With the creation of the modern Kuwaiti state, some people indigenous to the territory were excluded from citizenship. Those people and their descendants are still excluded from Kuwaiti citizenship and are known as ‘Bidoon’, or ‘without’. Since for the most part they do not have access to any other citizenship, the Bidoon in Kuwait are also stateless. This chapter uses an applied linguistic lens to interrogate the impact of three semiotic objects on the Bidoon community in Kuwait. It considers a speech from a government official, a non-citizen identity card, and an excerpt from an NGO report. It examines how these function to (re)produce social inequality and ‎(re)construct the social, political, and legal exclusion of the Bidoon. The author draws on his own experience both as an applied linguist and as a member of the Bidoon community in Kuwait to provide an analysis of the role of semiotic objects of control in the governance of citizenship in Kuwait and, by extension, the governance of the population excluded from that citizenship. While the case described in this chapter is in many ways unique, the author also shows how the analysis of language and of semiotic objects are crucial to understanding statelessness and its relationship to the governance of citizenship more generally.

Nadars occupy a uniquely disjunctive set of social positions in southern India. Historically viewed as one of the lowest ranked castes in the region, over the past two centuries they have also become one of the wealthiest. In negotiating identities and social status today, Nadars must balance the honour of their socioeconomic class with the continuing stigma of their caste. Part of this effort involves claims made on history to explain past and present standings. Such claims are especially likely to appear in the recounting of family history. This chapter uses such accounts – which chart movements across both space and hierarchy – to explore urban Hindu Nadars’ discursive strategies for managing disjunctive identities. They range from claiming expulsion from uppermost echelons during ancient regime changes; to acknowledging centuries-old degradation, albeit now overcome by a singular work ethic; to highlighting shared past discrimination with ‘untouchables’ as a radical critique of caste inequalities. Examining embedded class, caste, and religious politics, I consider the potential outcomes, losses, and gains of each strategy. Drawing from Caste and the Economic Frontier, Gifts and Poison and The Kingdom of Individuals, I build on Bailey’s insights into honour and reputation, caste mobility, and collective vs. individual goods.

The chapter addresses rhetorical and conceptual methodologies to be applied in empirical studies of constitutional crisis and conflicts concerning popular and national sovereignty. These include terms like ‘clustered and essential contested concepts’, ‘constitutional moments’ and the methodological strategy of constructing constitutional ‘ideal types’. It argues that the essential and analytical element is not the concept itself, but the arguments and responses that it is embedded in.

This chapter looks at likely trends for digital history over the next few years, with predictions about the impact of historical material increasingly being available solely or additionally in digital form. There is a discussion of the ethics of digital history projects in terms of their environmental impact and in the way they can uncover and make public information about individuals in unprecedented ways.

This chapter explores how you can analyse your sources to best effect. Scrutinising primary sources – which often involves asking pertinent questions of your materials – is central to the professional practice of historians, and yet from the outside, this process can be rather opaque. As readers we are typically presented with the finished product, such as published book or journal article. Little explanation is usually given by historians on the significant stage between locating evidence and constructing a persuasive historical argument. To support researchers in this area, this chapter discusses the strengths and limitations of primary source types in relation to spatial histories, including buildings, archival materials, personal testimony, visual sources and material culture.

In recognising that freedom should not be kept apart from the conditions of its profitable exercise, a conception that blends congenially positive and negative ideals must, this book argues, propose a mode of organisation that moves beyond both the negative freedom of right-libertarianism and the positive freedom of welfare statism. In doing so, the associational anarchist conception of freedom is a distinct amalgamation of certain tenets from the self-determination and self-realisation traditions, parsed through structures that recast yet ultimately respect the inviolability of a sphere of life within which the individual is sovereign. This specific conceptual constellation may be thought of as a newly formed ‘anarcho-Marxist humanism’. Most centrally, a particular mode of egalitarian property rights is pictured that, fundamentally, is democratised to its pluralist cores. Moving beyond the bounds of statehood, political intermediation is arranged through a reinvigorated and anarchised functional devolution. Demarcated labour processes, when horizontally aligned with other equally differentiated functions, are the most enriching form of production and the optimal method of social provision. Significantly, if products are not manifested with autonomy and independent powers, so there is neither a personification of the inanimate nor a thingification of the subject, they will not exist as alienated entities, and neither will the workers who produced them. It is through these organisational forms that associational anarchism fills out in finer detail the categories that class-struggle anarchism has always rightfully endorsed.

Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, just as Vattel and Hübner were writing, an important new phase in the law of neutrality was beginning. Belligerents were starting to wage economic war upon one another in a more thoroughgoing fashion than before. Various innovations in belligerents' rights were not supinely accepted by neutrals. Attempts of various kinds were made by neutral states to defend their claimed rights. In the process, some far-reaching legal innovations were made. With the spectre of total war removed, at least for the time being, it would prove possible for the states of the world gradually to reach a degree of agreement on some of the specific issues of the law of neutrality, if not on its more fundamental points. A time of confrontation was about to give way to a time of accommodation.

