Some argue that international administrations are contemporary manifestations of a project which began with the League of Nations Mandate System and the United Nations Trusteeship System. This chapter makes the case that these experiments of colonial administration systems are hardly international administrations, with sovereignty practices resting firmly within the European capitals at the time. If some projects envisionned a bigger role for the international organisations at the time, they were in fine defeated by officials brushing aside the idea of having these organisations play a crucial role in colonial governance. This discussion nevertheless sheds a new light on the specificities of contemporary international administration as a project of global governance.

This chapter examines the reciprocal development of climate understanding and intervention in the long nineteenth century. It studies the colonial practices of deforestation, cultivation, and drainage that philosophers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Baron de Montesquieu, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder hoped would induce a global, Westernised utopia of climatological temperance. It examines how the emergence, institutionalisation, and development of the scientific practices, theories, and models of climatology provided empirical documentation of climate as a global system subject to natural as well as anthropogenic change. Providing a century-long history of science, it concludes that John Tyndall’s small-scale investigation and Svante Arrhenius’s large-scale calculation of the heat-trapping agency of carbon dioxide led to the emerging insight that the global climate needed anthropogenic correction.

In this chapter, we outline how foreign aid and migration management practices impact governance. To do so, we set out to define a new category of aid – migration management aid – and estimate its size, distribution, and impact. We begin by taking a global picture – examining the trends, challenges, and opportunities that migration management aid presents in the twenty-first century – and then narrow our analysis to the EUTF and recipient countries in Africa. We identify three pathways for how migration management aid impacts authoritarianism and repression and explain how we explore these pathways through four case studies: Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Finally, we preview the lessons that can be learned if policymakers continue to intertwine aid and migration management.

Chapter 9 revisits our central contributions and considers the scope conditions of our argument. While the underlying governance conditions of a recipient state matter for the impact of migration management aid, we argue that it is migration management aid itself, rather than the regime type of recipient states, that carries the risk of increased repression or worsening authoritarian practices. We argue that reform of migration management aid is possible but that it requires decoupling its focus on building the migration state capacity of recipient countries from more “traditional” development or humanitarian aid, and that it must be accompanied by stronger accountability measures. Finally, we consider the impacts of continuing migration management aid not only for recipient countries, but also for donor countries, particularly those in Europe. The EU’s willingness to forego normal procedures to quickly implement the EUTF has not only undermined its commitment to democracy but has also yielded ground to the political maneuvering of far-right parties, spelling disaster for its own citizens as well as noncitizens within and beyond its borders.

Chapter 5 explores how migration management aid impacts a democratic state like Kenya, in the context of its colonial legacy and contentious regional politics. While there have been two significant revisions of the Refugee Act (2006/2021), Kenyan refugee policy relies on a compromise: the government agreed to host thousands of refugees in camps in exchange for billions in aid and a shirking of responsibility for managing the camps. Within this context, the EUTF is the latest package of funding in which Europeans condition aid on reforms by the Kenyan government. The chapter traces the long history of migration and international meddling in Kenya from formal colonialism to independence, examining the role of migration aid in the de facto encampment policy and in the 2006 and 2021 reforms. Through various interventions supported by the EUTF, Kenyan elites gained important political and financial capital, while pushing unpopular migration policies. Despite some democratic progress, we document specific projects related to counterterrorism and peacebuilding that securitized migration in Kenya, justifying more repression and restrictive policies (pathways I, II, III).

Chapter 8 examines Sudan, which was engulfed in civil war at the time of writing. Sudan’s current and previous conflicts stem in part from British and Egyptian colonial policies that promoted competing Arab versus African identities within the country, and after independence the country fought two civil wars that stemmed from entrenched racial divisions. In 2014, Sudan became a key player in the EU’s externalization of migration control via the Khartoum Process, and then President Omar al-Bashir selected the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as the central security force responsible for patrolling borders and building the enforcement capacity of the Sudanese state. Beginning in 2016, the EUTF allocated more than €200 million to Sudan, in addition to regional funding, to draft national legislation on migration management and human trafficking, to manage “return and reintegration” programs, and to further build the state’s capacity to address irregular migration. Sudan represents an extreme cautionary tale when it comes to migration management aid – EU funds increased the state’s capacity for repression (pathway I) – both toward migrants and its own citizens.

