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Rethinking Humanitarian Interventions in the 21^st Century examines the complex ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention since the end of the Cold War. These 12 essays focus on the challenges associated with interventions, conflict and attendant human rights violations, unmitigated and systematic violence, state re-building, and issues associated with human mobility and dislocation. In a context where layers to conflict are so complex and fluid, it is difficult to imagine one book could ‘rethink interventions’ to the extent that is required. Nevertheless, a contribution to debates can be made. In this collection, important choices were made in terms of how to bring a collection together that allows for the richness as well as maintaining coherence. The task of ‘rethinking’ has meant many of the chapters are underpinned by critical theory with structures of power and the ends that they are deployed to serve never far from discussion. Overall, the chapters in this book address three central themes pertaining to the evolution of 1) humanitarian interventions in a global era; 2) the limits of sovereignty and the ethics of interventions; and the 3) politics of post-intervention (re-)building and humanitarian engagement. As such, they provide a valuable contribution to academics, students, instructors and intellectual communities engaged in research pertaining to humanitarianism, conflict and interventions and different conceptions of security and international relations, and who agree that the present challenges require a basic rethinking of interventions.

Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a posthuman future, whereby human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces. Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or employ an ‘ism, given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of “market humans,” the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, and the varied ways human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species like refugees outside the human order. Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon the human and humanism, and instead proposes the ahuman to think alongside the human. Reified Life elaborates speculative fictions as critical mechanisms for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose fictions have become our realities. Narkunas offers, to that end, a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management.

This book is the fruit of twenty years’ reflection on Islamic charities, both in practical terms and as a key to understand the crisis in contemporary Islam. On the one hand Islam is undervalued as a global moral and political force whose admirable qualities are exemplified in its strong tradition of charitable giving. On the other hand, it suffers from a crisis of authority that cannot be blamed entirely on the history of colonialism and stigmatization to which Muslims have undoubtedly been subjected – most recently, as a result of the “war on terror”. The book consists of seventeen previously published chapters, with a general Introduction and new prefatory material for each chapter. The first nine chapters review the current situation of Islamic charities from many different viewpoints – theological, historical, diplomatic, legal, sociological and ethnographic – with first-hand data from the United States, Britain, Israel–Palestine, Mali and Indonesia. Chapters 10 to 17 expand the coverage to explore the potential for a twenty-first century “Islamic humanism” that would be devised by Muslims in the light of the human sciences and institutionalized throughout the Muslim world. This means addressing contentious topics such as religious toleration and the meaning of jihad. The intended readership includes academics and students at all levels, professionals concerned with aid and development, and all who have an interest in the future of Islam.

American Lutherans have had a longstanding foreign involvement with Madagascar through pre-colonial evangelical missions that began on the island in 1888 and continued for over a century. This book explores Lutherans’ efforts to institute an aid alliance that departs from the inequalities of the earlier mission work on the island. Focusing on a 30-year-old medical aid program between Lutherans in Madagascar (Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy) and the U.S. (after 1988, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), it provides a close analysis of the tensions among humanitarian activity, capitalism and global religious fellowship. Since the early 1980s, Lutherans have pursued an increasingly common aid model that entails sending from Minneapolis to Antananarivo the often unused medical discards of the U.S. medical establishment, created primarily by planned obsolescence or biomedical innovation. The book draws upon twenty-four months of primary ethnographic research in the Midwest U.S. and shorter research periods in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, aid workers, volunteer laborers, healer-evangelists and former missionaries. It develops an approach to Christian aid spaces as “conversionary sites,” or under-analyzed cultural spaces that operate as busy moral crossroads between past and present, as well as between geographically dispersed religious communities and global commodity chains. The book therefore maintains that contemporary biomedical aid from the United States to Madagascar is a multifaceted cultural and historical transaction; it is an ongoing, incomplete conversion of the moral foundation, practices and ways of knowing tied to the colonial legacy.

The end of the Second World War in Europe gave way to a gigantic refugee crisis. Thoroughly prepared by Allied military planners, the swift repatriation of millions of former forced laborers, concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war nearly put an end to this dramatic episode. Yet in September 1945, the number of displaced persons placed under the guardianship of Allied armies and relief agencies in occupied Germany amounted to 1.5 million. A costly burden for the occupying powers, the Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic DPs unwilling to return to their countries of origin presented a thorny international problem. Initially thought of as temporary displaced persons, the DPs awaiting emigration in a myriad of camps stretched from Northern Germany to Sicily had become long-term refugees and asylum seekers. Based on the records of the International Refugee Organization, this book describes how reactions to the European DP crisis crucially impinged on the shape of the postwar order. The DP question directly affected the outbreak of the Cold War; the transformation of the “West” into a new geopolitical entity; the conduct of political purges and retribution; the ideology and methods of modern humanitarian interventions; the appearance of international agencies and non-governmental organizations; the emergence of an international human rights system; migration movements and the redistribution of “surplus populations”; Jewish nationhood; and postwar categorizations of political and humanitarian refugees.

