This chapter looks at how the partition of Palestine in November 1947 was understood by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. In what ways did Islamist forces in the Arab world, foremost among them the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, attempt to respond to what was perceived as a major infringement of the religious rights of all Muslims in the world to a sacred land? What were the repercussions for Islamist movements in the decades following partition with regard to the calls of the Brotherhood to resist the division of Palestine? Using little-exploited diplomatic archives (American ones in particular), this chapter demonstrates the central role of Islamist movements in triggering a broad Arab reaction to the division of Palestine. It also highlights the centrality of Palestine in the Islamist imagination and how it influences the sociology, composition and evolution of the forces of political and radical Islam.

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.

The chapter addresses philosophically informed insights from Carl Schmitt, Claude Lefort and Pierre Rosanvallon concerning the concept of the political as a site for popular sovereignty. It encircles popular sovereignty as a legitimating conception today. It discusses contemporary political references to ‘the people’ and argues that a sociological approach to sovereignty would benefit from ‘realism’ in recent political theory.

Although there is no such thing as a coherent ‘archive theory’, several key texts and conceptualisations are frequently enlisted in discussions of archives at the turn of the twenty-first century (by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Nora, Jorge Luis Borges, Wolfgang Ernst and others). The chapter outlines the most frequently referenced theorisations of the archive and suggests several socio-historical reasons why the archive became so important during the last decades of the twentieth century. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent opening up of the old Stasi archives, the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the discussion of the role of archival practices in implementing the country’s racial politics as well the use of archival practices to heal the nation, all brought the archive to the forefront. Postcolonial and feminist scholars interested in forms of archival exclusion also contributed in making the archive a point of interest at this time. And in addition to these factors, the shift to digital technology resulted in renewed attention to the technological basis of history writing in general, and of archives in particular. The chapter argues that the meshing of such historical events and the broad cluster of theories about archives contributed to an increasing visibility and interest in both physical archives and the archive as a concept.

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.

This chapter explores how civil society organisations (CSOs) working to end statelessness use norm-based advocacy strategies to effect political and social change. In particular, it examines how they do this in relation to the Global Action Plan to End Statelessness (Action Plan). The CSOs of focus include local-level community groups, national and regional non-governmental organisations, and regional networks of individual experts. Highlighting specific examples from a content analysis of CSO documents, public statements, and discourse, the chapter analyses how CSOs attempt to ‘foreground’ and dismantle problematic social norms that relate to causes of statelessness. It observes that CSOs use two strategies – ‘normative reframing’ and ‘normative innovation’ – to advance alternative norms in their place. First, CSOs have used normative reframing to build momentum for change. That is, they have adopted a human rights framing for the discussion of Action 2 of the Action Plan (to ensure that no child is born stateless). This has taken a regional focus on Europe. Second, CSOs are currently using normative innovation. This is in order to advance a normative framework based on a combination of equality, inclusion, and anti-discrimination norms. The intention of this is to generate more progress on Action 3 (remove gender discrimination from nationality laws), an area that has seen less success than other areas. Although statelessness is the focus here, the conclusions of this research potentially hold relevance to civil society advocacy in other issue areas.

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 shows how to begin the research process. It suggests several possible starting points for thinking through and designing a spatial research project, divided here into the broad parameters of location or building type, theme or concept, and body of evidence. These different approaches are explored through a number of concrete case studies of spatial histories, demonstrating how these research routes work in practice. The final sub-section provides some wide-ranging advice for formulating useful research questions.

Several critiques have pointed out that #MeToo in India often erased the experiences of Dalit women, even as anti-caste feminists made questions of caste privilege core to these new technologies of resisting sexual harassment. In underscoring the routine nature of sexual violence against Dalit women, this chapter shows how their testimonies were not always legible under #MeToo, even in the hands of anti-caste feminists. It builds on the legal battle of one victim of caste-based sexual violence, Satyabhama, to throw light on such endemic violence in India, generally understood as the violence committed by upper-caste men against lower-caste women, politically and socially identified as Dalit women. Even when women like Satyabhama moved court and publics to name the injustice metered onto them, their voice – as with Dalit women’s testimonies of sexual violence more generally – tend to be sidelined, erased or concealed, in both intentional and unintentional ways. The chapter asks whether the urban MeToo movement was able to do a better job of foregrounding the voices and claims of marginalised women like Satyabhama. The chapter concludes that even as India’s #MeToo movement was initiated by the Dalit-Bahujan feminists, it ultimately offered limited prospects and space for engaging the phenomenon of caste-based sexual violence perpetrated against women from the marginalised sections of society.