This chapter explores the phenomenon of ‘intellectual relief’, that is, aid that was aimed specifically at intellectuals and intellectual institutions, in the era of the Great War. Beginning in 1914, a wide range of humanitarian agencies in North America and Britain were involved in myriad different forms of intellectual relief in the postwar period, many of which continued into the 1930s. This chapter interrogates the meaning and significance of intellectual relief in a period where humanitarian action is often associated with universal suffering. Yet the relief of intellectuals was built not upon humanitarian universalism but upon difference; distinctions such as class, education, and cultural attainment were essential in identifying those in need and allocating bespoke aid. Both agencies and those seeking assistance used the language of humanitarianism to justify intellectual need and the metaphor of ‘intellectual hunger’ was frequently invoked. The chapter looks at intellectual relief from 1914 to 1933, demonstrating that, while relief to intellectuals after 1933 is a well-known topic, humanitarian interventions to save scholars was a response to the conditions created by the Great War. While it utilised the language of humanitarianism, intellectual relief was premised upon the stabilisation of postwar European societies and the promotion of democracy in the face of Bolshevism. Fundamentally, it was about expertise rather than empathy. The chapter challenges what we think we know about the history of humanitarianism. By highlighting the widespread phenomenon of aid given to traditional elites rather than destitute children it questions just how universal Great War humanitarianism really was.

Selling the magazine The Big Issue, and begging for change, are distinct activities. Nevertheless, in the context of public spaces, both are recognisable as phenomena of visible poverty. Although these are not equivalents, they entail and are characterised by resemblances: beggars and vendors align themselves with pedestrian traffic flows in order to elicit money from, or sell magazines to, passers-by. These alignments are recoverable through detailed observation of the practices they involve, such as orienting to the temporal organisation of specific locations for maximum pedestrian traffic, close attention to and exploitation of the sequential environments that constitute public spaces, positioning within or standing just outside the pedestrian flows, using glance-available categories to increase opportunities for donations or sales. This chapter reports on two fieldwork experiences. One was observational team ethnography. The other involved a fieldworker with a single informant, in interview and tutorial activity. A tutorial, through which a seller of The Big Issue instructed the fieldworker to use pedestrian flows as a resource, is not subject to the reductions of positional reflexivity. Instead, this tutorial illustrates the contingencies of methods, as seen from the vantage point of the seller, with implications for the use of video data. Description and analysis was informed by an agenda-setting study of public spaces as categorial and sequential environments, which had a decisive influence upon subsequent studies of turn-taking systems. Once the self-replication and categorial organisation of pavement cultures are recognised, public spaces become fieldwork settings without exit.

This chapter analyses the planning and failure to implement international famine relief in Russia in 1921, at a scale that would have been the largest intergovernmental aid operation of the interwar period. Understanding the international response to the famine highlights how League of Nations member states required aid to serve a political – and specifically anti-Bolshevik – purpose following the Great War. In 1921, the Volga Famine threatened as many as thirty million inhabitants of Russia with death by starvation. As soon as news of the famine reached Western Europe and the Americas, private humanitarian organisations, government leaders, and officials at the League of Nations began to mobilise for relief. Both private and governmental conferences envisioned the creation of a massive international famine relief effort, capable of feeding at least twenty million children and adults. Based on an analysis of the negotiations among governments and private organisations about famine relief, this chapter argues that British and French interest in international famine relief was motivated by anti-Bolshevism. These governments sought a non-military avenue to containing revolutionary disorder in Bolshevik Russia, and initially believed that food could lead to political moderation. When political developments in Russia seemed to indicate otherwise, the same governments who had spearheaded discussions about international famine relief quickly lost interest in the operation. Instead of the largest intergovernmental relief effort of the interwar years, food aid for victims of the Volga famine was dominated by a large, American effort and accompanied by a considerably smaller, private pan-European effort.

This chapter is drawn from the author’s doctoral multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in urban public libraries impacted by UK austerity localism between 2010 and 2020. Reflecting on a single empirical site from this study, a community branch library in Southeast London run by activist-volunteers, the chapter charts the author’s complex and enmeshed relationality with the library from multiple subject positions, entries and exits. Her intersecting roles of researcher, volunteer, employee and activist in the library’s lifeworld created a complex positionality which shifted over time, along with the mutable shape and capacity of the library itself, generating a durational push-and-pull relationship with this site. Exploring the ‘fuzziness’ of the field through a recursive and reflexive methodological lens, this chapter examines productive analytical tensions arising from iterative processes of (re)entering and exiting and considers the importance of volitional, affective and ethical dimensions in the author’s oblique relationality to the field. The chapter works through a series of time periods in this circuitous research journey, concluding with three lessons on the difficulties and opportunities produced by entanglement and extraction dilemmas. The author argues that methodologically messy and longitudinal back-and-forth movements between leaving and returning, theory and practice, provide a challenging yet powerful analytic opportunity for enriching what ‘the field’ and one’s position in, around and through it can mean in both ethnographic discourse and activist praxis.

