This chapter highlights the careers of Save the Children’s principal field officer in Nigeria, Lieutenant-Commander A. R. Irvine Neave and the African Development Trust’s, Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock to explore the legacies of mission and empire. The former viewed poverty as a product of individual ignorance; the latter argued that it was due to the structural injustice of racist legislation across Southern Africa. Despite these differing imperial and political outlooks, both were, however, ‘techno-missionaries’: products of both the missionary past and the technocratic future of development. Mission stayed on after the empire, but it was transformed by the rise of the modern NGO and the humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid. It resulted in a ‘third colonial occupation’ of volunteer aid workers alongside the experts and technocrats of social and economic development.

The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014 marked a significant transformation in India's sociopolitical landscape. The BJP, as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu supremacist organizations, strategically utilized the full spectrum of politico-legal systems and socio-economic institutions in its attempt to shape India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). This effort has gained remarkable momentum, particularly following the BJP and its alliances’ successive electoral victories and firm control over the Indian parliament. For building Hindutva (Hindu nationhood) politics, the BJP adopts a primordial perspective, defining a nation through socio-biological links or socially constructed cultural connectivity, such as language, religion, territory, and kinship (de Souza 2022; Kumbamu 2020; Shani 2021). Deeply immersed in such primordialism, the Sangh Parivar defines the nation based on the idea of oneness (one law, one culture, one religion, and one language), which aims to promote Hindu supremacy, stigmatizing and labelling those who diverge from its definition as ‘enemies’ or ‘anti-nationals’ (Banaji 2018; Chacko 2023; Frykenberg 2008; Siddiqui 2017). As a result, there is an increasing criminalization of various forms of political dissent. This includes actions ranging from targeted ‘legal’ assaults on opposition political parties and ideologies to overt threats and ‘conspiracy’ cases against activists, academics, journalists, writers, and artists.

In this political context, deep-seated concerns have emerged regarding the state of democracy, civil liberties, and the functioning of constitutional institutions.

The conclusion summarises the interconnected histories of the plebiscite and its foremost scholar and places them in historical perspective. Both were shaped by Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to reorder the world. Over one hundred years on from that attempt, with major political changes having taken place, and liberal internationalism of the kind advocated by Wilson and followers seemingly having lost its appeal to the United States, the history of Sarah Wambaugh and the plebiscite seems relevant once more.

Sarah Wambaugh was technical advisor to the Peruvian delegation during the 1925-26 Tacna-Arica plebiscite, contested between Chile and Peru. Although the United States was to lead the plebiscite as a neutral arbiter, the fact that the territory was under the control of Chile, which had seized the region several generations earlier, would ultimately lead to the plebiscite being abandoned. Wambaugh would witness first-hand the violence and futility of the attempted plebiscite, made more galling because women were not allowed to vote, all of which fired her with determination to ensure that future plebiscites would not suffer the same results. Consequently, it was in Tacna-Arica that she began to systematically analyse the post-war plebiscites and distil normative conclusions for their future use. These normative prescriptions would be honed by her in the coming years, culminating in a list of eighteen points contained in her important 1933 work on the post-war plebiscites.

The final decade of Sarah Wambaugh’s life would see her appointed technical advisor to the allied-run mission to observe the sensitive Greek elections of 1946, as well as to the soon abandoned plebiscite in Kashmir several years later. However, in Greece Wambaugh’s expertise now stood in contrast to new scientific sampling techniques, while she would keep silent about the fact that women were not allowed to vote, in a bid to support the anti-communists who won the election. Meanwhile her normative rules for the plebiscite would be dispensed with as not culturally relevant by those planning the vote in Kashmir. The chapter ends with an examination of the first UN plebiscite actually held, in British Togoland in 1956, and with the 1955 referendum on the proposal to turn the Saar into a Europeanised territory. Both operations eschewed many of the heavy normative principles which Wambaugh had developed for the plebiscite.

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