Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.

Tarai was a landmass running along an east-west axis just to the south of the Himalayan ranges and was a part of Himalayan Kumaun ecology. At the stroke of independence, the colonialists had made plans to clear the Tarai and settle it with Indian soldiers returning from World War II. The task of actual clearing fell on the sovereign Indian government as the pressure to settle refugees piled on top of the plan to settle soldiers. With the nation struggling to meet its food requirements a new vision was born to turn the Tarai into a “granary” for the province. Under these contingencies, the Tarai became a landmass wherein new settlers were encouraged to perfect the art of productive agriculture. The post-colonial developmentalist state set up a model state farm to propagate such practices. To the outside developer and modernizer, Tarai came across as empty though, in fact, it was inhabited by a limited number of hill communities and villages. As Tarai was turned into a farming land with settlers from beyond, a local democratic movement for autonomy erupted in the region that called into question the method of land settlement and transformation.

This chapter examines the period around independence in Rwanda and Kivu. The 1950s saw the maturation and increasing salience of “national” and “ethnic” aspects of people’s identities as they became central to political discussions over “autochthony” and access to resources. Changing political contexts made the ground more fertile for “ethnic,” as well as “national” identity to become part of the political vernacular.

For Rwanda, it focuses on the refugee waves that were the result of political violence against Tutsi in the period between 1959 and 1964. It shows that focusing too narrowly on the forced nature of their mobility disguises previous connections that were conducive to helping Tutsi refugees establish themselves in Congo. The chapter thus reiterates the importance of looking at people’s “personal information fields” as well as other preexisting affective or other ties in understanding the patterns of their mobility. For Kivu, the chapter tries to explore what other fault lines become visible when one shifts the attention away from “identity” as the sole explanation for violent conflicts, such as the “Kanyarwanda wars” in the 1960s.

A last point this chapter makes is the changing meanings of the border between Rwanda and Congo, for people living in its vicinity as well as for the Belgian administration. Whereas the Belgians had always benefited from the close connections between Kivu and Rwanda, this changed almost overnight in 1960 when Congo became independent. Both Rwandans and Congolese had used cross-border connections to build political networks and to organize out of the reach of the colonial state and traditional authorities. After Congo’s independence, the loss of control over subversive activities just across the border caused anxieties for the Belgians in Rwanda. For Congolese and Rwandans, independence turned the border into a national boundary, separating Rwandan from Congolese political sovereignty as well as altering the sense of national belonging.

Chapter 7 explores some ways in which metaphors trauma shape the experience of the self and temporality through examples from refugees and Holocaust survivors. A key function of narrative is organizing the experience of time. Narratives of the self have consequences for the experience time. The discussion distinguishes two meta-narratives of the self in terms of their implicit root metaphors and associated temporalities: the adamantine self, characterized by endurance, integrity, coherence, autonomy, self-definition, self-determination, and self-control; and the relational self, characterized by flexibility, fluidity, sensitivity to context, multivocality, interdependence, and responsiveness. These models of the self are associated with different ideologies and forms of social life that shape trauma memory and experience. They also influence the ways that trauma experience is narrated through personal and collective stories. This occurs in settings that require an attentive listener. The ethics of storytelling has an essential counterpart in the ethics of listening, which involves particular forms of temporality and ways of participating in a cultural community.

Chapter 2 considers how Italian emigrants navigated the arrival of war during the period of Italian neutrality from August 1914 to May 1915. The immediate effects of the war in 1914 were felt most amongst those in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium and France, many of whom suddenly lost their jobs. Not content to remain unemployed and risk living in a war zone, a mass exodus to Italy began. By October 1914, half a million Italian emigrants had returned to Italy from across Europe. They faced grave difficulties upon arrival, primarily in finding employment, leading to instances of serious public unrest. The chapter also considers the experiences of the 3,000 garibaldini, Italian volunteers in the French Army, half of whom were Italian emigrants already living in France and half of whom were volunteers from Italy and elsewhere, including six of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s grandsons. Finally, the chapter analyses the immediate response of Italian emigrant communities to Italy’s declaration of war against Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915 and entry into the war alongside Britain, France and Russia.