This chapter focuses on the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (founded in 1901), the principal German Jewish philanthropic association, and its de facto leader Paul Nathan (1857–1927) and how they responded to the challenges that the war posed for their relief work in Eastern Europe. On the one hand, the Hilfsverein acted, knowingly and willingly, as a tool of German occupation policies in Eastern Europe. Whether the Hilfsverein liked it or not, it was part and parcel of the German war effort. On the other hand, the Hilfsverein tried to preserve its prewar co-operation with non-German relief associations, especially the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which it had helped create in 1914. The chapter illustrates the Hilfsverein’s efforts to navigate its national and transnational loyalties, a dilemma that affected many philanthropic organisations at the time. Moreover, it traces the increasing ‘Americanisation’ of the philanthropic relief work in Eastern Europe, which became truly apparent in the postwar period. In the era of the Great War, the epicentre of Jewish philanthropic work irrevocably shifted from Europe to the United States.

People identified as members of ‘nomadic’ groups, irrespective of whether they in fact undertake a mobile lifestyle, are frequently cited among the groups that may be stateless or at risk of statelessness. The figure of the ‘nomad’ – which is typified by a mobile and self-reliant lifestyle (often across multiple borders), a lack of permanent residence, communal land use, and traditions of self-government – may seem challenging to the idea of the modern nation-state with its settled population, private land ownership, and centralised government structures within fixed boundaries. This chapter brings the findings of a research project conducted at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness into conversation with the themes of the book. This project involved field research in three case studies – among marine Moken populations in Thailand and Myanmar, Fulbe pastoralists in Côte d’Ivoire, and Bedouin populations in Lebanon. The chapter examines how these nomadic or formerly mobile populations are considered in states’ governance and legal identity regimes. In particular, it provides a critical discussion of the practices relating to citizenship and legal identity that states employ and the difficulties they encounter in including populations with current or former mobile lifestyles. The chapter concludes with some observations about the importance of acknowledging and considering in policies and decision-making the agency and choices of these communities under rapidly changing ecological, economic, and socio-political conditions.

A compellingly complex portrait of humanitarianism in the era of the First World War has emerged in the past decade. Characterised by sharply different interpretations and disagreements about basic definitions, histories of humanitarianism display vibrant scholarly debates. Widening their horizons beyond the North Atlantic world, newer histories consider the interrelationship of imperial networks, secular and faith-inspired aid associations, and relief operations in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. They have deepened our understanding of populations afflicted by war such as Polish peasants, prisoners of war, and European academics who attracted focused attention by humanitarian agencies and how entangled in statecraft – belligerent and neutral – were all aid initiatives to the benefit of some peoples and the detriment of others. Efforts to save lives and rebuild societies continued long after the war officially ended because human misery did not cease upon the forging of peace settlements. These extended humanitarian endeavours comprise what is now called the ‘Greater War.

The chapter charts Argentine engagement in global humanitarian action during the First World War, tracing numerous fundraising campaigns as well as the recruitment of volunteers to serve as doctors, nurses, and stretcher-bearers in the battlefields. Like other Latin American countries, Argentina was linked to Europe through strong historical, cultural, economic, and demographic connections. The First World War thus deeply affected Argentine society on many different levels and resulted in a high degree of social, and humanitarian, mobilisation around the conflict. This chapter is the first to chart Argentine relief efforts to Europe and their significance during the Great War. It analyses, in the first place, the humanitarian mobilisation of different ethnic and social groups of Argentine society after 1914, including European immigrant communities. It shows that their initiatives became part of a transnational humanitarian effort, as demonstrated by their co-operation with the International Red Cross Committee, the belligerent countries’ Red Cross societies, and the Commission for Relief in Belgium. In the second place, the chapter reveals the competing aims of these often strongly nationalist humanitarian campaigns and the increasing challenge they posed to the neutrality adopted by the Argentine state. The chapter illustrates how humanitarian aid could become a means of social and cultural mobilisation in places that were seemingly far removed from the war’s main theatres. At the same time, it lays bare the tensions between a transnational sphere of humanitarianism and the intense nationalism of the belligerents and their local supporters.

According to international law, a person is considered ‘stateless’ if they are not recognised as a national by any country under the operation of its law. International law, then, provides an important dimension to understanding statelessness, and it is a dimension that has often been privileged. This chapter sets out to open out the discussion of statelessness to include consideration of more dimensions and how they intersect with each other. It shows how opening out the discussion of statelessness in this way provides new avenues for examining the often messy and complex ways in which the structures that govern society move people into and out of recognition. Central to this work is identifying the ‘problem’ that is being examined. While the traditional legal focus can make it easy to frame statelessness – and so also stateless people – as a ‘problem’ to be solved, a broader governance approach challenges this. Examining the relationship between governance and statelessness indicates that situations of statelessness are often underpinned by problems rooted in the governance of citizenship: in how citizenship is allocated, experienced, and even removed. Framing statelessness through governance, then, opens the way for new directions for studying both statelessness and governance. Crucially, this also makes it possible to develop new ways of both understanding and addressing statelessness and its implications.