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.

The year 1919 saw an unprecedented wave of female activism unleashed by women who collectively decried the exclusion of ’half of humanity’ from the peace negotiations. Promises of a new international order rooted in self-determination, popular sovereignty and social justice served as the catalyst for these women: suffragists, pacifists, labour activists, pan-Africanists and anti-colonialists from Europe, North America, India, Korea, Egypt, China and beyond. Throughout 1919, they congregated in meeting halls and marched in the streets, demanding a voice in the peace negotiations and insisting on representation in democratic states and the new institutions of global governance. In their vision, a just and secure international order depended as much on safeguarding the rights of individuals as it did on facilitating the peaceful coexistence of nations. The result of their activism was an ever-expanding and intersecting network of women’s organisations dedicated to securing gender equality around the world

The year 1919 is now remembered primarily as the year in which peace was restored to Europe following the cataclysm of the Great War. But it was also, no less importantly, a time of upheaval across much of the colonial world. In North Africa, Egyptians rose in revolt against British control and Tunisian protesters demanded the restoration of the constitution from their French overlords. Indians, too, rose against British rule, launching a concerted campaign that year for Indian self-determination. And across East and Southeast Asia – in China, Korea, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies – uprisings against imperialism transformed polities and societies. In short, the wake of the Great War saw the rise of a transnational revolt against the imperial world order, a revolt that would profoundly shape the transformation of international order in the ensuing decades.

No account of the global convulsions of Britishness in the decades after the Second World War can ignore the outbreak of the Northern Ireland Troubles in the late 1960s. This chapter sets out to tie this explosive episode into the global dynamics of the break-up of Greater Britain in two key respects. First, the climate of acute adveristy for colonialism worldwide provided ample encouragement and legitimacy to the ‘anti-colonialist’ credentials of militant nationalism. And second, and more significantly, the reaction of the Unionist majority cannot be viewed in isolation from the wider repercussions of Britain’s imperial endgame. The spectacle of a British government turning its back on longstanding moral commitments abroad (from East of Suez to Rhodesia, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands) only heightened suspicion that Protestant Ulster would be next in line. Ultimately, it was as much to combat English incomprehension of their plight that Protestant Loyalists resorted to a beleaguered militancy as the touchstone of their Britishness, unwittingly distancing themselves further from their ‘mainland’ counterparts.