Scores of young men and women were killed by regime forces during the Arab Spring in Egypt (2011–2013). Their photographs assumed iconic proportions, meandering online and off through countless acts of creative remediation. This essay examines the different kinds of social and political work that these photographs came to play during this period, including as indexes of the revolutionary cause and as mediators of revolutionary subjectivities at a distance. This essay departs from extant studies of visual cultures of secular martyrdom or funerary portraiture framed by notions of commemoration, and instead stresses contingent presence grounded in the specific liminal temporality of the revolutionary process. In this temporal limbo, photographs of martyrs often blurred conventional boundaries between representations and their referents. Established visual conventions of funerary portraiture were turned upside down, and portraits of martyrs were understood not as representations of the dead, but as alive and present, sometimes more alive than the dwindling group of dedicated revolutionaries.

Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.

The Mexican Cristero experience constituted a political laboratory and a school of resistance providing blueprints of action later exercised in Spain. With barely ten years between their own countries’ conflicts, the ladies of Catholic Action—in Mexico and then in Spain—organized themselves, first, as a passive resistance, and then both used the same justifications to support the use of political violence. News of the Mexican Catholic women’s experience had arrived across the Atlantic in the chronicles of Spanish newspapers beginning in the late 1920s and in the edifying, right-leaning novels that were spread, above all, in Spanish Catholic schools during the 1930s. This helps us understand the parallels between the actions, liaisons, informants, and weapons suppliers of the Brigades and other Catholic organizations in Mexico and the members of the women’s fifth column in Spain. Perhaps the contemporary presence in the public sphere of European fascists resonated more among young urban Madrid or Barcelona women during the Spanish Civil War, but, without a doubt, the social origin, experience, and cultural heritage of Mexican women was more in line with the efforts of conservative Spanish women all over the country during the conflict. In both cases, the defence of religion and their Catholic identity was at the forefront of their efforts and gave coherence to what might, at times, appear to be diverse political projects.

This article examines multi-vector pro-life exchanges between Poland and two American countries: the United States and Chile. We make the case that the 1970s through 1990s represent a significant historical moment that yielded both transplantable templates and direct longitudinal consequences for transnational social activism in the twenty-first century. We argue that during this time Poland acted as an incubation site for pro-life transnationalism, where “right to life” became the rallying cry of new generations of Catholic Far Right thinkers and activists like the politician Marek Jurek and journalists and social activists Ewa Kowalewska and Lech Kowalewski. The transnational entanglements that empowered Jurek, Kowalewska, and Kowalewski assumed intellectual and political forms, while also producing direct contact and active exchange of tactics, ideas, and know-how with the leaders of the U.S. pro-life movement such as John Willke or Father Paul Marx. Our study, situated at the intersection of intellectual history and social movement studies, highlights the importance of examining transnationalism with full attention to its local rootedness, and makes a case for incorporating non-progressive social activism into the post-1989 story of civic and social mobilization.

This article considers the history of Egypt’s mid-twentieth-century Spiritualist movement through an examination of its periodical, a monthly Arabic magazine called ʿAlam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit) (1947–1960). As it shows, Egyptian Spiritualists defended and promoted their project by crafting an experimental cosmology, one that blended claims about empirical verification with elements of Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies. It further shows how this combination of scientism and cosmology reflects a core dynamic within the history of scientific exploration in the Islamic world. Like spiritual seekers and occult practitioners in Muslim societies elsewhere, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned their project as one of eradicating superstition from religion, modernizing the nation, and advancing science. By attending to the Egyptian Spiritualist effort to scientize religion and spiritualize science, this article foregrounds the Islamic tradition’s entanglements with scientific discourses and navigates beyond claims about epistemological rupture that often characterize the study of Islam’s relationship to modern science.