This book collects eleven original essays in the cultural history of the British Empire since the eighteenth century. It is geographically capacious, taking in the United Kingdom, India, West Africa, Hong Kong, and Australia, as well as sites of informal British influence such as the Ottoman Empire and southern China. The book considers the ways in which British culture circulated within what John Darwin has called the British “world system”. In this, the book builds on existing imperial scholarship while innovating in several ways: it focuses on the movement of ideas and cultural praxis, whereas Darwin has focused mostly on imperial structures —financial, demographic, and military. The book examines the transmission, reception, and adaptation of British culture in the Metropole, the empire and informal colonial spaces, whereas many recent scholars have considered British imperial influence on the Metropole alone. It examines Britain's Atlantic and Asian imperial experiences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century together. Through focusing on political ideology, literary movements, material culture, marriage, and the construction of national identities, the essays demonstrate the salience of culture in making a “British World”.

Why Europe Intervenes in Africa analyzes the underlying causes of all European decisions for and against military interventions in conflicts in African states since the late 1980s. It focuses on the main European actors who have deployed troops in Africa: France, the United Kingdom and the European Union. When conflict occurs in Africa, the response of European actors is generally inaction. This can be explained in several ways: the absence of strategic and economic interests, the unwillingness of European leaders to become involved in conflicts in former colonies of other European states, and sometimes the Eurocentric assumption that conflict in Africa is a normal event which does not require intervention. When European actors do decide to intervene, it is primarily for motives of security and prestige, and not primarily for economic or humanitarian reasons. The weight of past relations with Africa can also be a driver for European military intervention, but the impact of that past is changing. This book offers a theory of European intervention based mainly on the approaches of realism and post-colonialism. It refutes the assumptions of liberals and constructivists who posit that states and organizations intervene primarily in order to respect the principle of the “responsibility to protect.”

Digital communication technologies have thrust the calculus of global political power into a period of unprecedented complexity. In every aspect of international affairs, digitally enabled actors are changing the way the world works, and disrupting the institutions that once held a monopoly on power. No area is immune: Humanitarianism, War, Diplomacy, Finance, Activism, or Journalism. In each, the government departments, international organizations and corporations who for a century were in charge, are being challenged by a new breed of international actor. Online, networked and decentralized, these new actors are innovating, for both good and ill, in the austere world of foreign policy. This book will bring these actors to light, explore their methods and tools, and demonstrate how they represent a new form of power. What is it that makes for successful digital international action? What are the tools being used by the actors increasingly controlling international affairs? How does their rise change the way we understand and act in the world? What are the negative consequences of a radically decentralized international system? And how can governments and corporations act to promote positive behaviour in a world of disruptive innovation? Disruptive Power explores the frontier of international affairs, profiles a wide range of emerging actors, and provides a road map for navigating a networked digital world. A world enabled by information technology, and led by disruptive innovators.

War captivity is an ideal observatory to address three interrelated questions. First, I argue that in order to understand what a prisoner of war was in the eighteenth century, from a legal viewpoint, we must forget what we know about this notion, as it has been shaped by twentieth-century international conventions. In the eighteenth century, the distinction between a prisoner of war, a hostage, a criminal and a slave was not always clear-cut, in theory and even more so in practice. Second, war captivity tells us something important about the eighteenth-century state, how it transformed itself, and why it endured. The third approach is a social history of international relations. The aim here is to understand how eighteenth-century societies were impacted by war: how the detention of foreign enemies on home soil revealed and challenged social values, representations, hierarchies, and practices. The book’s argument hinges on the experience of prisoners of war as the pivot of social relations within and outside the prison, between Britons and French and between prisoners and host communities. War does not simply destroy society, but it also creates new sorts of social ties.The book addresses a wide range of topics, such as the ethics of war, philanthropy, forced migrations, the sociology of the prison and the architecture of detention places. One of its strengths is the sheer magnitude and diversity of the archival material used, in English and in French, most of which have been little explored by other historians.