It is commonly believed that in order to address something, the first step is to measure it. This has been a common approach in efforts to address the challenges associated with statelessness. With the aim of gathering more reliable data on statelessness, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has launched a number of projects around the world intended to map the incidence of statelessness. Some of these have attempted to gather quantitative data. This chapter analyses methodological challenges involved in gathering quantitative data on statelessness. This includes ethical challenges associated with mapping projects in general, such as issues of privacy. It also includes specific ethical concerns that arise in the case of mapping politically vulnerable populations. There are also practical challenges. For example, the legal definition of a person as stateless is complex and often difficult to establish. This can lead to difficulties of consistency in data collection. This chapter presents reflections based on first-hand involvement in statelessness mapping projects. The chapter suggests that if mapping efforts continue, they need to address both the ethical and the practical challenges head-on.

Chapter 1 provides a chronological outline of the most important books, articles and other publications that define and promote archive art as a sub-genre of contemporary art from the mid-1990s to c. 2015. The outline is followed by a discussion of points of commonality between the different texts. This discussion is organised around ten thematic headings that include the political and critical associations of archive art; the most common theories and texts referenced; notions of the unreliable archive; the relationship between archive and photography; the archival notion as a curatorial connective idea; the contrast between archive as a material and metaphor; as well as intertextual and self-reflexive aspects of the archive. Many of the discussions in subsequent chapters are elaborations of issues identified and briefly outlined here.

This chapter addresses the conceptual schema of associational anarchism’s legal framework, which may be thought of as non-parliamentary jurisprudence. Anarchism renunciates the legal authority of the modern state. It points to the possibility of life beyond the law, of a social order held together by a cooperation that, where necessary, may be legitimately coerced if derived through collective and democratic decision-making. In general, it has been suggested that minor infringements can be left to public pressure, with more serious cases solved through trials, compensation, isolation and ultimately expulsion. This chapter qualifies these claims in certain ways. On the grounds that laws are determined inclusively by all who are subject to them, and that they are not enforced by the coercive institutions of the state, an anarchist legal order can be coherently theorised. Here the chapter engages with the intriguing political thought of J.J. Rousseau. The guilds will self-legislate within their own jurisdiction at the local level, and their legal decision-making will assume the mode of general will deliberations. The idea is that individual cooperators will determine the legal rules they themselves agree to comply with in their productive lives. The chapter moves on to indicate how interpersonal conflicts beyond the sphere of production may be settled consistently without recourse to a centrally administered judiciary. At this point, the distinction drawn in the works of Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin between ‘customary law’ and ‘codified law’ is explained, which leads to a discussion of the associational anarchist innovation of the ‘justice councils’.

The research methodology on which the book is based is explained in this chapter. Participatory study through activist research is described along with credits for those who took part in the process (including those interviewed).

The concluding chapter summarises the core arguments of the book and reflects on the dawn of the Third Nuclear Age as well as developments since January 2021. The central argument is that the ills of the Third Nuclear Age have not gone away with the departure of Donald Trump. Instead, as Russia brutally invades Ukraine and Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear sabre, as India accidentally launches a nuclear-capable missile into Pakistan, as China builds more nuclear missile silos, and as the UK increases the cap on its nuclear warhead stockpile, many of the issues analysed in this book are here to stay. Despite the renewal of nuclear arms control treaties such as New START, alongside the nuclear weapons states’ reaffirmation of the Reagan–Gorbachev principle that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’, the chapter argues that the Third Nuclear Age is still a time of potentially unparalleled catastrophe. The final section of this chapter explores what can be done to challenge and overcome the exterminism of the new nuclear age, and draws together some of the positive developments made during the period of analysis – such as the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in January 2021 – to suggest where we go from here.

Chapter 7 argues that in addition to kinship, a key driver of humanitarian efforts are affinity ties (Ho 2017). These are commonalities between those offering support and those whom it is aimed at. Recognising such affinities challenges the trope of the ‘white saviour’ (Cole 2012), which reiterates the importance of interventions by those from the Global North, making others invisible. This chapter nuances the ‘white saviour’ narrative and makes visible the wealth of aid relations that derive from affinity ties, based on similarity and shared biographies. Such commonalities can be shared experiences of deprivation while growing up; experiences of abandonment, displacement or bereavement. It surfaces in notions of a pan-‘Asian-ness’, shared by everyday humanitarians from other Asian countries. Even as supporters from the Global North are foregrounded on websites of their aid projects, this often serves the purposes of fundraising, and networking with potential donors. This feeds into a ‘white saviour’ narrative, but obscures the often fundamentally cooperative nature of such initiatives. Everyday humanitarian ventures often rely on close collaborations between Cambodians and foreigners from other parts of Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, and are by no means the prerogative of those from the Global North. The chapter argues that the figure of the ‘white saviour’ needs to not only be critiqued, but the mechanisms through which it is continuously reinvigorated, to be made visible. This recognises the complexity of interactions at stake, and understand who is offering support to whom, how, and with what consequences.