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This article analyses how the United Kingdom’s Due Diligence Regulations on Forest Risk Commodities (UKDR) relate to the bilateral soybean trade between Brazil and the UK. The findings strongly suggest that soybeans from Brazil are one of the main targets of the UK's new legislation. The crossing of literature, NGO reports, trade data, and open governmental and institutional documents showed that the UK highly relies on soybeans from South America to fulfil its internal animal protein food industry, with soybeans from Brazil being the second major case of the UK’s ‘imported deforestation’. Between 2020 and 2022, soybeans were also the second most exported product from Brazil to the UK, after gold, reinstating the Brazilian traditional place as an exporter of raw and essential commodities to developed countries. This article advocates that even though the new UKDR will affect Brazil disproportionally, compared to other agri-exporter countries, the legislation is not designed to challenge the soybeans economic model or deforestation on a broader aspect but to ‘clean’ UK’s agricultural supply chain from illegal tropical forest deforestation. The article's findings show that in the last five years (2017 -2022), the annual percentage of Brazilian soybean exports from states that comprise the Amazon biome, in part or wholly, to the UK was above 70% every year, a trend that does not follow Brazilian general soybean exports, suggesting that the UK may be more exposed to deforestation than other importing countries. The UK food industry could be financing an agricultural production model contributing to Amazon forest deforestation.

The present study aimed to investigate the moderating effect of perceived punishment on the relationship between the Dark Triad personality traits and corruption in Brazil (N = 118) and the United Kingdom (N = 130). Participants answered the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen Scale, as well as measures of corruption and perceived punishment. It was found that punishment predicts corruption in both countries. Regarding the Dark Triad traits, a relationship between Machiavellianism and corruption was identified in Brazil and the United Kingdom, although an interaction with punishment was identified only in Brazil. Moreover, psychopathy had no relationship with corruption or punishment in either country. A direct relationship was found only in Brazil on narcissism, although the interaction term was significant in both countries. In general, it was identified that perceived punishment and the dark triad traits contribute to the understanding of corruption, despite some differences in the results between Brazil and the United Kingdom.

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Starting with an individual report in a leading British periodical of higher education, this article fans outwards to show how the contemporary field of caste studies reflects the degeneracy of its methods and claims. Rather than producing knowledge about India and the so-called caste system, caste studies has worked itself into a corner by creating a set of imagined victims and perpetrators of caste oppression, atrocities, violence and discrimination, and by making unsustainable claims on legal systems and other institutions. The manifold and insurmountable problems of contemporary caste studies include its basis in the European framework for the study of India founded upon Christian theological claims, the carry-over of this account into the secularised humanities and social sciences, and its engagement in corrupted academic practices of the kind that typify grievance studies today. That an alternative account exists in the form of the research programme of SN Balagangadhara, which inspires the articles in this special issue, is good reason for rethinking and revision of the field. Comenzando con un informe individual en un importante periódico británico de educación superior, este artículo se abre para mostrar cómo el campo contemporáneo de los estudios de castas refleja la degeneración de sus métodos y afirmaciones. En lugar de producir conocimiento sobre la India y el llamado sistema de castas, los estudios de castas se han arrinconado al crear un conjunto de víctimas y victimarios imaginarios de la opresión, las atrocidades, la violencia y la discriminación de las castas, y al hacer reclamaciones insostenibles sobre los sistemas jurídicos y otras instituciones. Los múltiples e insuperables problemas de los estudios de castas contemporáneos incluyen su base en el marco europeo para el estudio de la India basado en afirmaciones teológicas cristianas, la transferencia de este relato a las humanidades secularizadas y las ciencias sociales, y su participación en prácticas académicas corruptas que tipifican los estudios de agravios en la actualidad. Que exista un relato alternativo en la forma del programa de investigación de SN Balagangadhara, que inspira los artículos de este número especial, es una buena razón para repensar y revisar el campo. Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1372

Building upon Wayne Modest’s work on the representation of Caribbean and enslaved people in the British Museum, this article examines the representation of Caribbean plantations in several British establishments, the Museum of London Docklands, the National Maritime Museum, the Mshed Museum, the Georgian House, and the International Slavery Museum. Drawing on Black feminist works on race, geography and identity, I argue that these museums create a homogenised vision of the Caribbean, which results in a homogenised depiction of enslaved peoples. Specifically, resistance to slavery is presented as a largely masculine endeavour and taking place only in terms of military conflict. Indeed, representations of enslaved women are largely absent in many of these museums. Only the International Slavery Museum achieves a complex rendering of the Caribbean by pushing against the limitations of abolitionist produced representations of the Caribbean and incorporating models and a multifaceted range of testimonies, including that of enslaved women.