Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq during the “War on Terror” following 9/11. Because the Taliban gave sanctuary to al Qaeda, the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001. Within months, Osama bin Laden had fled, and the Taliban took refuge in Pakistan. However, the Taliban launched an offensive in 2006. Despite Allied efforts, the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan. In 2020, Trump agreed to a peace plan that would remove all Allied troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Biden carried out Trump’s capitulation. Like Vietnam, the fighting ended in American surrender by withdrawal in a chaotic evacuation. Justified by faulty rationale, Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. After a quick victory in the conventional attack, Iraqi resistance transformed into an insurgency that brought the Americans to the brink of defeat. In December 2006, Bush authorized the Surge, increasing the number of troops and instituting a new counterinsurgency strategy. The Surge proved successful, and Obama reasonably extracted all American combat troops by December 2011. The treatment of detainees during the War on Terror began with Bush abandoning humane guidelines. Abu Ghraib strikingly revealed American abuses. But with the Surge, detainee operations emphasized rehabilitation and release to increase trust among the Iraqi population.

This chapter provides a practitioner’s point of view on diplomatic images. The author is positioned to give a unique perspective as a freelance photographer who is currently based in Singapore, which has recently become a significant city-state for major global diplomatic events. Through his first-hand experiences of covering high-profile international diplomatic events, such as the 2018 Trump-Kim Summit held in Singapore, the author takes us backstage and demonstrates how famous diplomatic images are produced to represent the affective register of the moment. In so doing, the chapter illuminates the situational context of the photographer in taking diplomatic images, offering insight into the editorial process in which diplomatic images are produced by the media.

This chapter uses the lens of feminine rhetorical style to examine how gendered expectations affect first ladies’ public speeches and how their rhetorical styles evolved over time. Selected speeches of first ladies from Eleanor Roosevelt to Melania Trump are analyzed and five recurring themes are reviewed. These include the discussion of feminine topics such as family and childcare and envisioning women’s role in society, addressing masculine issues such as war and politics through feminine rhetoric, connecting with audiences as peers, use of personal narratives, and use of expert sources and statistics. The chapter concludes that first ladies’ addresses are usually delivered within the bounds of stereotypical gendered expectations, though subtle deviations can be found depending on the first lady’s public image, her professional experience, and the popular opinion of the times. The analysis of first ladies’ rhetorical styles helps us better understand their evolving role in US politics.

The Introduction sets out the main analytical framework to probe a transregional formation of Arabic learning. Building on a rich historiography of the Indian Ocean world and its various regions it formulates an approach to studying mobile manuscripts with a view to exploring the shared social and cultural histories of learned communities. It discusses ‘mobilities’ as the potential of manuscripts to move around and ‘histories of circulation’ as actualised or ‘enacted’ movement among scribes, readers, and owners of manuscripts. In particular, it engages with the concepts of ‘enactment’ to study social and cultural mobilities of manuscripts and ‘entanglement’ to plot these mobilities on a transoceanic field of Arabic learning. Arabic philology takes centre stage in this study and represents a diverse and many-sided field of Arabic learning. Manuscript collections which form the empirical basis of the research are delineated and discussed.

This brief conclusion surveys the history presented in the preceding chapters and demonstrates how that history supports the conceptual framework presented in Chapter 1 and the primary themes of Leaving the Fight. These themes include the evolution of state, military, and individual surrender from the Middle Ages to the present and the origins and development of the treatment of prisoners of war and detainees. This last can be seen as growing out of medieval honorable surrender, becoming formal cartels between combatants, and then becoming international conventions, from the second half of the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. The conclusion also argues that detention operations instituted during the Iraq Surge serve as a source of lessons to be learned in future conflicts.

