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4 The Emergency: the war, the poor, the Church and the state, 1939–45 A very common sight in the Dublin dispensaries is a poor slum mother, about forty years of age, with pale face and colourless lips – tired and lifeless. She frequently lives on a diet consisting of tea and a small amount of milk in it, and possibly bread dipped in dripping.1 The Second World War was defined as the Emergency by the Irish Free State, which maintained a policy of ‘benevolent neutrality’.2 While the state was spared the direct carnage of war, it nevertheless faced a number of
considered technically to be asylum seekers, the UNHCR provided displaced persons in Africa with basic assistance when, from time to time, it was given a specific assignment by the General Assembly; the extent of such emergencies grew by such a degree that by the end of the 1960s the organisation was spending in Africa two-thirds of its budget for field operations. 2 The wars that were devastating the Great Lakes region neither won the attention of the Western media nor became high-profile points on the international community’s agenda. They did, however, make
Technology has advanced far beyond that which (and far more quickly than) humankind could have imagined – and far more quickly than it could have done. If resources were infinite, it is likely that innumerably more aspects of our existence would be enveloped in technological solutions. That said, when an extraordinary event occurs which challenges the day-to-day operations of any system, it is rare that technology can adapt to each and every aspect of the event. Humanitarian emergencies, crises
5 Emergency and bare life The capacity to name and decide between friend and enemy is directly related to the capacity to declare a state of exception, or what is more commonly called a state of emergency. In many respects, this is the heart of sovereignty, and it is a rather dark heart. It might also be said that this is the centre of superhero universes, the exceptional condition out of which all stories emerge, or the black hole into which all stories are remorselessly drawn. That the exception or state of emergency is the norm within superhero universes is
-point into exploring the Xinjiang emergency. It does so by arguing that the trajectory of the party-state's governance of the XUAR has been profoundly shaped by dynamics of colonialism, settler colonialism, and associated state-building that have provided the bases for a transition towards cultural genocide in the XUAR as a means of resolving China's ‘Xinjiang problem’. Second, the chapter then provides an overview of the structure of and individual contributions to this volume. Xinjiang: Colonial past, settler colonial present
An ex-Trident submarine captain considers the evolution of UK nuclear deterrence policy and the implications of a previously unacknowledged, enduring aversion to military strategies that threaten civilian casualties. This book draws on extensive archival research to provide a uniquely concise synthesis of factors affecting British nuclear policy decision-making, and draws parallels between government debates about reprisals for First World War Zeppelin raids on London, the strategic bombing raids of the Second World War and the development of the nuclear deterrent to continuous at-sea deterrence, through the end of the Cold War and the announcement of the Dreadnought programme. It develops the idea that, in a supreme emergency, a breach of otherwise inviolable moral rules might be excused, but never justified, in order to prevent a greater moral catastrophe; and it explores the related ethical concept of dirty hands – when a moral actor faces a choice between two inevitable actions, mutually exclusive but both reprehensible. It concludes that, amongst all the technical factors, government aversion to be seen to condone civilian casualties has inhibited government engagement with the public on deterrence strategy since 1915 and, uniquely among nuclear weapon states, successive British governments have been coy about discussing nuclear deterrence policy publicly because they feared to expose the complexity of the moral reasoning behind the policy, a reticence exacerbated by the tendency of policy and media investigation to be reduced to simplistic soundbites.
From a law-abiding dependency to insurrection: a failure of intelligence? During the Malayan Emergency the police force was largely Malay while the police problem was fundamentally Chinese. This situation was the outcome of, firstly, the pre-war ideology and practice of colonial government, secondly, the plural society it administered, and thirdly, the cultural
perceived strategic importance to British Middle East defence policy. What views did Punch and its cartoonists, traditionally critical of imperialism, take of this violent episode during the end of empire? Did it support the Conservative government's policies and propaganda efforts, or was it critical of them? This chapter, by focusing on the six Punch cartoons on the Cyprus ‘emergency’, shows that although Punch had not lost its humour it had lost its acerbic radical critical thinking. The historiography of the Cyprus ‘emergency’, from 1955 to
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tends to address these issues in isolation, but this groundbreaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions’ significance for the future of President Xi Jinping’s China.
. Among them was Socrates Loizides, a senior aide to Colonel George Grivas (alias Dighenis), the right-wing and staunchly anti-communist Greek leader of the organisation that planned to use the arms shipment, soon to be well known to the British as EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyrion Agoniston – The National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters). 1 Although the State of Emergency was not to be declared in Cyprus