Sociology
The chapter employs the lens of reading across empires, empirically linking Ukrainian land and farming labour with overseas colonial projects and intra-European imperial rivalries. It follows the projects of the Soviet, German and Dutch empires, relating the latter’s loss of colonies in Indonesia and East Africa with the shift of gaze towards conquering Ukraine to meet food insecurities around grain. Namely, it examines how Ukraine became a substitute for Dutch lost over-seas colonies and how the Soviet project used grain coming from Ukraine for industrialisation and development. By doing that, the analysis works against a double move which separates (1) external colonies and intra-European racialisation and (2) capitalist and socialist projects of development and industrialisation. The chapter connects these geo-historical imperial imaginations and material hierarchies to situate the current entanglements in the blockade of Ukrainian grain in the ports and the threat of famine in the countries dependent on it as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
This chapter centres the post-Yugoslav space as a productive vantage point for understanding the multifarious forms of violence through which Europeanisation proceeds around the world. It builds on rich intellectual dialogues from/about the region that, mobilising wider epistemological frames shaped by intersecting postcolonial, postsocialist and post-conflict legacies, posit the region as a site of knowledge production about global politics, rather than as an object of intervention, as predominantly understood in mainstream IR narratives. From this vantage point, the chapter illustrates how Europeanisation engenders a complex set of affective registers and material effects that ‘entrap’ the post-Yugoslav space in a never-ending transition towards the cruel promises of Europeanisation. Conceptualising this affective/material impasse as slow violence, the chapter unpacks the region’s ambivalent positioning as both the Balkan other in need of EU intervention and containment, and its accomplice in racialised logics of spectacular and everyday violence at the core of the European project and its b/ordering. At the same time, it proposes the post-Yugoslav space as a site of critical imaginaries and alternative solidarities emerging from creative cultural interventions and social movements that challenge the violence of Europeanisation. The chapter argues that attending to these complexities refracted through the region contributes to an interrogation of Europeanisation as violence from multiple positionings, spotlighting global entanglements in the politics of race and Empire, as well as activating resonances across seemingly unrelated histories and struggles.
Drawing on the lived experiences of persons from the Global South and East who have obtained student residence permits in Finland, the chapter demonstrates how policies aimed at attracting ‘international talent’ are firmly entangled in the coloniality of power reproduced in the world of nation-states founded on a naturalised spatial separation of national subjects from migrants. The chapter connects the student status to a discourse of innovation and talent, which relies on colonial ideals, and analyses it in relation to the governing of migrants through seemingly neutral and apolitical acts of administration based on law and policy. It contributes to research that resists static binaries and the temptation to trace global coloniality back to a single source by analysing the ‘relations of force’ stemming from political, administrative and legal procedures, which in their intersection produce the conjuncture of a racial-colonial present of the innovation economy. Via the analysis of the hierarchical ordering of non-EU/EEA student–migrants and the friction produced vis-à-vis laws and administrative bordering practices, the chapter contributes to the theorisation of Europeanisation as violence in a context of talent attraction for the innovation economy.
Drawing on family stories of German displacement from Silesia after the Second World War and French natural scientific pursuits in the Indian Ocean in the post-war period, I crack open a widened aperture contextualising the current so-called EU border migration crisis between Poland and Belarus. In the shadow of new fences and walls on this Eastern frontier, I argue we must dive deep into the geo-historical imaginaries infusing the region, weaving a narrative that connects the ethnic cleansing of Poles from the Kresy borderlands, the wholesale removal of the German population of Breslau and Polish plans to move its entire Jewish population to Madagascar. It is within the horizon of these broader post-war historical realignments that we can make sense of the ways postcolonial and postsocialist space today entangle in the Kresy through an operative analytics I call ‘swimming with the coelacanth’.
