The first part of the introduction provides an overview of the problems that this book is addressing, offering an ethnographic account of everyday moralities, rather than normative ethics. It outlines the research agenda, and its origins in a study of international aid workers as mobile professionals. The second part of the introduction explains how Cambodia matters as a research location, and what makes it a particularly appropriate site for everyday humanitarianism to flourish. These include its recent violent past, a subsequent influx of overseas aid, as well as being a popular tourist destination.

Chapter 2 directly follows on from Chapter 1 by introducing recent events from the start of the Trump presidency that led to the dawn of the Third Nuclear Age. It then introduces current research on the new nuclear age, pointing out that the dangers of the new nuclear age have not gone away with the departure of Donald Trump from office, and explaining how research suggests that the Third Nuclear Age is characterised by a multipolar world of competitive nuclear relationships, potential nuclear proliferation, the development of new technologies, the unpredictable change of key concepts and theories such as deterrence, the erosion of norms around the non-use of nuclear weapons, as well as the continued persistence of dangers from earlier nuclear ages. The chapter then demonstrates how a novel approach grounded in critical nuclear studies can provide for a richer insight into the Third Nuclear Age by going beyond the state-centric focus on ‘high politics’ of current research and illuminating how the ‘low politics’ of everyday lived experiences matter. It makes the case for critical nuclear studies by drawing together a range of interdisciplinary scholarship that is attuned to the role of nuclear masculinity, nuclear imperialism, nuclear culture, and nuclear exterminism in order to analyse and address the challenges and harms of the new nuclear age.

Chapter 3 echoes a slogan which was displayed in a cafe run by a small NGO, dedicated to people with disabilities. Such emphatic commitment to the value of the single person is not unique to this constituency. The belief that ‘every person counts’ drives the initiatives at the heart of this book. This insistent focus on the individual, improving the lives of small groups of beneficiaries often shape their activities. What makes the work meaningful to them is creating a visible difference in the life of a particular person, while accommodating their limited efficacy in the context of widespread poverty. This matters not least because a focus on the small-scale runs counter to much development policy that favours ‘scaling up’, relying on large-scale approaches rather than localised interventions. Everyday humanitarians accommodate the partial-ness of their endeavours by deploying the scale of the individual. The practices carried out under this logic contain singular acts of care, and lives being transformed. This consists of distributing hot meals to those marginalised; helping a handful of students through their high school exams, or setting up a cafe to provide training for young people used to living on the street. Importantly, other scales are brought into play, such as someone ‘paying it forward’ by supporting others in turn, and effecting change in wider society. Rather than leaping from a scale of ‘the one’ to ‘the many’, humanitarian practitioners continuously interlink these. What appears as a limited act, offers pathways into the future.

The instinctive revulsion of the moralist for neutrality has manifested itself, since 1945, in two principal contexts: the UN and the Cold War. The UN system was a more thoroughgoing embodiment of the just-war outlook than the League of Nations had been. On a number of occasions since 1945, states have invoked the traditional rights of belligerents, and, conversely, duties of neutrals. This chapter looks at some of the principal instances, and also at the approach taken by the San Remo Manual on the various issues in question. The distinctive feature of the post-1945 period is the extent to which sovereign rights have become a substitute for the ordinary rights of belligerents, rather than merely a supplement to them. The chapter looks at the post-1945 practice in two areas rich in pre-1945 precedent: blacklisting and reprisal. It describes the main 'growth area' since 1945: necessity, in the context of self-defence.

Chapter 3 opens in August of 2019 with the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which the author argues stands as the pivotal point at which the Third Nuclear Age began. The chapter analyses the significance of arms control and its recent unravelling, but goes beyond a narrow focus on the ‘high politics’ of arms control negotiations and diplomacy to demonstrate how a critical approach reveals how arms control is influenced by, and in turn shapes, broader societal norms. It argues that as the INF Treaty was the first bilateral treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapon from the USA and USSR, it worked to seriously limit exterminism during the time it was implemented. American and Russian steps to develop and deploy INF missiles after the demise of the treaty therefore demonstrate that the dangers of exterminism are once again with us. The text then elaborates on the ‘nuclear taboo’ – the norm around the non-use of nuclear weapons – and illustrates how this norm is being eroded through, for example, two statements made in August 2019: Donald Trump’s exclamation, ‘I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?’ when hurricanes were heading to the US mainland that summer, and Elon Musk’s idea to ‘Nuke Mars!’. Whilst recognising the ridiculous nature of these claims, the author argues that they reveal a worrying tendency for nuclear weapons to be viewed as a silver bullet solution to complex problems, where their existence and use then becomes normalised.