Chapter 7 explores Egypt, a consolidated autocracy. Historically colonized by the French and British, Egypt also received substantial financial support from the United States. Egypt was initially less involved with Europe’s external migration approach throughout the 1990s and 2000s in comparison to neighboring countries, but in 2017 the EU and Egypt signed an agreement under the EUTF worth €60 million. The funding was divided among seven projects, ranging from institutional capacity building to job generation and entrepreneurship. The majority of EUTF funding went toward infrastructure improvement in line with the current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s domestic priorities. In this way, migration management aid reinforced Egypt’s authoritarian rule through substitution (pathway II) and by channeling funding through patronage networks (pathway III). The EUTF’s predominant spending on local infrastructure projects tied beneficiaries to government networks, and also allowed the government to redirect its funding toward mega infrastructure projects built through military contracts, thereby further capacitating the regime’s repressive apparatus.

In this chapter, we define what migration management aid is and is not. We argue that migration management aid is a specialized kind of foreign aid because it aims to transform domestic migration institutions of recipient states, advocates for restrictive migration policies, and is ideologically motivated by the “root causes” of migration. The chapter also describes a brief history of foreign aid and migration, connecting the history of colonialism, imperialism, development, and migration controls.

Chapter 6 examines migration management aid in Ethiopia – a semi-democracy. Ethiopia’s history of foreign aid and migration is intertwined with intra-regional conflicts, the politicization of famine, and forced resettlement in service of centralizing control and statebuilding. The EU and its member states built on shifting alliances throughout the 1990s and 2000s to become the largest humanitarian and development donors in Ethiopia, all while pushing European interests in the region and overlooking the government’s human rights record. The EUTF grants fit within this pattern of conditional aid in which the EU dangled the carrot of €281 million, in exchange for ambitious promises to reform refugee protection. By the end of 2023, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, had fought a devastating war in the Tigray region, relocated refugee camps, blocked aid to displaced people in Tigray, and redirected economic investments toward his allies. In the case of Ethiopia, migration management aid was used to tie domestic actors to central authorities in the refugee agency (pathway III), and ultimately to redirect aid away from Tigray (pathway II).

Race had a key role in the construction of madness and literary value and thus in periodical production in asylums, especially in the United States. Contributing to a periodical enabled educated white patients not only to express their creativity, enlightenment, and agency, but to reclaim their citizenship, at least figuratively. The launch of the Meteor in 1872 by a former plantation owner and patient at the Alabama Insane Hospital, Joseph Alexander Goree, was an act of rebellion against the irony of losing his own liberty and rights once he was certified as insane. The periodical was part of a larger campaign of literary activity through which he demonstrated his erudition, high taste, and reason. Recasting himself as an ally and collaborator to the superintendent, Goree found empowerment in maintaining the high literary quality of his publication and keeping madness out of it. Yet, the Meteor was far from a homogeneous polished account of the asylum: during its irregular run, it embodied different viewpoints as well as Goree’s declining enthusiasm and growing discontent, as he realised that his project of self-empowerment would fail to earn him his freedom and rights.

This chapter draws from research the author has undertaken into the politically charged circumstances of life and death in situations of state violence in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Algerian war of independence. It reflects on the author’s engagements with the morgue record book of the Institut médico-légal (IML) in Paris for the year 1961, which is stored in the archives of the Prefecture of the Paris police. This ledger includes entries on corpses received at the morgue. Through the fall of 1961, there were a number of entries for corpses received at the IML in which no identifying name was listed. Instead, persons were listed with the title “inconnu” – “unknown,” “unidentified,” unrecognized.” With many of these entries, small photographs were affixed to the sides of the pages. In reflecting on the presence of these photographs of the unidentified dead, the author delves into the complicated play of death and life, and actuality and imagining, that marks the unsettling appearance of these photographs. The haunting aftereffects of the photographs tie into questions of image, memory, body and corpse, the phenomenon of death life, and representations of violence in histories of French colonialism.

Chapter 1 attends to the historical context of British bomb testing through an exploration of contrasting accounts of nuclear risk. It juxtaposes archival and official narratives of military risk management with test veterans’ own memories of hazardous events. This reveals the jarring mismatch that test veterans experienced when encountering official records detailing moments their younger selves experienced first-hand. I explore how radiation measurement technologies, material infrastructures, and a military culture of hierarchical trust negated the perception of risk, yet still left room for servicemen to experience doubt and fear. This chapter also places the harms to service personnel in the wider colonial context of racial hierarchies and the theft of lands, revealing how stories of Indigenous injury became uncertain undercurrents within test veterans’ own narratives.

