Brazilian hospitality’ refers to the continuous trend, in the last two decades, of a generous treatment by the Brazilian state towards asylum seekers. In regard to stateless persons, that ‘hospitality policy’ turned into law when in 2017 a new migratory act was approved. This created a statelessness determination procedure, unprecedented for a Latin American country, and a facilitated naturalisation process for stateless persons. This chapter tells the story of how Brazil addressed the risk of leaving thousands of stateless children abroad because of an inopportune constitutional amendment. Also, it shows how that recent legislative innovation has changed the game, turning the country into a reference in the continent regarding statelessness prevention and sheltering for stateless persons. The new legislation on statelessness in Brazil is part of a broader regional cooperation of Latin American countries on questions related to asylum, guided by the so-called ‘spirit of Cartagena’, referring to the milestone of the Cartagena Declaration of 1984. The Brazilian hospitality policy is discussed through the lens of the welcoming initiative inaugurated to receive Haitians fleeing from the 2010 earthquake, called ‘humanitarian visas’, as well as the activism carried out by Maha Mamo, a formerly stateless person who became internationally known for her struggle for citizenship recognition. Now a naturalised Brazilian citizen of Syrian origin, Mamo’s charisma turned her into a voice and human face for the millions of stateless persons in the world still in search of visibility and inclusion.

Chapter 5 revolves around the purpose of humanitarian aid defined by the desire to help and argues that it leaves a key motivation out of sight: how aid is animated by its twin desire to connect. This can include first-hand contact with those they support, such as bringing supplies to schools. It can mean direct experience of aid activities, and their tangible efficacy. Establishing personal relationships across national, ethnic and cultural differences, while potentially challenging, is a key motivation for those involved. These connections are often sought with people in need, separated by geographical distance, and who may be considered ‘Other’ in some ways from everyday humanitarians themselves. The ‘impulse of philanthropy’ (Bornstein 2009), is here conjoined with a parallel, anthropological impulse to know and connect with an Other. The importance of relationships for institutionalised aid has, at least partly, been recognised. More than social relations being instrumental to successful aid practice, the chapter suggests that providing assistance to others can facilitate the making of these desired relations. Rather than assisting distant strangers, forging these connections means making relationships personal. This can lead to long-term connections between people, regular visits and contact with overseas supporters. The desire to connect unsettles notions of the ‘distant stranger’ as the archetypical humanitarian object, highlighting the familiarity and closeness just as important for motivating assistance to others.

Over a four-year period, we engaged in a community-based post-critical ethnography in Riverhill – a mid-sized city located in southern Appalachia in the United States. Beginning in 2007, a non-profit organization placed Burundians in public housing projects in Riverhill. Through English as a Second Language tutoring and a small interdisciplinary research team, we met with Burundian children and families the next year. Most Burundians came to the United States from refugee camps in Tanzania, Republic of Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This chapter, traces the authors’ layered and multiple exits from living in Riverhill. Specifically, the authors mark exits from some places and people within the community and the exit from an interdisciplinary research team itself, and from thresholds of communication and relationships that became unbearable to maintain. Haunted by what was, and in touch with some of what is through connections with some members of Burundian families through social media, they authors use autoethnographic reflection alongside fieldnotes and e-mail communication, and interactive interviews with each other, to represent the ways of living through and living with entrances and exits. Some of the exits easiest to leave personally were the hardest to give up professionally. Among their exits the authors focus on what shattered all preparation and expectation, their privileges that allowed them to leave Riverhill as a place once lived, and their thoughts of the children, now young adults, who never leave them at all.

In October 2017, a law school student in California posted a list on the social media platform Facebook of Indian men accused of sexual harassment. In response, within a day, a group of feminists had posted a statement asking the group that had posted the list to consider due process rather than anonymous accusations with ‘no context or explanation’. These two texts became the subject of an intense and fraught debate among feminists in India. This chapter focuses on feminist arguments, disagreements and solidarities in the wake of #MeToo rather than on the debates surrounding sexual harassment itself. Rather than sexual harassment, it was feminism which became the subject of contestation. This chapter traces narratives from this debate and engages in conversations with feminists to think back to that moment. The chapter is located around the idea of what it calls internet time and its capacities to reshape the trajectory of feminist debates. It reflects on what it means to have an argument in internet time. What does it mean to engage as feminists with each other in the online space? What are the specific pressures and anxieties produced by articulations and disagreements in online spaces? How might one reflect on the question of disagreement, especially disagreement with allies, in a time of social media? And how might one think of and construct the possibilities and circumscriptions of feminist solidarities in internet time, in messy circumstances?

This chapter shows how the #MeToo moment in India became an important turning point for the engagement of Indian women’s movements with legal processes Based on an autoethnographic account of being a member of university committees framing anti-sexual harassment policies and dealing with complaints, it also examines the specific site of complaints committees in Indian higher education institutions in the context of #MeToo. Finally, in mapping vast changes to the legal and institutional landscape of sexual harassment in India, it reflects on the ‘messiness’ of these spaces and insists on the role of care and conversation in feminist debates and their engagements with the law and university complaints processes.