West German President Heinrich Lübke’s 1963 trip to Indonesia was the first official visit of a Western head of state to the island nation. An official German photograph shows him paying his respects in a war heroes’ cemetery. This chapter explores the political significance of the ceremonial and deconstructs this photograph. The chapter is a thick description of this state visit as an interaction between West Germany and Indonesia at the time of decolonisation. The chapter departs from the realist paradigm of the history of diplomacy and interprets the visit in terms of the cultural history of diplomacy. Cultural aspects of diplomacy create political meaning and shape political outcomes. Style and substance of diplomatic encounters mutually condition each other. These insights provide the basis for a cultural history of global diplomacy, one that helps us break down boundaries between binary categories such as East and West, while at the same time displaying an awareness of global asymmetries.

In the more centralized states of early modern Europe, rulers exerted greater control over warfare. They established ransom, parole, and exchange for all ranks, not simply the elites. Men taken in battle and held by enemy forces could be ransomed by the states for which they fought. In certain circumstances, prisoners could be free of confinement until ransoms were paid, a new sense of parole. Prisoners could also be exchanged between warring parties. The details of these practices were set out in formal agreements, “cartels,” between adversaries. State surrenders in European wars were set down in treaties; however, the language of the treaties was typified by respectful treatment of the defeated, avoiding the term “surrender,” and praising the return of peace. Moderate language conformed to the principles of an age in which contemporary writings praised the more civilized, even polite, conduct of war. Surrender of military units was common, particularly in siege warfare. The besieged could win advantages by surrender. Garrisons might be given the honors of war, by which a defeated garrison would be allowed to march out and proceed to a friendly camp or garrison, rejoining their own army and escaping imprisonment.

On the Singaporean resort island of Sentosa, two waxworks depict the British surrender to the Japanese in Singapore in 1942, and the Japanese surrender to the Allies in 1945. This essay focuses on the Japanese surrender waxworks, first displayed in 1974. Consideration of what the waxworks represent, how the display came about, and the experience the exhibit offers provides a perhaps unexpected opportunity to examine questions concerning the nature of diplomacy as refracted through post-war Japan-Singapore relations. In both representational and material terms, the waxworks mark a liminal condition. Representing a surrender grants them an ambivalent relation to post-war diplomacy, something crystallised by fraught public debate over their creation in the 1970s as independent Singapore struggled to reconcile its wartime past and commercial present. The chapter then goes on to consider the contemporary experience of the waxworks, which today represent historical curiosities in their own right and present the visitor with a strange and uncanny embodied experience of a moment frozen in time. In light of the events the waxworks depict, and the debates they triggered, the chapter seeks to answer the question of what embodied ‘work’ of history they continue to perform.

Why should we take visual sources more seriously in our study of global diplomacy? The innovative approach presented in this volume involves using a wide range of visual sources, such as photographs, paintings, films, and material culture, to reveal how these sources can help to illuminate symbolic aspects of diplomacy that textual sources alone may not be able to do. Visual sources can reveal hidden stories and, importantly, help to de-centre the prevailing preconceptions about the nature of global diplomacy and its power dynamics. The unravelling of symbolisms can add cultural depth to the staging of global diplomacy. The approach introduces a host of diplomatic actors often neglected by scholars, including Southeast Asian leaders, female personalities, and crowds of onlookers. Each chapter, which includes examples of intra-Asia diplomacy as well as Asian diplomacy with Western societies, demonstrates the critical role played by visual sources to the field of diplomatic culture.

The second chapter charts the history of the Royal Library of Bijapur, today housed in the British Library in London, through the histories of circulation of its manuscripts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It highlights the entanglement of Bijapur’s courtly and scholarly elites with the world of transoceanic Arabic scholarship. By focusing on different manuscript notes as symbols of political power, scholarly authority, and textual soundness, it illuminates the changing functions and significances of the manuscript corpus. This manuscript collection constituted a royal library collection, made up of sultanic sub-collections, but it was also an Islamicate library that preserved stories of knowledge transmission in Arabic and Persian. Over the seventeenth century, shifting intellectual and political incentives transformed the manuscript collection from a courtly collection with its economy of gift-giving into a shrine library. It served as a textual entrepôt for scholarly communities. The chapter makes the broader argument that such textual entrepôts constituted crucial sociabilities and brought together learned individuals in their shared intellectual pursuits.