Recently, I wrote a paper together with Masud Chaichian (see here) containing a mathematical proof of confinement of a non-Abelian gauge theory based on Kugo-Ojima criterion. This paper underwent an extended review by several colleagues well before its submission. One of them has been Taichiro Kugo, one of the discoverers of the confinement criterion, that helped a lot to improve the paper and clarify some points. Then, after a review round of about two months, the paper has been accepted in Physics Letters B, one of the most important journals in particle physics.
This paper contains the exact beta function of a Yang-Mills theory. This confirms that confinement arises by the combination of the running coupling and the propagator. This idea was around in some papers in these latter years. It emerged as soon as people realized that the propagator by itself was not enough to grant confinement, after extended studies on the lattice.
It is interesting to point out that confinement is rooted in the BRST invariance and asymptotic freedom. The Kugo-Ojima confinement criterion permits to close the argument in a rigorous way yielding the exact beta funtion of the theory.
The Gauge Connection 