This article investigates the introduction of human rights reforms in late colonial Africa, a period defined by the disintegration of European colonial rule. While existing scholarship often attributes these reforms to European efforts to ensure a smooth transition to independence, foster post-colonial stability, and address post-war geopolitical challenges, such analyses frequently overlook the agency of indigenous nationalist leaders and anti-colonial activists. These groups perceived the reforms as strategically motivated maneuvers by departing colonial powers and engaged with them accordingly. Focusing on the decolonisation era in Africa, this study argues that both colonisers and the colonised approached human rights rhetoric primarily as a tool for pragmatic objectives rather than as an expression of ideological commitment to human rights norms. European powers framed these reforms as altruistic, yet their underlying motivations were rooted in political and economic interests. Conversely, African leaders appropriated human rights discourse to expose colonial hypocrisy and advance their political agendas. This engagement underscores the tension between universal human rights ideals and the pragmatic realities of political strategy (realpolitik) during a transformative period in the development of the international human rights framework. It also highlights how political calculations constrained the realization of universal human rights principles such as dignity, equality, and inalienability.

Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—is an archive of displacement, containing the imprint of overlooked, erased, or forgotten (often violent) pasts stored in everyday things like trees, trash, talk, and translations. Uniting all these unintended archival deposits are the dead—especially the uncommemorated, forgotten, or abandoned dead—and the urban spaces they co-inhabit with the most marginalized of the living. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper centers on urban cemeteries as archival nodes that gather together impressions—physically and psycho-semiotically—of uncommemorated pasts that nevertheless have left their mark on the urban fabric and people’s lives. This material “documentation” embedded in the built environment provides a vernacular alternative to the “fantasy” of official, national archives, foregrounding the blurry colonial-postcolonial divide in ordinary people’s historical imaginaries. Urban traces of displaced people and pasts show how complex semiotic residues get carried across otherwise disparate urban spaces where the postcolonial present has yet to reckon fully with colonialism’s mortal remains.

The Song of Songs—a biblical celebration of love and desire—holds a unique place in literary history, revered not only for its religious significance, but also for its poetic beauty. Early Chinese translations of this biblical book struggled to resonate with local audiences until the release of the Delegates’ Version, which is acclaimed as the first Chinese Bible that can truly be regarded as a work of Chinese literature. The Song of Songs in the Delegates’ Version, titled Yage 雅歌 (The Refined Song), undergoes a noticeable acculturation in which its imagery and themes are intricately woven into the fabric of Chinese literary tradition. This article explores how this biblical love song has been recontextualised to resonate with Chinese cultural and literary sensibilities. By examining the portrayal of lovers, the nature of love, and the poetic resonance established through the integration of verses from the Shijing in the Yage, it highlights the intricate interplay between biblical text and Chinese literature. Ultimately, this study reveals that, while the Bible shapes the life of its community, it is also shaped by the cultural and linguistic contexts in which it is translated.

This article reflects on the pitfalls of the combined search for big and better data and argues for more attention to everyday experiences and incidental evidence. It proposes that including spatial aspects, perspectives from cultural, colonial, and women’s history, as well as widening the source base helps to remedy these challenges, and encourages historians to abandon their hesitations and embrace the uncertainties in doing so. It draws on the results of a research project at the University of Amsterdam that utilizes incidental evidence to enhance our understanding of gendered spatial patterns in premodern cities.

Left-populist narratives of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world, including the twentieth-century Middle East, often construe it as a process whereby multinational fossil capital encloses and commodifies land held in common. Although such narratives may capture the experience of communities along certain oil and gas frontiers, they do not account for the social terrains and political trajectories of extractive land grabs in areas where private property in land already underpins commercial agriculture. How do energy companies engage with an existing market in land, and reorient a commodity frontier around extractive rather than agrarian capitalism? This article explores that question by examining property struggles in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the multinational Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) sought to acquire land still devoted to cash crop agriculture. Drawing on business records and material from Iraqi archives entirely new to Anglophone scholarship, I show how land conflicts on the Basra oil frontier came to revolve less around the IPC as such than the Iraqi state. The latter’s expanding remit entailed both the revival of older powers of sovereign landlordism and the deployment of novel capacities, as the state sought to mediate conflicting legal claims on land and its value and manage the social consequences of territorial dispossession. Ultimately, this article historicizes the political-legal status of postcolonial landlord states like Iraq in an era of hydrocarbon extraction, locating the origin of their powers as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructures as in the monopoly over oil rents.

In the 1920s, Coca-Cola successfully registered both its English and Chinese trademarks in China. Its product strengths, experience with trademark enforcement, and the legal privileges it enjoyed under extraterritoriality all contributed to its ability to combat counterfeits and defend its brand. Yet the company failed to align its trademark protection efforts with local conditions in China. Cultural differences between China and the United States, the uncertainties brought by war, and the structural limitations of Chinese commercial law introduced new challenges. Coca-Cola lacked targeted responses to these issues and operated without reliable local partners in its enforcement efforts. Consequently, it encountered increasing difficulties in protecting its trademarks. This article demonstrates how cultural, wartime, and legal factors profoundly shaped trademark protection for multinational corporations abroad. It argues that attention to local specificities in overseas markets proved essential for effective trademark enforcement.

Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.

The Mexican Cristero experience constituted a political laboratory and a school of resistance providing blueprints of action later exercised in Spain. With barely ten years between their own countries’ conflicts, the ladies of Catholic Action—in Mexico and then in Spain—organized themselves, first, as a passive resistance, and then both used the same justifications to support the use of political violence. News of the Mexican Catholic women’s experience had arrived across the Atlantic in the chronicles of Spanish newspapers beginning in the late 1920s and in the edifying, right-leaning novels that were spread, above all, in Spanish Catholic schools during the 1930s. This helps us understand the parallels between the actions, liaisons, informants, and weapons suppliers of the Brigades and other Catholic organizations in Mexico and the members of the women’s fifth column in Spain. Perhaps the contemporary presence in the public sphere of European fascists resonated more among young urban Madrid or Barcelona women during the Spanish Civil War, but, without a doubt, the social origin, experience, and cultural heritage of Mexican women was more in line with the efforts of conservative Spanish women all over the country during the conflict. In both cases, the defence of religion and their Catholic identity was at the forefront of their efforts and gave coherence to what might, at times, appear to be diverse political projects.