In 1981, Britain’s Conservative government endorsed the execution of Seymour Thomas in Belize, shortly before the nation’s independence. This decision was consistent with support among sections of the Conservative Party for the resumption of hanging in the UK, but Thomas would be the last person executed in a British Dependent Territory. This chapter explores the reasons why Britain’s tolerance of the Dependent Territories death penalty became difficult to sustain over subsequent years. They included calls for abolition from governors who were uncomfortable administering the prerogative of mercy; an increasingly interventionist British approach to Dependent Territories governance in response to drug trafficking and corruption; abolitionist trends in international law and European allies’ foreign policies and repeated votes by MPs against the reintroduction of the death penalty in Britain. An increase in violent crime, coupled with the Caribbean’s booming tourist industry, also increased the likelihood of foreign nationals’ involvement in capital cases and threatened to cast an unflattering international spotlight on British complicity in capital punishment.

Chapter 2 follows the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef to independent Algeria, where he began a lifetime engagement with the Maghreb as a site for quotidian poetics to reflect on Arab political experience. A key figure is his fictional, Algerian alter ego, L’Akhdar ben Youssef, through whom Youssef developed the Mashreq’s Algerian topos to engage events like the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). I situate Youssef’s transregional poetics in dialogue with the Syrian Baʿthist thinker Mutaʿ Safadi, who argued that Arabic literature and philosophy should ground the scale and slogans of Arab nationalism in social experience. The chapter compares transregionalism’s texturing of fuṣḥā with daily life with Algerian critiques of Arabization by leftist intellectuals Sadek Hadjerès and Mostefa Lacheraf. For these Algerian thinkers, the renewal of Arabic signified the promise of decolonization as a plural, popular expression of the multilingual nation. The chapter concludes with Algerian Kabyle linguist Mouloud Mammeri’s critique of the neo-colonial nature of Arabization.

The integration of technology into human rights practice in Latin America has been marked by scepticism and practical challenges. This chapter traces the origins of technology’s intersection with human rights in the region, beginning in the late 1980s in the Southern Cone, as grassroots actors responded to state repression and creatively used technology to document violations. It explores the bundle of risks and opportunities that human rights practitioners faced when using technology in creative ways to confront human rights challenges. It identifies three main obstacles to integration: a legal-centric approach to human rights, a language barrier given the English-language predominance in the tech sector, and wariness of technology. The text highlights some breakthroughs, deriving from bottom-up adoption of technology, and provides discrete examples of local innovation. The chapter concludes by stressing the ongoing need to adapt and better harness technological advances in Latin America while also learning from local experiences.

This chapter reads Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s best-selling novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1993). In it, a circular bracelet, the authentic sign of the Algerian woman-nation, grounds the promise of a “true” Arabic in the postcolonial present. Mosteghanemi’s novel imagines a stark separation between the Algerian War – when men were honorable and language was utile – and the ruined Arab present, ruled by banalized words and corrupted men. Her novel adopts a transregional geography, weaving the topoi of Algeria and Palestine together. A self-conscious heir to the transregionalism described in this study, Mosteghanemi retains its Arab scale to great commercial success but gently critiques its collective, male Arab voice. Through the voice of her male narrator, Arab literary constructions of meaning over Algeria are revealed as homosocial exchanges between male intellectuals, bonding them across distance and rivalries. In Memory, literature’s interpretation of Algeria emerges as an autobiographical task, revealing and narrating an Arab intellectual subject to himself and his likenesses.

While victim participation in transitional justice has often been subject to critique, victim movements have also actively expanded and reshaped the field, using its framework to advance increasingly diverse justice struggles. This introductory chapter adopts the lens of ‘victims-as-protagonists’, emphasizing the central role that victim-survivors have played in shaping transitional justice from its inception. It explores the macro-level dynamics that have amplified focus on victims’ roles in scholarship and policy, and maps key strands of existing literature. Against this backdrop, the chapter introduces a new conceptual framework of ‘generations of victim participation’, offering a more comprehensive account of how victims’ agency has shifted throughout three discernible phases: from grassroots activism, to institutional participation, and multi-faceted forms of resistance. Rather than presenting a linear progression, this framework foregrounds the overlapping and intersecting strategies through which victims pursue justice today, and how this calls for a rethinking of transitional justice’s boundaries and methodologies.