This chapter maintains that the concept of individual responsibility for offences committed in non-international armed conflicts has evolved through an instant customary process, from 1992 until 1998. There is still a question mark as to what is the exact ambit of criminal liability in internal conflicts. The existing distinction between international and internal armed conflicts is not a contemporary creation. The difference lies not in the nature of the actual hostilities themselves but in that people of the same land are naturally friends, their land being sick and torn by faction. Depending on the severity of hostilities, the organisation and level of international legitimacy enjoyed by the dissidents, two stages of civil conflict have traditionally been recognised: insurgency and belligerency. Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions calls into application a set of minimum humanitarian standards with regard to those armed conflicts that are 'not of an international character'.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which the basic war strategies of the two sides affected neutrals, and in the legal innovations and controversies involved. From the Allied side, came the set of techniques sometimes given the broad collective title of 'long-distance blockade'. From the Central powers' side, the outstanding innovation was a new style of preying on enemy commerce at sea: submarine warfare, which was waged by means that departed significantly from those of traditional maritime war. An important resemblance between the Great War and the Napoleonic wars of the previous century was the prominent part played by sovereign right measures, as contrasted with traditional belligerents' rights per se. At the very outset of the War, Germany provided a spectacular demonstration of its readiness to commit serious infringements of the normal rights of neutrals under the rubric of necessity.

Chapter 1 provides a brief history of nuclear weapons and introduces readers to the broad contours and main characteristics of the First and Second Nuclear Ages. It begins by discussing Einstein’s role in developing, and eventually opposing, nuclear weapons, before then outlining significant developments in the First and Second Nuclear Ages by drawing upon the statements of world leaders, policy documents, international treaties, secondary literature, and artefacts of popular culture such as the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove and the TV series 24. Whilst mainly providing an introductory historical overview for readers who may be unacquainted with the history of nuclear weapons, the argument of the first chapter is that the nuclear exterminism that E. P. Thompson warned of in the early 1980s was gradually tempered by the development of arms control agreements and the consolidation of a norm around the non-use of nuclear weapons.`

Neutrality did more than merely survive the creation of the League. It even experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the most striking failure of the League system: the unsuccessful attempt to stop the Italian conquest of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1936, by imposing economic sanctions against Italy. This humiliating failure led many to conclude that the collective-security apparatus was too weak to rely on in a crisis. There was general agreement too that neutrality was not abolished by the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War of 1928. One regional codification effort should be noted: the Pan-American Convention on Maritime Neutrality of 1928. The 'new neutrality' group disagreed with its community-interest rival in not being hostile to the very concept of neutrality per se. Neutral solidarity, in the spirit of the Spanish Civil War, was one of the most striking features of World War II.

The conclusion highlights the significance of everyday humanitarianism in a broader context. People who seek to instigate social change are inevitably challenged to consider their own, limited actions with what they consider as the wider context or causes. I suggest that beyond a reflexive understanding, a scalar approach can provide a blueprint for action. Making and operating within a set of interlinking scales, consciously or not, can offset doubts about lacking significance. It provides a sense of how one’s own actions matter in a wider world, and those of others. Challenging scales and the values associated with them, has wider applicability. People seeking social change consider how their own, limited actions link with wider issues including social injustice, environmentalism, or the climate crisis.

The European Convention on Human Rights, although now just one among many human rights treaties, is certainly the most fully developed and the best observed. By the same token, the institutions created to supervise the Convention, originally the European Commission and Court of Human Rights, and now the new Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, have through their work provided an inspiring model for other human rights systems. It is vital to lay down in advance the rights and freedoms that must be respected in a democratic society and to create institutions to see that they are observed. In December 1966 the two Covenants and the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights were approved by the General Assembly and ten years later came into force.

Chapter 2 tackles the ‘problem of the singular’ (Ticktin 2015) with which humanitarianism has been diagnosed. While aimed at the entirety of suffering humanity, its efforts, whether carried out by large organisations or lone individuals, can only ever have a partial reach. The situation of everyday humanitarians in Cambodia is no exception. This chapter traces their often acute awareness of the bigger picture, such as the socio-political landscape of Cambodia, and how they feel positioned and act within this. Some arrive at what they are doing after having become disenchanted during careers in large aid organisations. Others have had less linear trajectories, but are ambitious for the future of their projects, such as bringing their activities to a larger group of beneficiaries. For either process, the making of scales is crucial: their insistence that ‘small is beautiful’ provides an ongoing source of inspiration and assurance for some, and their actions become meaningful within this particular scale. For others, their attention remains fixed not on a whole nation but on members of a particular community, such as training a group of single mothers, to help improve their livelihoods. A key practice to sustaining everyday humanitarianism is the adoption of temporal, spatial or numerical scales which express their priorities, manifest in the popular mantra, ‘changing the world, one village at a time’. This does not imply ignorance or neglect of other forces that shape the lives of their beneficiaries, and often affect them adversely, but means articulating their position within this context.