The chapter addresses the human rights revolution after the second world war, as one of the most complex challenges that the idea of sovereignty has confronted. It examines the debate on the tension between transnational human rights regimes and national and popular sovereignty. It discusses propositions as to how we are to consider the relationship between popular sovereignty and the human rights discourse.

This chapter draws on the authors’ experiences of leaving and returning to the field in research with people living with dementia as part of an ESRC-NIHR-funded five-year longitudinal study of the neighbourhood experiences of people living with dementia and their families, friends and care partners. The authors deployed a range of approaches and methods that placed fieldwork and the sustained, repeated engagement with participants in particular places over a period time. The ‘field’ they were concerned with was not simply a geographically bounded location such as the neighbourhoods where participants lived, but also temporal – incorporating change over time, and social – incorporating relational ties with other people regardless of their location. Dementia can be associated with a range of symptoms including cognitive change such memory loss, declining physical abilities and communication difficulties. Over time, these can make it difficult for those participating in the research to cognitively and physically access, recognise or locate themselves in the social and spatial fields the authors were exploring. Participants may also be unable to remember previous interactions with the research team or the experiences they previously have shared. The authors’ repeated interactions with participants and their associated social networks, in the places they visited or where they lived, prompted a messy process of entering, ‘leaving’ and re-engaging with what the authors came to recognise as the field. This chapter seeks to question what it means to leave, return and remember the field as a cognitive as well as a physical and temporal location.

The chapter has several aims. First, it argues for an entangled history of partitioned political spaces, and suggests that we should trace back the idea of partition to the interwar years and locate it in a British imperial context. It is argued that the idea of partition emerged as a colonial management tool for maintaining and controlling religious and ethnonational differences within the Empire, but adapted to the post-1914 language of self-determination. Second, the chapter places the Palestine and India partitions of 1947–48 side by side and proposes that, from this vantage point, the 1947–49 war in Palestine would be better understood as a war of partition. Finally, the chapter concludes that neither in India/Pakistan nor in Israel/Palestine did partition prove to be a practical solution as its architects announced it to be.

The author was trained and supervised by Bailey at Sussex in the early 1970s and remained in touch with him for the next half-century. This chapter examines Bailey’s original theoretical influence on the writer’s focus on community, leadership, continuity, and change. It considers Bailey’s debt to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, and someone frequently overlooked, the classicist Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University whose attention to the Stoics drove to the heart of Bailey’s political anthropology, to his character, and helps explain F. G. B.’s antipathy to Marx and to religion ‒ something this writer’s background was steeped in. Indeed, was it not for embarking on this essay to begin with, it is likely the author would have skirted the discomfiture his faith-religion long presented. The chapter is divided into four histories: (i) Bailey’s Oxford years, (ii) Liverpool and Manchester, (iii) F. G. B.’s initial role and impact on the author, and (iv) on Griffin’s use of FGB’s concepts in Nice and a Var village in the 1970s, and on a Traveller-‘Gypsy’ caravan site in west London in the 1980s. In between, and later, not included here, the writer did fieldwork in Fiji, and (collaboratively on a case of nomad displacement) in Chennai.

Chapter 5 engages with the COVID-19 pandemic which seemed to many as though we were living in ‘the world of post-apocalypse movies’. This chapter argues that rather than being tangential to nuclear politics, global health crises – such as COVID-19 – are exacerbated by how states prioritise nuclear weapons and military spending as solutions to security threats. The author analyses how the Trump administration’s decision to end a pandemic early warning system, the UK government’s failure to take the findings of a pandemic planning exercise seriously, and the early handling of the COVID-19 pandemic during February–April 2020 demonstrate how poorly prepared states are for security threats and health crises, such as those that would be generated by a nuclear conflict or accident. Moreover, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals how a state-centric, military-focused understanding of security makes the world less, rather than more, safe. Subsequently, the chapter builds upon recent work in critical security studies and argues that by reconceptualising security differently and moving away from the importance of the state as the object to be secured, not only can we better understand and critique the political and ethical dimensions of nuclear weapons, but we can also contribute towards reforming security and addressing the harms that nuclear weapons cause in the Third Nuclear Age.

