While Japan’s military contribution to the First World War remained rather limited, the nation continuously aided Belgium, presented in the Japanese press as a small nation inhabited by an infinitely heroic and brave population, from 1914 to 1926. Japanese officials, women’s organisations, and large corporations encouraged, organised, and financially supported these humanitarian campaigns. During the Great War, Japanese society came alive with collections for a faraway country few Japanese had previously had any connection to – but why? The chapter explores Japanese humanitarian activities for Belgium during and after the war, paying special attention to the plethora of motivations and objectives that propelled the country’s charitable activities. The chapter shows that, alongside Japan’s political and economic involvement in Great War-era Europe, humanitarian efforts were part of the nation’s quest for international acknowledgement. The chapter not only focuses on official contributors but includes the efforts of those who at first sight would not be considered diplomatic brokers: Japanese women, journalists, and businessmen. It identifies the main motivations that drove contributors to sacrifice time and money to help people living on the other side of the world. In this way, the chapter reveals the truly global reverberations of events on the Western front, explores significant shifts in Japanese society, and provides some historical answers to the perennial question of why societies and individuals save strangers at all.

This chapter gives a description of the life-cycle of a digital history project, from digitisation of source material onwards, with advice on the practicalities and costs of different approaches to producing machine-readable text. There is introductory coverage of data cleaning and version control using Git, although these are covered more fully in later chapters.

Statelessness and citizenship fall along a fluid and unstable continuum that is formed, deployed, and maintained by an assemblage of administrative technologies and human actors. This includes: technological artefacts (such as birth certificates and other state-issued identification documents), technological infrastructures (such as internationally shared passenger name records for air travellers), and statutory and treaty instruments (such as citizenship laws and international treaties). Irregularities arising in such an assemblage lead to a troubling of citizenship or even outright statelessness. This chapter recognises that statelessness can be understood as a failure of the technology of citizenship. As such, it examines some of the ways in which birth certificates privilege a particular type of citizenship. This is a citizenship predicated on cisheterosexual norms. This has significant effects on the governance of citizenship. First, people born within a particular jurisdiction who do not comply with cisheterosexual norms may be barred from accessing full recognition of their citizenship. Second, these norms add barriers to potential or eventual citizenship for those who want or need to change jurisdictions. This chapter advocates a turn away from the fetishisation of birth certificates as they currently stand. It suggests instead the need for a reassessment and change in approaches to such technologies of citizenship and identification at both state and global levels.

The title is from Freddy’s 1978 paper. Tertius gaudens (literally, ‘third man rejoicing’) refers to a third party who benefits from conflict between two others. The gaudens is a strategist and manipulator. Numen conveys religion, divinity, and power. A numen controls via collective beliefs and values. Their legitimacy transcends the self-serving gaudens. Discussion of third parties runs through much of Freddy’s work: political stratagems to acquire ‘spoils’; tension between individualism and action on behalf (or perceived to be on behalf) of a community; the nature of leadership and control over followers; the dangers of a world dominated in the name of numen. I focus on the range of theoretical books between Stratagems and Spoils and God-Botherers and Other True Believers. Third parties are also important in the theory and practice of conflict resolution. In this chapter, I bring together Freddy’s conceptions of third parties with what we know about how they function in the world of disputes and conflicts; and I use what we have learned about third parties in conflict resolution to expand the range of Freddy’s concepts.

Recent historical writing has emphasised the extent to which non-governmental organisations fuelled the ‘innovative humanitarian countermeasures’ seen during the Great War. State authorities rarely figure in these discussions or are depicted as facilitative actors, providing the context within which the new agencies could flourish, rather than purposeful actors in their own right. This chapter offers a corrective to this view by exploring the role of the US government in providing ‘protecting power’ services between 1914 and 1917. Washington had led the way in developing state practice in this area, but by 1914 the institution remained a customary, rather than a formal, element of interstate relations. The humanitarian crisis after 1914 forced states to continually re-evaluate the role of protecting powers, and, by the war’s close, neutral governments had come to assume a wide array of responsibilities over humanitarian affairs. The majority of these innovations were formally acknowledged in 1929, when protecting powers’ responsibilities were explicitly written in to the new Prisoner of War Convention. The US record after 1914 shows the extent to which state authorities operated as humanitarian norm entrepreneurs and sheds light on how ‘humanitarian imperatives’ intersected with the neutrals’ political, strategic, and commercial interests. America’s protecting power mandates gave government a discrete and direct stake in the country’s ‘humanitarian awakening’ over these years. Despite its impressive record, however, Washington remained reticent in shouldering direct responsibility for humanitarian affairs after this date, or pushing for too expansive a remit for protecting powers in the 1929 PoW convention.