Embodied movement within and across national borders has been increasing. Prompted by intensifying local–global unsettling, it has led to a series of tensions concerning the way even the most supposedly cosmopolitan of countries now treat the refugees and migrants. Those who seek refuge have become a problem. In this conflict-ridden world in which the displacement has become endemic – and in this mediated world where the hope of finding a better place to live is held out as part of the dominant global imaginary – countries across the globe are now attempting to manage the global flow of non-citizens. Here the visceral immediacy of human needs and hopes is confronted by the abstracting machinery of state surveillance and management. This chapter explores the tensions between the continuing embodied movement of those who seek refuge and the intensifying abstraction of state engagement with those persons. The chapter takes three liberal democracies as its focus – Australia, Canada, and the United States. These are settler colonial countries which we might expect to be cosmopolitan and welcoming. The history of refugee reception is, however, a movement away from that sensibility.

This chapter shows how foreign observers sometimes condemned and sometimes endorsed the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policies in the years before the Second World War, and in turn how the Third Reich responded to global opinion. The Nazis encountered international outrage in the face of their anti-Jewish policies. But they also found imitators and supporters around the world, including in the USA, who applauded Hitler’s efforts to solve the “Jewish question.” As the 1930s proceeded, global condemnation of Hitler’s antisemitism grew, but the Nazi regime rightly came to see expressions of outrage as largely toothless, as the international community appeared either unwilling or incapable of organizing collective action to save Europe’s Jews.

This chapter offers a nuanced account of liberation, displacement, and homecoming after the Second World War. It emphasizes the ambiguity of a liberation that was not always freeing, displacement that continued wartime suffering, and a homecoming that was often bittersweet, when it was even possible. It traces the ways in which the savage history of postwar Europe led to massive population transfers, including of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It looks at “homecoming” both in western and in eastern Europe, as well as post-liberation migration out of Europe. After all, most east European Jews quickly realized they had little future in Europe, their sense of belonging shattered. The surrounding societies were often unwelcoming for returnees, reluctant to return appropriated property, and retained substantial antisemitism. If, in western Europe, Jewish survivors could, to a degree, “go home again,” this proved impossible for the most part in eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish survivors often abandoned Europe altogether, seeking new lives in Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. The political and social history of displaced persons after the war is thus both pan-European and global.

How are conflict costs quantified and studied? For many researchers, analyzing the wide-ranging and long-term impacts of intrastate conflicts presents a harrowing task, dealing with topics involving death, devastation, and deprivation. As this chapter argues, there is no perfect way to measure the impact of war. Conflict costs are closely linked to the human development of countries involved in a conflict, helping to better clarify their impact relative to more peaceful countries. Furthermore, there are indicators of a conflict’s devastation beyond casualty figures that research should consider. Here, examining the conflict’s impact on areas such as education, infrastructure, health, the standard of living and economy, along with crime and the environment is useful. With numerous debates tackling these issues, this chapter delves into the complicated discussions of how to study these events. It suggests that a broader expansion of intrastate models and use of indicator statistics helps provide a greater understanding of such deadly occurrences and ultimately highlights the need to end or ideally prevent their outbreak.

The chapter argues that post-1945 international human rights law cannot be understood without accounting for the interwar period and some core elements of human rights discourse which existed at the time. Whereas classical histories of human rights have focused on genealogy and teleology to spell out the advent of rights universalism, more recent work has anchored the origins of human rights in national political communities. Accounting for these new historiographies, this chapter distinguishes between nineteenth-century human rights discourse and post–Second World War international human rights law. Elements of the former and antecedents of the latter can be found in the interwar period, in particular in the legal regimes for the protection of refugees and minorities. Although it analyses the two regimes separately, it articulates their points of convergence and situates them in the context of rising nationalism and the advent of the individual as a subject of international law.