Eurocentric discourses assert the necessity for objectivity, transparency and accountability in producing knowledge. They claim all the knowledge they make is unbiased and scientific. However, I won’t be discussing or challenging these arguments here for many feminists, decolonial and postcolonial scholars have done that for decades. Instead, this chapter seeks to focus on the stories that are often overlooked. In this chapter, I explore the complex dynamics of internal and external colonialism, with a particular emphasis on the rule of the Imamate and its enduring influence on the ongoing conflict in Yemen. The research illuminates the Imamate’s strategic manipulation of societal divisions, particularly the caste system, reflecting a pattern of internal colonialism that mirrors the strategies of external colonial powers. It further investigates the Imamate’s alliances with Western empires as inter-imperial rather than anti-imperial, challenging prevalent narratives that portray the Imams as strictly anti-colonial. Moreover, the term ‘white laundering’ was coined to alert to the tactic employed by inter-imperialists to obscure colonial/ anti-colonial intentions under benign pretexts, often leading to the marginalisation of indigenous perspectives. The chapter concludes with the assertion that acknowledging these varied experiences is vital for understanding Yemen’s current socio-political context. This chapter serves as a starting point for further studies on challenging the dominant narratives and highlights the importance of a gender-sensitive lens and the exploration of oral histories and does not claim to be a definitive or all-encompassing account of Yemen’s history.
The area of Germany which became the Soviet Occupation Zone/German Democratic Republic (GDR) bore the brunt of the Soviet offensive of 1945. This last phase of the Second World War on German soil produced a sensational death toll. Yet, a systematic registration of war burials on GDR soil did not take place until the 1970s. This article analyses a particular facet of knowledge production and mass death by turning to the process of accounting for Second World War burials through lists and statistics in the socialist GDR, with a particular focus on key policy changes in the 1970s. Unpacking the reasons which prompted a large-scale registration of war burials some twenty-five years after the end of the war, I argue that the process of accounting for war deaths was shaped by both domestic and foreign politics, and in particular by evolving relations with non-socialist countries. I also demonstrate that international requirements for the visibility and accountability of war burials, as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, generated tensions with a domestic ‘politics of history’ which required the invisibility of particular categories of dead.
This article intends to shed light on the influence of gas warfare on the management of dead bodies of violence. It shows that this new type of weapon prompted the setting up of new military centres dedicated to forensic research within the French army. This work notably involved carrying out numerous autopsies on the bodies of deceased intoxicated soldiers. By looking at the reports produced and the work of forensic pathologists, the article demonstrates how dead bodies became a site of knowledge production. It also investigates the tensions related to the treatment of dead bodies resulting from this widespread practice of autopsy. The reports produced also provide precise descriptions of the last moments of the soldiers who died in ambulances or hospitals. Finally, by cross-referencing these sources with soldiers’ grave registers, it is possible to grasp the afterlives of autopsied bodies and the diverse fates of soldiers who fell at the front.
This is the first study dedicated to discussing perspectives on proposals to transfuse blood from people killed in conflict zones. It attempts to present a rounded picture of why the idea has apparently failed to translate into practice. Drawing on a range of sources, from scientific research on ‘cadaver’ blood transfusions to discussions around planning for mass casualty events, the article shows how professional interest in the transfusion possibilities of blood taken from the battlefield dead evolved from Soviet research in the 1930s, spread internationally and endured after the Second World War. It then demonstrates that a range of issues, from taboos to practicability, require consideration if past challenges to utility are to be reliably understood. It notes, too, that some early obstacles may, today, be outdated.
This article shows how the medicalisation of death in wartime can be seen as integral to a broader medicalisation of war that it both stems from and sustains. More specifically, it highlights the pivotal role of post-mortem examinations – which were widely performed in French military hospitals during the First Indochina War – in advancing clinical knowledge and monitoring the quality of care, as the only way of providing diagnostic certainty. Pathology procedures also contributed to the introduction of therapeutic innovations, which were largely the result of ongoing interactions both within the armed forces medical service and with the wider military and civilian French and international medical community.
The book’s conclusions are briefly presented in the last chapter. Given that each chapter offers its own concluding reflections, this chapter returns to the question of urban comparison within African peripheries and considers the value of comparison for advancing understanding in these complex urban spaces. It briefly addresses the book’s contribution to core literatures detailed here at the start of this chapter, but primarily it returns to our conceptual framework and our five logics of African urban peripheries to consider their value and limitations. Finally, the chapter considers the policy implications, very generally, of some of the arguments and evidence presented in this text.