This comparative article examines the iterative interactions between the French conception of guerre contre-révolutionnaire and the (re-)legitimation of modern torture techniques from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Based on a threefold argument, and drawing on multilingual historical sources and museal artifacts, it argues that the ideological campaign against the “revolutionary war” was a specifically military-intellectual approach to dealing with real or imagined subversive enemies. This dispositif promoted torture as a method of obtaining information and intimidating victims. First, this article shows how torture and the corresponding knowledge production can be traced back to colonial Indochina. There, archaic techniques were peculiarly blended, often with other experiences and indigenous practices. Later, leading military officers believed that the resulting doctrine of counterrevolutionary warfare was successful largely because of the use of methods of torture that left no trace. This key feature facilitated the export of its techniques to other regions. Therefore, in a second step, this article shows how this intertwined knowledge system was applied to the Algerian War, where it was widely employed and exploited. Subsequently, the fear of the spread of global communism facilitated the emergence of torture as a covert science of the Cold War. Third, this essay demonstrates how leading French theorists globalized their teachings by influencing their South American counterparts through their cross-continental interactions from the 1960s onward. Since the end of the Cold War, traces of this savoir-faire have remained potent, culminating in their influence on U.S. American counterinsurgency doctrine.

In the wake of the 2015 attacks claimed by the Islamic State on the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan theater, cafés in Paris, and the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, survivors were granted reparation based on an already existing legal framework. This article traces the history of compensation for terrorism in France back to a previous campaign of bombings carried out by Lebanese Hezbollah on iconic Parisian sites in 1985–1986 and, beyond the conjuncture of the late 1980s, to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). While genealogies of human rights have so far focused on the aftermath of World War II and the history of the Holocaust, the paper uncovers the wars of decolonization as a key historical conjuncture for the emergence of contemporary humanitarianism and for the structuring of its fundamentally ambivalent discourse. A review of the successive arguments over how to draft, amend, and rewrite the reparation statutes in the late 1950s reveals how compensation was weaponized as an integral part of the “war on terror.” The paper then brings the analysis into the 1980s and the creation of a compensation fund as part of the 1986 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Reparations for terrorism emerge not only as a form of humanitarian intervention but also as a tool of counterinsurgency warfare in its own right. On a historiographical level, I draw on David Scott’s concept of “problem-space” to analyze the late 1950s and 1980s as imbricated conjunctures bearing an exceptional testimony to the history of the present.

Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—is an archive of displacement, containing the imprint of overlooked, erased, or forgotten (often violent) pasts stored in everyday things like trees, trash, talk, and translations. Uniting all these unintended archival deposits are the dead—especially the uncommemorated, forgotten, or abandoned dead—and the urban spaces they co-inhabit with the most marginalized of the living. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper centers on urban cemeteries as archival nodes that gather together impressions—physically and psycho-semiotically—of uncommemorated pasts that nevertheless have left their mark on the urban fabric and people’s lives. This material “documentation” embedded in the built environment provides a vernacular alternative to the “fantasy” of official, national archives, foregrounding the blurry colonial-postcolonial divide in ordinary people’s historical imaginaries. Urban traces of displaced people and pasts show how complex semiotic residues get carried across otherwise disparate urban spaces where the postcolonial present has yet to reckon fully with colonialism’s mortal remains.

Widowers make occasional appearances in Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and—even though Old Norse did not even have a word for them—they exhibit some distinctive behavioral patterns. This article uses the framework of bereavement studies to examine the interplay of gender, affect, and small-scale politics in the wake of the loss of a wife. It proposes two archetypes of dysfunctional bereaved husband, observable in the medieval Norse world which the sagas describe (ca. 800–1300): the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both followed cultural scripts for widowers’ conduct, but did so imperfectly, in a manner that exposes their society’s constructions of masculinity, its prescriptive family codes, and the clandestine channels linking private emotional turmoil with public socio-political disruption. My typology of maladjusted Norse widowers offers heuristic tools for further study of bereaved husbands in other periods and places, as well as for comparison with bereaved wives and with men in other life-stages.