This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

Critical scholarship on travel writing in Africa has largely concentrated on texts by European travelers or Eurocentric manifestations of the genre in Africa. A consequence of this is the inference that Africa has a scant body of travel texts or lacks a tradition of travel writing. This chapter disrupts this view and traces the genre of travel writing in Africa by circumventing the rigid generic boundaries. It maps the many dis/continuities of forms and shapes of the genre in Africa from before the twentieth century to date. This study offers a survey of the generic characteristics of African travel writing informed by a multitude of conditions and realities of writing and positionality. It explores the tradition of African travel writing complicated by the conflicting histories of imperialism and the writers’ cultural realities and engagement with space; the triangulation of travel, labor, and leisure in African travel writing; the politics of deconstructing a Eurocentric form; and the transformation of the genre in the digital space in Africa. In this chapter, African travel writing serves as a basis for theorizing travel and the African continent functions as a point of departure and arrival in networks of travel and writing.

A framing case study describes the 2018 surge of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from continental Europe to the UK in small boats to seek refugee status. The chapter then discusses international migration law. The chapter begins by presenting important concepts and historical trends from migration law, and the competing models of economic migration and crisis migration. It then describes in detail major components of the Refugee Convention, which sets international rules for determining whether an individual can be a refugee, creates rights for refugees, and shapes subsequent outcomes for individuals who are denied or lose refugee status. Finally, the chapter examines how international migration law interacts with topics discussed earlier in the book, including: law of the sea, human rights, armed conflict, criminal law, and environmental law.

Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

The two crises in this chapter share three main characteristics. They involve territorial (border) conflict that relates to the independence of Ukraine (or, relatedly, the breakup of the Soviet Union), feature an East–West tension, and (as of this writing) do not escalate to a war among the major states. In 2014, after Ukraine attempted to move closer to Europe (i.e., it contemplated an EU agreement and the pro-Russian government fell), Putin annexed Crimea to secure the long-held naval base there. Although done forcefully, there were no military fatalities. In 2022, amidst a fear that Ukraine was again moving closer to Europe (i.e., it looked to be closer to joining NATO and its government became less pro-Russian), Russia invaded Ukraine. It failed to take Kyiv, even though it heavily bombed Ukraine. Russia then withdrew to the east, where a majority of Russian speakers had sought to separate from Ukraine. The United States and the European Union gave weapons and aid that expanded as the war continued. Deaths mounted on both sides. The Russians successfully created a land bridge from the Donbas to Crimea. After his election, Trump attempted to negotiate a settlement that would end the war.

This chapter summarizes the main lessons for diplomacy that we derive from our study. These eight lessons are: 1. A major factor separates the crises that escalate to war from those that do not; in the latter, a strong leader reins in any hard-liners who advocate going to war. 2. Individuals make a difference. 3. Contingency plays a more important role than system structure in determining whether or not a crisis escalates to war. 4. Someone must stand for peace. 5. The secret to preventing war structurally is to find a functional equivalent to war. 6. Norms and rules are important for avoiding war – and, therefore, maintaining peace. 7. War can be avoided; it is not inevitable. 8. The realist concepts of the national interest and balance of power do not always accurately describe the behavior of states.

Akbari describes what it means to have a human body in the digital age and argues that datafication has transformed the materiality of the body in its very flesh and bone. This transformation is especially dangerous in uncertain spaces, such as borders and refugee camps, where identity becomes crucial and only certain categories of human bodies can pass. The consequences to those experiencing datafication of their bodies at the border are harsh and severe. However, the deliberate unruliness of the border paves the way for these spaces to become technological testing grounds, as evidenced by the development of technologies to track fleeing populations for the purposes of contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Akbari’s text oscillates deliberately between academic thinking, autobiographical accounts, pictures, and poetry, thus clearly denoting the discomfort of the human being living in a Code|Body.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

Brexit was a great revealer in many respects. In relation to Northern Ireland, it revealed the almost invisible role that joint EU membership had played in providing a scaffold for the peace process in the province and in resolving a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions. In addition to EU political support and in facilitating good relations between Ireland and the UK, joint membership of the single market and customs union, along with the Common Travel Area between the two jurisdictions, reduced the practical and symbolic effect of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was thus the functional effects of single market law which provided the context within which a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions could be managed. Brexit, particularly of the ‘hard’ variety, threatened to reintroduce this border, undermining a key element of the peace process. The Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol or Windsor Framework is an imperfect substitute which results in an extremely complex legal landscape of multiple interacting sources of law: a form of legal pluralism or even legal entanglement.