Chapter 2 considers the historical context from which today’s station hustle has emerged as a distinct economic logic and mode of production. It relates the station’s contemporary workings to the history of local economic practices and the wider political and economic changes that have shaped commercial road transport since the early days of motorisation in the early twentieth century, emphasising the role that bus stations have played in these developments. It shows how local transport operators have long harnessed the logics of risk, competition, and shrewd resourcefulness as the principal properties of economic organisation and action, features that have allowed them to both capitalise on and compensate for the weakness of the services provided by the state. The ways in which they have accommodated the effects of state regulatory intervention are consistent with these logics: in most cases, state intervention has been considered just another element of market volatility.

This chapter initially begins with a narrative concerning how the author first came to Surama Village in Guyana in 2012. After discussing the author’s path to the village, as well as the author’s positionality in the field, the chapter describes the landscape of the Makushi people in Guyana. It provides an overview of the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) through which Makushi people in Surama and beyond have engaged with outsiders (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in the past and present. The chapter then summarises historical Makushi encounters with European colonisation involving the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as Anglican missionisation during the mid nineteenth century. It provides a brief history of Surama Village, which is the Makushi village that is centred throughout the book. The chapter closes by providing context and background for contemporary transformations among the Makushi people in Surama Village.

This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.

The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about postnational cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of US culture. This chapter reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the United States as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, the essay considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine–American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the United States. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the United States as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.

This chapter begins the second part of the book, which tests the main empirical implications of localized peace enforcement theory using data from Mali, a land-locked country in West Africa. Though Mali experienced three coups, a separatist civil war, and an Islamist extremist insurgency from 2012 to 2024, no source of conflict has been more fatal or detrimental to Malian society than communal violence. The chapter starts by providing a very brief history of identity-based conflict in the country. It also places Mali within a broader historical context and demonstrates that its experience of interethnic tensions is representative of countries with colonial legacies. The chapter then draws on detailed interviews with forty-eight local leaders to describe what communal violence and peacekeeping look like in Mali from the residents’ perspective. Given the theoretical importance domestic perceptions of peacekeepers, these interviews offer crucial insights into the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory. There are distinct advantages of studying the Malian case, which the chapter describes in a brief overview of international interventions by the UN and France from 2012 to 2024.

This chapter introduces the early modern East India Company and its modes of engaging with the sciences in the period before the mid eighteenth century. Two aspects of science and the early modern Company are emphasized. First, before 1757, the Company generally contracted out many of the navigational, historical, medical, mathematical and other areas of expertise that supported and were supported by overseas trade. As an institution, the Company did directly own and manage a vast amount of information related to logistics, regulations and accounting. However, although the Company also depended upon technical and scientific expertise, it did not directly fund, manage or organize the other branches of science upon which its operations depended. Thus, in this period, and following a general pattern of early modern “contractor states,” science generally grew and developed under the Company, if not at the Company. Second, science under the Company found space to grow by way of the peculiar structure and organization of Company trading that historians have called the “internal free trade.” The Company’s practice of allowing individuals to profit under the “private trade” would be especially important to the growth of the curiosity and manuscript trade between Britain and Asia in this period.

Chapter 3 presents localized peace enforcement theory. It first discusses the challenges facing individuals involved in a communal dispute. Reflecting on these obstacles to peaceful dispute resolution, the chapter outlines a formal micro-level theory of dispute escalation between two individuals from different social groups who live in the same community. It explains how international intervention shapes escalation dynamics. The chapter then shifts the focus to local perceptions of intervener impartiality, which the theory posits are a key determinant of whether a UN intervention succeeds in preventing the onset of violence. The identifies the importance of multilateralism, diversity, and the nonuse of force as critical factors shaping local perceptions and, as a result, UN peacekeeping effectiveness. Critically, the theory does not suggest that UN peacekeepers will always succeed, or that all kinds of UN peacekeepers will succeed. Indeed, perceptions of UN peacekeepers vary depending on the troop-contributing country and the identity of the civilians involved in the dispute. The chapter closes with a discussion of the most important hypotheses derived from the theory.

This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.

From the 16th century onwards, the Republic of the United Provinces, or the Dutch Republic, developed into a state with extensive maritime economic activities (fisheries, trade and whaling) with an extensive trade network in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and North and South America. In the wake of these developments, the navy of the republic found itself involved in many conflicts throughout the early modern era. Sometimes this was for conquest, but most of the time these involvements were to defend. In other words, the maritime power of the republic was mostly used for defensive, rather than offensive, operations. In this chapter we will explore two cases where the republic used naval powers: the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), a struggle between a few rebellious states in the Netherlands and the Spanish Habsburg Empire, and three wars between England and the republic that happened in the second half of the seventeenth century. We will discuss the sources, the presence of a maritime revolution, and the question of who was in charge in deciding the objective for the creation of grand strategy, who were the opponents, what were the causes of the wars, what where the objectives, what means were at the disposal of the republic to achieve its objectives, how priorities were decided and to what degree did cultural and emotional factors play a role in prioritisation.

Chapter 1 introduces the argument, summarises the findings, and describes the conceptual framework applied throughout the book to analyse UN mediation as a gendered-colonial institution. It begins by noting the slow progress of the WPS Agenda in UN mediation, which the scholarly literature has not adequately addressed. It also stakes out the significance of WPS in UN mediation for the realisation of women's right to political participation, the advancement of gender equality in post-conflict contexts, and the diffusion of international approaches to gender-sensitive mediation from the UN to other organisations. The next section discusses how UN mediation can be analysed as an institution and identifies the key concepts and techniques used in parsing its gendered institutional logics. It also argues for using decolonial concepts of gender in studying the UN. Next, the chapter describes the interpretive research design and considers the ethical and practical implications of this approach. Last, the chapter concludes with an overview of each chapter.