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Few causes before or since have inspired such passion, determination and sacrifice than the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). This book explores the many ways in which Scots responded to the war in Spain, covering the activists and humanitarians who raised funds and awareness at home, as well as the hundreds of Scots who journeyed to Spain to fight as part of the International Brigades that fought for the Republican cause. Their stories reflect much larger narratives of the rise of European fascism, the networks and cultures of international communism and the wider modern phenomenon of transnational foreign war volunteering. Scots and the Spanish Civil War is a groundbreaking study of Scottish involvement in one of the 20th century’s most famous and divisive conflicts, drawing on newly-declassified government documents and international archives in Spain and beyond. As well as shedding new light on Scottish politics in the 1930s, it is argued that this case study – part of the largest wave of foreign war volunteers in the 20th century – can help us understand other such mobilisations, past and present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.

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”.

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.

A global society has come into being, but possesses as yet no political institutions of its own. In his book, Faisal Devji argues that new forms of militancy, like that of Al Qaeda, achieve meaning in this institutional vacuum, while representing in their various ways the search for a global politics. From environmentalism to pacifism and beyond, such a politics can only be one that takes humanity itself as its object, hence militant practices are informed by the same search that animates humanitarianism, which from human rights to humanitarian intervention has become the global aim and signature of all contemporary politics. This is the search for humanity as an agent and not simply the victim of history. To the militant, victimized Muslims represent not their religion so much as humanity itself, and terrorism the effort to turn this humanity into an historical actor – since it is after all the globe’s only possible actor. For environmentalists and pacifists as much as for our holy warriors, a global humanity has in this way replaced the international proletariat as the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ of history.