Economic growth boosted living standards after it first surfaced in Britain in the 1700s. Why did it not arise earlier or somewhere else? Why did it spread quickly to northwestern Europe, but take longer to reach much of the rest of the world? The answer is not slavery, colonialism, or capitalism. Rather, it lies with advantages shared by much of northwestern Europe: institutions that secured property rights with benefits beyond a narrow elite; states that could rearrange property rights with credible compensation to improve transportation and agricultural productivity; cities made possible by productive agriculture that spawned agglomeration effects like those at work in Silicon Valley; skilled workers who could implement new ideas; and access to the ideas themselves from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Northwestern Europe had these advantages for four reasons: its history, its religion, its intellectual heritage, and its distance from Eurasia’s steppes. Those four reasons are the ultimate causes for the onset of sustained economic growth in Britain in the 1700s and for its spread to northwestern Europe.

This chapter delves into the concept of ‘Rights of Nature’ (RoN) through a semiotic lens; in particular, the ethnological semiology of Jean Baudrillard has significantly influenced this contribution. RoN challenges conventional anthropocentric legal paradigms by integrating Indigenous cosmovisions in Western jurisprudence. By examining legislative examples such as New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act and Australia’s Yarra River Protection Act, this chapter assesses whether these recognitions faithfully reflect Indigenous viewpoints or merely adapt nature into pre-existing Western ontological (legal) philosophies.

RoN frequently intersects with Indigenous cosmovisions, suggesting a profound, metaphysical significance beyond Western legal constructs. This discussion illuminates the evolving character of RoN and its interplay with legal pluralism. The incorporation of RoN into Western legal systems unveils a dynamic where Indigenous knowledge is recognised but simultaneously streamlined to conform to established legal structures.

The chapter further contemplates the possibility that RoN may simply codify Indigenous rights without capturing the full depth of Indigenous perspectives. Ultimately, RoN signifies an endeavour to broaden the legal recognition of nature and its purported intrinsic values, albeit at the risk of misrepresenting Indigenous knowledge as mere extensions of Western legal ontology. In doing so, RoN adorns itself with the Indigenous symbol and ritual to advance environmental politics.

Like most other African states, the nature of British rule meant late-colonial and early post-colonial Kenya was an extraverted state, inseparably tied in a peripheral manner to global networks of power and capital. As its political leaders set about challenging British rule in the 1950s, they had little choice but to engage with external actors seeking to influence the outcome of the process of decolonisation. But the likes of Tom Mboya did so in nuanced and sometimes contradictory ways. Mboya was certainly a worldmaker, who saw links to international allies as key to the overthrow of British colonialism and the reconstruction of the global economy and international organisations as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence. In this effort he found considerable support from the United States. But this effort set him in competition with Kenya’s other worldmakers, such as Oginga Odinga, who had very different networks and more radical visions of what a post-colonial world might look like and Kenya’s place within it. In his efforts to assert control over Kenya’s links to the wider world and to exclude his political rivals, Mboya became an adept gatekeeper.

In this chapter, religion’s role in conflict and violence is examined, covering the decades from c. 1603 until shortly before the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641. The chapter traces how it was increasingly religious flashpoints – sacred objects, churches and churchyards, and rituals such as the Mass among others – that generated tension, unrest and even violence in seventeenth-century Ireland. As Protestant settlers sought to implement the work of ‘converting and civilising’, Irish Catholics pushed back against what they viewed as heretical incursions. They reveal battles over ideas of possession, heritage, power and the nature of the sacred itself, and how religious symbols and language were growing ever more important in how Irish and British, Catholic and Protestant viewed and lived alongside one another. Intra-confessional conflict is also addressed, through examining the eruption of violence by Scottish settlers against the Church of Ireland in the wake of the National Covenant and ensuing unrest in Scotland. It indicates religion’s potent ability to motivate and mobilise resistance, even unto violence, as crisis Unfolded across the Three Kingdoms.

A principle and practice of sufficiency informs Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), which concludes by condemning the rapaciousness of Europeans. Responding to that too-muchness, the philosopher experiments with the thought of what he calls “mere hospitality.” Hospitality is not opposed to inhospitality but a species of inhospitality that welcomes the possibility of being alone, together rather than either alone and apart or together as one. Because human beings cannot forever part ways on the curved surface of the planet, and because they must also live among each other on one and the same planet, if they are to live at all, they are obliged, against their inclinations to fight or flee, to dwell alongside others whom they do not necessarily wish to be nearby. The earth’s surface speaks a bare truth to an enclosed, Europeanized world, a world in which so many are denied a place: It is enough.