This chapter explores the origins, nature, and persistence of Cold War liberalism in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by analyzing the writings and policies of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1953–59). Dulles was both a pivotal and archetypal figure in the history of U.S.–Middle East relations. The chapter posits three pillars of Cold War liberalism that, with some variation, have undergirded U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since Dulles’ tenure. First, the United States is preoccupied with the establishment of a global order predicated on a preponderance of American power. This is not a “rules-based” order but rather one upheld by security alliances constructed to advance America’s perceived interests, often in defiance of international laws or norms. Second, Cold War liberalism’s raison d’être is couched in and sometimes shaped by discourses of freedom and self-determination. Third, rhetorical commitments to promoting democracy notwithstanding, Cold War liberalism fuels skepticism, even hostility, toward genuine expressions of democracy and mass politics in the Middle East. Finally, the chapter argues that Cold War liberalism in the Middle East is not limited chronologically to the Cold War. All three pillars have Wilsonian antecedents and continue to shape US–Middle East relations.

Where Clarke examined examples from Rwanda and the 2013 intervention in Libya in order to protect civilians, Boyd van Dijk reminds us that the means of war have long been regulated by humanitarian aspirations quite apart from the humanitarian ends cited for launching it. And, as van Dijk reveals, there have been persistent attempts to “fuse” such humanitarian concern with the concept of human rights or with the legal framework or mobilizational strategies associated with it. Like Clarke, van Dijk does not want to tell an uplifting story, for the fusion of human rights and war could equally produce what he calls “human rights warriors.”

Chapter 4 uses assemblage theory, which is an anti-colonialist theory of social and spatial construction that has traction in the Global South, to show how urban inequalities become assembled, disassembled, and reassembled over time and yet how grassroots activism for social and environmental justice and for community resilience can change the form and functions of cities. Buchanan arose at a time when the role of urban planning in the US cities was growing but largely conceived as the top–down imposition of order and dominant values on urban space. However, we are increasingly aware of just how contested and evolving the practice of urban planning and urban development are. Case studies of green gentrification from Los Angeles, California and Accra, Ghana illustrate the competing ideological perspectives on resilience in cities and the potential for and yet tentativeness of progress towards social justice in urban planning. The chapter explores the connections of racism in American land use with colonialism in the Global South, and the commonalities in the experiences of grassroots social-justice movements across cities worldwide.

Chapter 4 follows the trajectory of Ernst Frey and other European anti-fascists, who enlisted in the Vietnamese Army after defecting from the French Foreign Legion. It focuses on the complicated relationship between the soldiers who survived the anti-fascist struggles in Europe and the new generation of soldiers of the anti-colonial wars in the Global South. After 1945, many Spanish Civil War veterans followed events in Algeria and Indochina with great interest and sided with those fighting for national self-determination. Notwithstanding the visibility of both causes, notable armed support materialised only in Indochina, where foreign volunteers were initially well-received and saw their military influence grow much beyond what their modest careers in the French Foreign Legion might indicate. With time, however, they were also seen as a challenge to the nationalistic Vietnamese leadership, who, thanks largely to Chinese support from the early 1950s onwards, were radically altering their military structure, leaving little or no space for French Foreign Legion defectors.

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?

This chapter explores those transformations in intimate lives that have been collectively shorthanded with the term “sexual revolution.” Whether thought of as a gradually evolving process spanning the 1950s to the 1990s or rather understood as referring to the briefer era of heightened incitement and excitement around sex that reached its heyday in the 1960s-1970s, the story of sexual developments in the second half of the twentieth century has long been written in a linear, teleological fashion. Scholars emphasize the rise of reproductive freedom, women”s equality, rights for sexual minorities, and a more general attitude of sex-positivism. However, by reconceiving the story of the sexual revolution as a global one, inextricable from tectonic geopolitical shifts in both East-West and North-South relations – from the Cold War to decolonization and development projects and obsession with the purported dangers of “overpopulation” in the global South, and from the eventual collapse of Communism to the rise of a neoliberal economic order – this chapter challenges the “liberalization paradigm” and instead explores the sexual revolution as a multi-form, multi-sited, but also profoundly ambivalent process, met with recurrent backlashes as well as marred by its own intrinsic complexities.

In the early twenty-first century, nations across Africa celebrated their fiftieth birthdays. The symbols employed to mark the occasion and the memories evoked bore witness to the joys as well as the trials and tribulations of a fifty-year history. For many, fifty years of independent nationhood was an occasion for celebration.1 But at the same time, the history of nationalism and nationhood is not purely a celebratory story. The politics of the early twenty-first century, in African countries as elsewhere in the world, served as a reminder that modern nationalism also has a dark side, and that violence and dispossession can follow when dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are drawn along national lines.

Chapter 4 examines the tradition of Gandhian political thought. It explores the critique of liberal parliamentarism in the writings of M. K. Gandhi and those of his supporters.

In French colonial history, we can read the world wars as a single conflict. The Great War and World War II broke the French empire as it existed in the previous century. The empire contributed substantially in blood and treasure to victory in 1918, though mobilization for that war deepened existing colonial tensions and created new ones. Shifting dynamics pointed to a renegotiation of basic colonial bargains. An ostensibly new colonial doctrine, the mise en valeur, sought to make the empire a more cohesive economic and political unit. Anti-colonial movements became stronger and more articulate throughout the interwar period, though repression and military force had little trouble preserving imperial authority, for the time being. The defeat of 1940 upended imperial relationships. How could the Vichy regime rule an empire when it had very limited authority even in the Hexagon? Yet Free France promised only continued, if reformed, imperial rule. This situation made questions of collaboration and resistance at least as complicated in the empire as in Europe. By 1945, it became clear to the attentive that the French empire would either have to expire or become something else.