Freedom of expression in Article 10(1) has been given an appropriately broad interpretation when the scope of the concept has had to be considered. In its Recommendation 38 of September 1949 the Consultative Assembly listed freedom of assembly and freedom of association as two separate rights. They are grouped together in Article 11 of the Convention. The right to marry and to found a family is to be exercised 'according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right'. Article 13 provides: 'Everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity.' Making out a case under Article 13 involves demonstrating that the rights of action and other means of redress available under domestic law are inadequate, which may be difficult.

Chapter 4 addresses the notion of humanitarianism as predicated on distance, that is, geographical scale. This is prominently embodied in the figure of the distant stranger, a trope ubiquitous and simplistic in equal measure. In this context, what role does distance play for people’s desire to intervene in the lives of others? What compels people to support those nearby, regional neighbours, or across nation states and continents? The chapter illustrates how people create and respond to distance, and how this shapes their personal and professional trajectories, and interventions in the lives of others. This matters not least because the notion of distance, physical and social, looms large in how philosophers and ordinary people construct responsibilities towards others. Unravelling these tropes, everyday humanitarian practice shows how distance is not fixed, but dynamic and flexible. Those who intervene outside of their own country are attracted to help in faraway places not least by a desire for travel and adventure. When faced with street children or begging veterans on a daily basis, some find they need to keep poverty at bay. They move between immersing themselves, and withdrawing when it becomes overwhelming. Embedding themselves in local communities of need, or retreating, sometimes for good, to more comfortable surroundings, requires constant negotiation and raises moral quandaries. As practitioners are using sliding scales, humanitarian distance emerges not as fixed, but segmented into mobile, interlocking and dynamic scales, which they adopt as it suits their situation.

How does a partition of land between ‘nations’ that inhabit a single colonial territory seem like a sensible solution in 1947/48 British India and mandate Palestine? This chapter suggests that the sociology of colonial knowledge provides some answers. The colonial construction of unitary, fundamentally defined, but politically governed communities occurred over different time spans but in similar ways in both regions. Within this broad formulation, this chapter examines the history of legal governance, and the representational practices that codify and actualise this colonial sociology. British adjudication and laws replaced local authorities and systems of governance in socioreligious groups. This replacement was a complex and negotiated process between the British authorities and the local elite. It occurred over a longer period in India than Palestine, but followed similar processes in Palestine emanating from the British experience of governing in India. In addition, British colonial authorities in both regions looked at the development of political ‘representation’ of important social groups in their administration, by organising various power-sharing arrangements. The chapter suggests that in the process of legal administration and political representation, multiple ‘fuzzy’ religious groups of the early colonial period were forged into highly nationalised, singular religious communities at the time of devolution and partition. Seeing these processes comparatively elucidates British colonial legalities and highlights the common nature of these processes and links across colonial territories.

F. G. Bailey has likened himself to the fox, who has many ideas, as contrasted to the hedgehog, who has but one (and supposedly defends it with bristling spines). However, this is not to say that there is no coherence in his writings from the 1950s into the 21st century. Over decades, he has developed a sophisticated and ever-refined repertoire of terms and axioms applicable and adaptable for the analysis of social action in general – famously, he was among the first scholars to speak of political ‘arenas’. With his model of actors struggling not only over substantial prizes but also over the very rules of the political game, F. G. Bailey has always remained epistemologically modest, basing his analyses on observed behaviour and plausible inference, culturally grounded but always assuming a very humanistic unity of mankind. His eventual turn towards rhetorical persuasion as a prime vehicle of social action opens a window into his very conception of human nature. Drawing on a thorough reading of F. G. Bailey’s theoretical corpus, this chapter summarizes his proverbial toolkit to demonstrate how the various parts interlock and offer an accessible middle-range approach to interaction and conflict. It ends on a reflection on the position of F. G. Bailey’s work in the patchy history of political anthropology. A discussion of three critics of his approach serves to underline the specific strengths of the toolkit, with its universalist ambitions. Operating at a level of abstraction less fashionable today, as the postmodern drift of political anthropology has rerouted disciplinary interest away from political action to political form and eventually political thought, it might not receive fair and adequate representation in current textbooks, but still remains an inspiring and cohesive contribution to not only interaction, but social theory.