Part II covers the period from the emergence of neo-socialism as an independent political force in late 1933 with the formation of the Parti Socialiste de France (PSdF) to its incorporation into, and marginalization by, the anti-fascist Popular Front in 1936. The period immediately following the 1933 schism is often taken to be one in which neo-socialism, unburdened by the doctrinal shackles of the SFIO, could express itself freely and reveal its true colors. Moreover, the fact that the neo-socialists embraced “order, authority, nation” as their watchwords and the fact of their experimentation with a fascisant discourse during a period of political crisis in 1934 appear to lend credence to the notion that neo-socialism was always-already a proto-fascist ideology and thus at the root of Déat’s collaborationist fascism during the occupation. A closer look at this period, however, suggests a more complex and crooked path for the neo-socialists.

This chapter introduces the case of Marcel Déat, a leader of the French Socialist Party who founded one of the main collaborationist parties during the German occupation of France. I define political conversion and argue that accounts of it tend to be marked by a continuity bias. This is true of extant accounts of Déat’s conversion, which emphasize the significance of neo-socialism in determining his trajectory. I argue that this explanatory emphasis on ideological continuity is theoretically and empirically unsound. As an alternative approach, I introduce what I call the practical logic of political conversion, drawing on anti-essentialist and relational theories of political ideologies that treat these as articulated products of classification struggles within political fields. I argue further that the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion means that it should be analyzed in terms of what Bourdieu calls “trajectory.” I end with an overview of the book.

The conclusion reviews the evolution of transregional Arabic literature from its emergence during the Algerian War of Independence to its transformations in the twenty-first century. Decolonization catalyzed a new literary practice that sought to express Arab nationalist solidarities and critique emergent forms of oppressive power – including those exercised in the name of Arab collectives. The conclusion touches on the ways authors grappled with the faltering of revolutionary hopes and rise of new cultural hegemonies in the present century, notably the establishment of the Gulf as a major new hub for Arabic literature. The author notes the ironic reception of the decolonization generation and its concerns in the contemporary Arabic novel and the queering of Arabness in diasporic literature. Revisiting a key theme of the book, the conclusion highlights literature’s evolving work to imagine, engage, and contest shared political experiences across the Maghreb and Mashreq. The chapter concludes by affirming the ongoing political vitality of calls for linguistic and cultural pluralism in Algeria, as exemplified by the Hirak protest movement.

As the political crisis of 1934 passed, Déat and the neo-socialists dropped their equivocal posture and returned to the parliamentary preoccupations of their past, merging with other independent reformist socialist parties to form the Union Socialiste et Républicaine (USR). The USR was drawn into the orbit of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition, but the Popular Front would prove to be a political disaster for the neo-socialists. With the Socialists willing to govern and the Communists emerging as the primary bearers of the Popular Front’s popular-democratic and national-popular mystique, the neo-socialists struggled to distinguish themselves within the political field, resulting in a poor showing in the 1936 elections that brought the Popular Front to power. The Popular Front period was significant for Déat and the neo-socialists’ trajectory, not because it provided a bridge between neo-socialism and fascism, but because it led to the marginalization and disarticulation of neo-socialism.

The most significant late twentieth-century executions in a British Dependent Territory occurred in 1977 when Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn were hanged in Bermuda for a series of politically motivated murders. While previous studies have argued that British ministers could readily have dispensed with the Creech Jones doctrine and prevented these executions, Chapter 5 makes the case that, for political and constitutional reasons, this was not a straightforward proposition, but nor was abandoning Creech Jones a necessary precondition for commuting the death sentences. It further argues that from a long-term perspective, the Bermuda executions were an anomaly rather than a turning point in British death penalty policy. Colonial capital punishment continued to operate into the 1980s much as it had since British abolition, with the British government working behind the scenes to prevent most executions and tolerating periodic political crises over controversial death sentences for fear that advocating abolition would have still more damaging repercussions.

The Directive on Takeover Bids was almost not adopted and has since not been subject to reform, despite not having produced the harmonisation it intended. The chapter contends that this is because the Directive covers very different areas of law, where only some are suitable for harmonisation. The chapter analyses these differences to suggest a possible route for a reformed Directive that may provide actual harmonisation of the areas where such harmonisation is required.