This chapter draws inspiration from F. G. Bailey’s The Witch Hunt (1996, Cornell University Press) to analyse an instance of political conflict from a growing transnational field of epidemiological researcher-advocates who are working to promote Indigenous health equity. While Bailey’s ethnographic focus on the Indian village of Bisipara in the 1950s may seem worlds apart from transnational Indigenous activism at the turn of the 21st century, his attention to how participants in political conflicts regularly reframe what others experience as injustice in morally positive terms, as they attempt to achieve their own agendas, remain timely and relevant. In The Witch Hunt: Or, the Triumph of Morality, Bailey documents how key participants in a conflict in the village of Bisipara ended up framing the persecution of one man as a morally appropriate act in support of the collective good. For comparison, I draw an example from the twists and turns of a political conflict in Aotearoa New Zealand, in which Māori researchers have contended with recurrent political efforts to deny copious evidence that ethnicity patterns health and social inequities, and responded to the ways in which proponents of these denials have attempted to invoke the positive moral rubric of ‘fairness’.

Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 relates to property rights. Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 provides: 'No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.' Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 provides: 'The High Contracting Parties undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.' Article 1 of Protocol No. 6 reads as follows: 'The death penalty shall be abolished. No one shall be condemned to such penalty or executed.'

This chapter explains why majority rule remained the basis for the partition of the Indian subcontinent, but was not put into effect in Palestine as the Jewish population only formed a majority in one of Palestine’s subdistricts – the Jaffa subdistrict – which was too small to establish an independent Jewish state. So majority rule was applied in British India between Muslims and non-Muslims, but denied to the Arabs of Palestine where subdistricts with overwhelming Arab majorities were allotted to the Jewish state. Drawing on archival sources, the chapter explains how the Muslim League made inquiries with the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva in the late 1930s as to whether, as representatives of British India, they could challenge the legality of British policy in Palestine at the Permanent Court of International Justice, which they alleged was incompatible with Britain’s obligations under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Strikingly, this inquiry bore a resemblance to the later attempt by Ethiopia and Liberia to challenge apartheid in South West Africa at the International Court of Justice that was based on the same provision of the League’s Covenant. One of the consequences of this flagrant deprivation of Palestinian democratic rights, and the perpetuation of minority rule in large parts of the colonial world, was that it paved the way for the emergence of an aggressive form of Third World nationalism that led to the development of irredentist forms of violent nationalism and anti-imperialism.

This short chapter brings together in a few summary paragraphs the new forms of associational anarchism’s hybrid constitution, the kernel of which is a democratic pluralism organised through a specific functional devolution. It is true that certain social anarchist tenets have been modified. This is especially so with regards to a role for a body-politic, an ethic of representation, hierarchical structures, self-legislation and centralisation, together with a weakened commitment to strict economic equality of outcome. The chapter indicates though that the content of associational anarchism’s essential maxims – in particular the new forms of local decision-making, self-governance and the universalisation of creative forms of labour – are still very much anarchist in essence. In order to minimise the powers of the commune to the absolute minimum, a subordinated role for a market mechanism in the field of consumption goods had to be admitted. But the mild guild market system, regulated horizontally through the networks of public agencies – rather than through hard markets forces, plutocrats or intervening states – is constituted through a pluralised egalitarian control over the means of production, where there is neither a capitalist class nor a dominant role for capital. As huge concentrations and centralisations of capital and wealth cannot accumulate, equality of opportunity is more sustainable than it is in systems of untrammelled markets. The chapter concludes by confirming the ways in which the institutional arrangements within and between the guilds and consumer councils complement the twentieth-century anarchist notion of developed selfhood.

This chapter approaches bureaucracies as mechanistic systems struggling to perform functions that are suited to entrepreneurial styles of modern management. In resource-scarce communities facing droughts or poverty, the system functions in an environment of uncertainty or dynamism. As a result, such bureaucracies must wrestle with choice among normative, strategic, and pragmatic rules (Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils 2001) of their institutions in order to cope with influences coming from the top down, from the state, and from the bottom up, from community-based organizations. This choice among normative, pragmatic, and strategic rules by the bureaucracy is the ad hoc response to the asymmetrical flow of information resulting from the contingencies thrust upon them by the politicians and or the ordinary people. Case studies from the internationally implemented Participatory Irrigation Management Program in Sri Lanka, India and the Philippines and the Quantification Settlement Agreement in Imperial Valley, California, are used to illustrate how these choices result in different outcomes at variance to the original goals.

This Editors’ Introduction reviews existing literature on ‘leaving’, as well as highlighting how the actual business of exiting a research setting has, by and large, been neglected in accounts of fieldwork. We find this odd, given recent moves toward open and ‘confessional’ forms of methodological writing. We also make a strong case for examining exits as a meaningful stage of the research process, rather than a bookend to it. We provide our own tales of exiting (or not…) our own field sites in order to suggest that the last day can be just as generative of insight as the first. We introduce the chapters across the four sections of the book and, in sum, argue for the need for all ethnographers to experience exits, and the difficulties or impossibilities thereof, as active researchers.