Chapter 8 ties the art historical discussion of a shift in the artwork’s relationship to art history (Arthur Danto, Hans Belting) to considerations of presentism (François Hartog). The institutional understanding of art entails a lack of grounding in a teleological art history, since the artwork’s identity as art is now considered to be grounded in a set of networks in the present. The terminology of the ‘contemporary’ and ‘contemporaneity’ (Boris Groys, David Joselit, Dan Karlholm, Terry Smith, Christine Ross) as well as the terminology of ‘turns’ are shown to be enmeshed with the notion of the archive in significant ways. Although presentism would at first glance seem contrary to the archive art phenomenon, with its interest in, almost obsession with, history, the book’s final chapter shows how notions such as presentism and ‘history’ can be productively used for analysing the kind of interest in history that is associated with archive art. The chapter gets back to the practice of returning to works from the 1960s and 1970s by artists in the 1990s and early 2000s that has been discussed in previous chapters, and considers the temporal implications of such artworks.

The chapter argues that there has been an unacknowledged relationship of Manchester Anthropology that Max Gluckman promoted, and in which F. G. Bailey was trained, to a small network of Melanesianists, myself included. The chapter begins with a brief account of the orientation and interests of what I call ‘Mancunian Realism’, Gluckman’s actor-centered methodology. I then appraise the political anthropology that Bailey went on to develop from it, before turning to the impact of Mancunian Realism on Melanesian anthropology. Specifically, I assess exemplary texts in the work of John Barnes, Peter Worsley, and A. L. Epstein, and go on to evaluate the extent to which Mancunian Realism did and did not influence my own doctoral research in Papua New Guinea.

In this chapter a re-appraisal of the squares movement (2011–2013) is developed by focusing on characteristic forms of public space appropriation that may be considered to constitute examples of a new kind of space-sharing, as well as a promising set of ways of sharing through space. What constitutes the core of the proposed argument is that we can establish an interpretative analogy between actual changes (collectively imagined or projected ones) in occupied spaces and changes in the subjects of action (stemming from experienced identity crisis). For this, three terms are proposed in order to analyze the process of collective identity formation through commoning practices: transposition (visiting otherness), translation (creating passages to existing or potential identities), and transformation (becoming other). This chapter includes an interview with an important activist of the Gezi Park occupation (Istanbul).

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'.

‘Fonua’ refers to a child’s placenta, which is often buried by Pacific nation groups in order to connect that child to their place of birth. When a person leaves, or is forced to leave their place of birth, it disrupts their connection to their homeland. This contributes to the production of cultural statelessness. In the Pacific, cultural statelessness is also tied to legal and political statelessness resulting from a history of forced displacement and labour migration. Today, cultural statelessness is increasingly associated with the impacts of climate change and is increasingly experienced by communities living on low-lying atolls and low-elevation areas of islands in the Pacific Ocean. These communities are on the front line of rising sea levels and extreme weather events caused by anthropogenic climate change. Discussions of statelessness is necessarily complex and intertwined with the governance of labour, history, citizenship and human relationships with the climate. This chapter provides a regional perspective of cultural statelessness and governance; and it explores connectivities that are particular to the Pacific region. However, this narrative also demonstrates how statelessness in the Pacific is tied to questions of global governance.

This chapter uses the example of statelessness in Kuwait to demonstrate how the legal structures that produce statelessness in a given state may depend on that state’s national ideology. It argues that law alone is incapable of (re)producing the stateless subject. In fact, knowledge systems like education and media – and the national narratives they put forward – operate to sustain systems that produce the social inequalities which underpin conditions like exclusion from citizenship. In particular, this chapter uses an analysis of a Kuwaiti educational textbook to examine mundane constructions of statelessness and exclusion. It presents how the text and images used in the textbook presume the national subject as natural. In this way, the contents of the textbook both implicitly and explicitly mark any deviation from a particular form of national subjectivity as unnatural, even as threatening to the Kuwaiti nation. The chapter uses this analysis of the school textbook as a stepping-off point to show how forms of categorical differences between citizens and non-citizens are produced and governed. This includes attributing positive characteristics to the national subject (Kuwaiti) and negative characteristics to non-citizen Others (Bidoon, Migrant). The chapter argues that these differences justify the policies and practices that render Others as inadmissible outsiders and validate the production of Bidoon statelessness. The chapter calls for researchers to challenge the intellectual foundations of the nation-state and problematise the assumptions nations have with respect to identity and belonging.

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.

The book’s theoretical attempt to unite the private sphere of production with the public sphere of citizenship within a newly constructed system of communal ownership presents a viable decentralised alternative to both liberal democracy and state socialism. The outcome is an organisational schema of horizontalised networks, which are held together through what the book argues are libertarian politics. Although there is no role for a centralised state, there is a pluralist self-governance to fulfil the functions of coordination and administration. Political intermediation proceeds via a complex web of interrelating functional associations, which operate within a system of revitalised communities. As routine methods of management are carried out through modes of self-regulation that embody the key anarchist values of equality, solidarity and mutual aid, this specific configuration of functional devolution adds formative detail to the guiding anarchist principle that coercive and authoritarian structures must be replaced with voluntary and libertarian alternatives.

Autonomous neighborhoods in Mexico DF, organized by the direct participation of their inhabitants and through explicitly politicized movements, have developed to concrete examples of a different form of social organization, based on equality and sharing. Analyzing two of them, La Polvorilla (part of an initiative by a movement called Los Panchos), and Tlanezi Calli (created by the Brújula Roja movement), the chapter explores the emancipatory potentialities of the urban autonomy project and its relation to urban commoning practices. The definition of a shared territory became crucial for the autonomous urban communities. People in the reclaimed land of those neighborhoods do not aspire to create their “own” safe havens in the middle of highly dangerous urban periferias. They rather attempt to construct shared housing areas to live in, which may be considered as materialized examples of a different kind of urban co-habitation. Excerpts from interviews with leading activists of both neighborhoods are included.

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.`

The chapter begins by introducing the key ideals and principles central to social anarchist discourse. It then suggests there are certain ideas in Cole’s guild socialist writings that, suitably revised, offer a sound base upon which to build a new model of social anarchism. This serves as the essential premise upon which to frame a specific anarchist-Marxist dialogue, which seeks to breathe new life into the classical anarchist project. Bakunin and Kropotkin received Marx’s argument that the relations within and between social classes are the foundational inequalities through which capitalism systematically reproduces itself sympathetically, yet at the same time they defined class more extensively, and they fiercely rejected his prescribed role for a communist revolutionary state, spearheaded by an authoritarian vanguard. Here the chapter puts forward a rationale for rejecting state communism whilst retaining Marx’s penetrating critique of the capitalist mode of production. Both anarchism and Marxism are committed to instigating a world beyond inequality and exploitation, where production need not be an alienating experience. Although tensions between the two schools of anti-capitalist thought remain, especially on the question of prefigurative politics, the chapter explains that at the same time, there are certain ideal and maxims that are held in common, which consist of themes central to social anarchism and non-statist communism. The resulting conception constellation regards Marx’s sophisticated analyses of political economy and the anarchist suspicion of the main institutions of the modern state as mutually enriching. It is this amalgamation that permeates the entire constitution of associational anarchism. In sum, associational anarchism’s plural democracy is the practical application of the key ideals of class-struggle anarchism, and it is the libertarian edge of democratic Marxism.