To this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.

This article examines the role of trade unions and of the Kebele – the most local urban administrative structures of the Ethiopian state – in the making of the Red Terror, a period of unprecedented political violence that closely followed the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Drawing on a broad range of new source materials – from labour union files to oral histories and East German State Security archives – this article shows how the Red Terror was in large part the product of synergies between diverse groups and actors within these structures, and how it was rooted in histories, motives, and collaborations that have scarcely been considered in the historiography of revolutionary Ethiopia. In turn, the Red Terror radically reshaped both trade unions and Kebele administrations, affording Ethiopian state actors an unprecedented means of control over civil society and urban residents.

Migration was a crucial component of the spatially uneven formation of labour markets and export-oriented economies in colonial Africa. Much of this mobility was initiated by migrants themselves rather than by colonial authorities. Building on analytical concepts from economic history and migration theory, this study explains the changing composition and magnitude of one such uncontrolled migration flow, from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda. Migrants’ mobility choices – when to migrate, for how long, and with whom – proved highly responsive to shifting economic opportunity structures on the sending and receiving ends. Initially, large differences in terms of land and labour endowments, socio-economic structures, and colonial interventions, combined with substantial scope for price arbitrage, created large spatial inequalities of opportunity and strong incentives for circular male labour migration. Over time, however, migration contracted as opportunities in Ruanda-Urundi and Uganda converged, not in the least as a result of large-scale mobility itself.

This article reconstructs the trajectory of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII) to shed light on the politics of socialist education in 1960s Ghana. On the basis of archival evidence, it explores the changing role of the institute in the making of Nkrumahism as public discourse and documents the evolving relationship between the universalism of Marxism-Leninism and the quest for more local political iconographies centred on Nkrumah's life and work. Secondly, the article analyses the individual motivations and experiences of a sample of foreign lecturers. The article suggests that ideological institutes offer insights into the processes by which official ideologies were created and disseminated, a foil through which to interrogate the usages and appropriation of social sciences education, and a window onto the multiple ways in which local and foreign agents negotiated their identities and political participation in African socialist experiments.

Throughout the socialist experiment between 1974 and 1992, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) ran a network of internment camps officially known as reeducation centers. Established in remote rural sites to mentally decolonize wayward members of urban society and putative enemies of the socialist revolution, the camps became a dumping ground for unwanted citizens accused of all kinds of wrongdoing. Although the Frelimo leaders envisioned a pedagogical institution that would undo the damage of colonialism by transforming reeducatees into new social beings, the gap between the idea of rehabilitation and the reality of detention was abysmally wide. Austerity – the order of the day throughout the fifteen years of socialist experiment in Mozambique – conditioned and defined the organic functioning of reeducation camps. Unlike internment camps elsewhere, Mozambique's camps were not strictly regimented. The carceral regime that emerged not only set Mozambique's reeducation centers apart from camps elsewhere, they were also far from the technocratic moralism and panoptic ambitions of the ruling party.

Mining activities in the Arctic often have a strong impact on people living here and the sustainability of their communities. The article takes as its point of departure two widely different cases relating to Arctic communities: the former mining city of Qullissat in the Greenlandic Disko Bay area and the rural village of Sakajärvi, which is threatened by expansions of the Aitik copper mine in the Norbotten County, Sweden. The cases differ in terms of time span, the number of people affected and the intensity of the affective economies, but they go through comparable processes of giving rise to emotional communities as a result of the termination or expansion of mining activities. Based on field observations and social and web-based media, the author argues that various actors with diverging purposes here compete to install their respective temporalities and narratives in the processes of communitification, i.e., by articulating borders or performing as community. In both cases, the communities employ narrative strategies of uchronotopia: aiming towards better futures by narratively breaking with the past. The agency of these communities depends to a high extent on the intensity of their affective economies, a symbolic capital that may hold considerable potential for creating desirable futures.

This article focuses on the nature of Japan’s foreign policy formulation and legitimization through a study of its interaction with Central Asian countries. The article examines foreign policy discourse that constructs Japan’s “self” vis-à-vis Central Asian “other.” It reveals the textual mechanism through which reality, objects, and subjects are constructed, and it interprets the official statements contained in several foreign policy initiatives, in particular, the “Eurasian (Silk Road) Diplomacy,” the “Central Asia plus Japan,” and the “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity,” as an attempt to understand the intersubjective knowledge and analytical lens through which Japanese foreign policy makers conceive and interpret the constructed “reality,” produce foreign policy choices, and choose among identified alternatives.

This article examines the effect of shared group membership on civilian attitudes regarding insurgent forces during an armed conflict. We rely on the original survey conducted in eight towns of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in May–June 2015. Based on the bivariate and multivariate analysis of the survey results, this article finds that a sense of shared identity with rebel forces at the start of the armed conflict in Donbas had a strong independent effect on civilian views of insurgents. Those respondents who identified themselves as residents of the region were more likely to attribute ideational motives to insurgents, report no knowledge of civilian victimization caused by rebel forces, and feel secure in their presence. By contrast, respondents identifying themselves as Ukrainian citizens were more likely to attribute material motives to insurgents, indicate their responsibility for attacks against civilians, and feel intimidated during direct encounters with rebels. These findings point to broader significance of identity cleavages in explaining the Donbas conflict.