Researchers often have concerns about how to leave the field and end the relationships they have forged with communities. However, in some cases the field expands, and the researcher moves from being at the periphery to become a full participant within the networked relationality of a community of practice. This chapter explores this experience of becoming fixed within the field. Reflecting on research with care-experienced children and young people in Wales, an ongoing journey of increasing nearness, rather than increasing distance, is considered. The original study led to impact activities and further research, within a field of young people in care, care leavers and partner organisations, in which the researcher became immersed and gained an ongoing sense of permanency. In considering this position of ‘no exit’ the chapter draws on déjà vu and jamais vu. Déjà vu, already seen, occurs when one feels as though a situation is familiar, despite evidence that the situation could not have been experienced before, resulting from familiarity-based recognition, or recognition based on feelings of familiarity that occur without identification of their source. Jamais vu, never seen, occurs when things seem unfamiliar and there is little connection between long-term memory and perceptions from the present. In becoming more than native and embedded in the emotion, policy, practice and mediation of care experiences, the chapter presents encounters and relationships with partners and young people that generated feelings of déjà vu and jamais vu through the complexities of familiarity, shifting positionalities and self-contained worlds of common understanding.

The medieval Christian world held neutrality in low esteem. It could hardly do otherwise, given the prevailing concept of war in Christian thought as a contest between justice and injustice. True to their intellectual heritage of just-war ideas, neither Gentili nor Grotius had a strong conception of a set of rights of neutrals as such. Neutrals were nevertheless recognised as having rights of a sort: the basic rights which natural law accorded to persons and states generally. The so-called 'rights' of neutrals comprised, in reality, an alliance between general natural-law rights and the freedom of action 'left over' when the rights of belligerents came to a stop. Even with the evolution of these sets of basic rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents, a host of practical problems remained relating to their exercise in practice.

Chapter 7 analyses events between August and October 2020 and begins by discussing the revelation that money given to the Pentagon for face masks and medical equipment was instead funnelled to defence contractors to make jet engine parts and body armour. The author argues that militarism and the entrenchment of the nuclear-military-industrial complex across economics, politics, media, and society serve to make the world less safe. In particular, the chapter focuses on the absurdities of the Pentagon awarding a $13 billion contract to Northrup Grumman to build a new fleet of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Such developments reflect a staggering level of exterminism given that in a bizarre hangover from the Cold War, ICBM silos based across the American Midwest are intended to act as a ‘nuclear sponge’ to draw an enemy attack away from larger American cities. Also central to this chapter is the impact that militarism and nuclear weapons currently have on exacerbating climate change, and the potential climate impact of even a small nuclear war that could annihilate all life on earth By discussing the influence of lobbying, cronyism, and corruption in and beyond the nuclear-military-industrial complex, this chapter draws attention to the political economy and environmental harm that underpins the Third Nuclear Age.

From fieldwork among Irula and Alu Kurumba communities within the Nilgiris mountains of South India, this chapter examines increased anxiety and psycho-social symptoms associated with socioeconomic and cultural transformations. Drawing upon F. G. Bailey’s classic work, I argue that the conflicts between value systems associated with Adivasi (indigenous), Hindu, and civil society have become intensified through landscape transformations in recent years, resulting in a generalized sense of malevolence within communities. Reduced access to land has undermined the cultivation of traditional dietary and ritual staples. As local residents put it, ‘food was medicine’, and ‘now we are sick’. Many have left their respective village-based communities as itinerant laborers. One consequence of this livelihood shift has been the neglect of communal ritual life centered upon ancestral ‘sacred groves’. The disruption of ritual life, in turn, has produced shifts in diet and access to traditional medicines, as well as a drift towards Hinduism, associated with the Tamil population. A rise in ‘new illnesses’ has resulted. Community healers speak of increasing illness due to intensified sorcery. The anxieties and symptoms, in turn, reflect and exacerbate growing inequality and precarity. Notions of change and malevolence construct a tribal harmony that is retroactively imagined in its perceived demise. Against a structuralist or functionalist understanding, and following Bailey’s influential critiques of ‘ideological holism’, I argue that a growing archive of local ideas about cultural loss partially obscures underlying pathologies of power within rural India, and the forces that divide and defer the tribal from non-tribal.