This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

International arbitration is the preferred method for the resolution of commercial and investment disputes. It provides a neutral forum where commercial disputes can be resolved by independent decision-makers, selected by or for the parties applying neutral adjudicative procedures designed to provide expeditious, expert and efficient dispute resolution.

Accompanying its increasing use, there have been efforts to harmonise the practice of international arbitration around the world. The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Law provides the basis for nations to enact arbitration legislation with best practices, offering uniformity for users and courts. The New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards provides an effective and streamlined process for cross-border enforcement of arbitral awards by facilitating their recognition in over 170 nations around the world. Arbitral institutions periodically amend and update their arbitration rules in response to users’ needs, including their desire for harmonising the practice. All of these developments seek to enhance the dispute resolution process for parties to international commercial and investment agreements.

Despite these various efforts to harmonise both law and practice, important differences remain. The arbitration legislation of different countries inevitably differs. The backgrounds of national court judges also differ. The implementation of seemingly similar legislative provisions can also differ. Understanding these differences in international arbitration law and practice is essential for both practitioners and courts, as well as academic commentators.

State of the Art

The global Second World War caused major humanitarian catastrophes that necessitated relief for soldiers, military and civilian prisoners of war, as well as for other victims of the war, including refugees and displaced persons in Europe and in non-European war zones, particularly in Asia. To assist the ever-increasing needs of these diverse groups became a major task for established humanitarian actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), various national Red Cross Societies, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Quakers. They could resort to organisational knowledge and experienced staff, and professionalised more and more their war-related relief work in the course of the ongoing conflict. However, just like during, and in the aftermath of, the First World War, the present global conflagration also saw the emergence of new humanitarian organisations, such as Oxfam and the Catholic Relief Service, that mobilised for special concerns or helped to facilitate potential political alliances. Regardless of whether the humanitarian organisation was an established or a new one, non-state relief agencies entered into close, often co-dependent relationships with states during the war. States understood aid as significant due to moral concerns, but also to safeguard their political, economic and strategic interests, and hence strove to control, guide and coordinate humanitarian activities during and in the aftermath of the war

Written into the Versailles Treaty fifteen years earlier, the Saar plebiscite of 1935 asked the inhabitants of this important German industrial region whether they wished to return to Germany, join France, or remain under the existing League of Nations administration. As technical advisor and deputy member of the plebiscite commission, Sarah Wambaugh would play the leading role in organising the vote and in shaping public perceptions of its efficacy. As a pathbreaking woman playing a masterful role in a sensitive political question, Wambaugh would become an international news story in her own right. Although the plebiscite was widely seen as a successful example of the peaceful settlement of disputes, its electoral outcome was an overwhelming triumph for Nazi Germany. The chapter concludes with a comparison of Wambaugh’s positive appraisal of the Saar plebiscite to British journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann’s dissenting view, which came to diametrically opposite conclusions.

Every 5 years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consists of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussions of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time-series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

In 1984, after her Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi, a revenge pogrom took the lives of over 3,000 Sikhs on the streets of Delhi. Congress Party members led many killer mobs, but some were led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well. This is a fact forgotten by history but recorded in newspaper headlines of the day. It was this massacre that set me on the road to fight communalism with my camera. For the next decade, I recorded different examples of the rise of the religious right, as seen in diverse movements from the Khalistani upsurge in Punjab to the glorification of sati in Rajasthan and the movement to replace the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya with a temple to the Hindu god Ram. The material I filmed was very complex and if I had tried to encompass it all into a single film, it would have been too long and confusing. Eventually, three distinct films emerged from the footage shot between 1984 and 1994, all broadly describing the rise of religious fundamentalism and the resistance offered by secular forces in the country. Una Mitran Di Yaad Pyaari (In Memory of Friends), the first film to get completed, spoke of the situation in the Punjab of the 1980s where Khalistanis as well as the Indian government were claiming Bhagat Singh as their hero, but only people from the left remembered the Bhagat Singh who, from his death cell, wrote the booklet Why I Am an Atheist.

Every 5 years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consists of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussions of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time-series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.

Several scholars have researched religious violence in India (for example, Brass 1997; Engineer 1994; Varshney 2002) and have offered insights into the role of the state in furthering pogroms (I. Ahmad 2022; Brass 2006; Khalidi 2003; Vanaik 2009; Varshney and Gubler 2012). Many writers have also emphasized the role of electoral politics in triggering pogroms (for example, Wilkinson 2006). Yet the role of violence remains under-examined from the perspective of a capitalist political economy. Put differently, past studies have paid less attention to how pogroms are used as political tools to advance the economic interests of big capital by mobilizing lower classes under the guise of distributed sovereignty. This is a significant oversight, particularly when mass violence against Muslims is systematically deployed to shape fascist politics that advances the interests of big capital (Desai 2014, 2016).

This chapter addresses the aforementioned lacuna by examining the 2020 pogrom in north-east Delhi, which began on February 23 and lasted six days. Without being economistic in my reading of fascism, as Kershaw (1989) warns against, and acknowledging some autonomy of the Sangh Parivar, I draw attention to the political economy of fascist violence. The pogrom in which Muslim lives and property were disproportionately harmed witnessed fifty-three deaths, and thousands of businesses and homes were destroyed (Gowda et al. 2020).

In the 1990s, the humanitarian charities finalised their entry into the development mainstream. They became partners in a humanitarian-development complex associated with military intervention, liberal governance and permanent emergency. As they followed in the wake of more powerful agencies, they also adopted the rhetoric and discourses of official aid. Following the collapse of both communism and apartheid, human rights were confirmed as the guiding principle of international governance. Charity regulation had previously prevented the advocacy of human rights. But after the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1993, the charities all signed up to a ‘rights-based approach’. This was a human rights framework more individualised, more focused on basic rights and less targeted at the inequalities arising out of structural injustice. Rights allowed the humanitarians to depoliticise their work and for charity to be accepted as a part of the common sense solution to poverty at home and abroad. This was a type of charitable humanitarianism that emerged ‘after empire’ and which was palatable to both governments and mass donating publics.

After almost three months of providing medical relief work, shortly before their departure from the country in August 1946, Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), a prominent businessperson and philanthropist of Indian origin, praised the Congress Medical Mission at a tea party in Singapore for being a promoter of Indo-Asian unity. One year later, a book titled Congress Mission to Malaya was published by C. Siva Rama Sastry, one of the mission's members. The Indian National Congress (INC) politician and mission organiser Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) provided the foreword. Roy stated, ‘We the people of India, feel proud of their [the mission members’] achievement and appreciate with gratitude the services they rendered in the name of the Congress.’ In both instances, the work of the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was presented as successful; this success was based partly, but not exclusively, on the mission's effective promotion of domestic and foreign policy objectives of the INC.

In the history of humanitarianism, the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya has been forgotten. It does not figure in the research on the transitional period between the end of the global Second World War, late colonial rule, and early decolonisation in South Asia, nor does it figure in the standard accounts of Indian nationalism, although it is at times mentioned in passing in the histories of Malaysia. Nevertheless, examining the humanitarian undertaking of the INC, the anticolonial organisation that would soon become the party leading India's postcolonial government, is crucial, as the mission represents the last instance of Indian non-state nationalist humanitarian aid provided to civilians in need outside the South Asian subcontinent during the period of colonial rule.