fact-checking outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries that shifted their focus from holding politicians to account to acting as content moderators. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalog the pressures they face and their struggle with tasks that are increasingly different from the journalistic values underpinning the practice. We find that fact-checkers have to balance the number of checks across each side of the partisan divide, an exercise in "bothsidesism" to manage the expectations of partisan social media users; that they increasingly prioritize the checking of viral content; and that Meta's third-party fact-checking program prevents them from holding local politicians to account. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for content moderation outside WEIRD countries.