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The spread of smallholder cash cropping in Myanmar's southeast is undermining Karen customary land use practices and communal tenure. The ceasefire agreement reached in 2012 with the main Karen rebel group, the KNU, led to a rapid expansion of smallholder cash cropping. Based on field research during 2020-2023 in 19 Karen villages under Karen rebel administration, we found smallholder agriculture to have directly contributed to significant land use change and the privatization of communal forestland. Wealthier Karen villagers and newlyarrived non-Karen migrants are increasingly replacing Karen traditional swidden rice farming and their communal tenure system with that of private household cash cropping plots with land titles. This agrarian change has increased land disparity and economic inequality, and transformed Karen relations to land and the Karen rebel group. These findings point to challenges for community-led forest conservation, the revitalization of the traditional Karen governance system, and ethno-nationalist struggles for federal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has made available to scholars a significant collection of documents captured from the files of the Saddam-era Iraqi intelligence services. DOD is also studying ways in which further such documents can be released. These documents paint a picture in many ways reminiscent of the intelligence services of the totalitarian Soviet Union. These and forthcoming documents may enable important research on Iraq and on the role of intelligence services in totalitarian states. One newly available document gives the Iraqi General Military Intelligence Directorate's assessment of Iran on the eve of the Iran-Iraq War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large collection of captured documents from the very highest levels of the Iraqi government offers a chance to gain insight into why Saddam Hussein was unwilling and unable to alter his strategy on the eve of the 2003 war that toppled his regime. This paper explores some of the perceptions and misperceptions that Saddam Hussein took away from the 1991 Gulf War and shows how they affected his decisionmaking on the eve of the war in 2003. It concludes with some thoughts on the policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]