Across belligerent and even in neutral Europe, wartime brought changes in people’s experience of food. To begin with, the war changed most contemporaries’ diets because of shortages that in some regions lingered long after the Armistice: a drop in consumption of meat, cheese, eggs, cereal, and other foodstuffs; and the widespread use of substitute ingredients and adulteration of food, with cereal-poor “war bread” as a prime example. Other changes in the diet would become permanent, such as the increased consumption of sugar. Wartime populations did not just eat different things; they also ate in different ways. The recipients of relief – an ever-larger segment of the population – had to queue at soup kitchens, although the hard-up middle classes benefited from more restaurant-like surroundings. This points to a larger pattern touched upon in this chapter, viz., the efforts made by authorities and by civil societies not just to provide food in wartime, but also to frame the destabilizing phenomenon that was war food in normalizing, reassuring terms.

Specifically analysing the experiences of Palestinian youth in a West Bank refugee camp, Chapter IV analyses the navigation of emotions inevitably precipitated by the grinding realities of colonisation and military occupation, in a setting in which normative conceptions of masculinity assert that ‘men don’t cry’. Using Palestinian rap music as a case study to explore young refugee men’s navigation and subversion of these dynamics, I argue that emotional expression in this particular musical culture both functions to reconfigure binary gendered norms in a context of invasive settler colonialism, while simultaneously masculinising emotionality through a dialogic performance of emotion, nationalism, resistance, and paternalism. I illustrate, therefore, that in some ways gendered binaries are challenged in and through the performance of Palestinian rap as a form of resistance and release, while in other ways, these are reconfigured so that men’s emotional expression can be subsumed within them.

Chapter II examines shifting notions of masculinised strength as they adapt in occupied Palestine, contesting notions of ‘masculinity in crisis’ so frequently applied to this context. Where it is nigh impossible to enact physical strength in the face of the military might of Israel, I explore the fluidity of emblems of masculine strength and prowess – arguing that hegemonic masculinities and patriarchies in Palestine are not fixed, but move in dynamic relation to the conditions of coloniality with which they intersect. Through the examination of sumud, mental strength and moral strength, this chapter therefore charts emergent narratives of strength and resistance in a setting in which bodily invasion by the occupying forces is an ever-present reality. As such, where the violence of militarised colonisation routinely undermines normative conceptions of ‘masculine excellence’, I examine masculinised ideals as negotiated, maintaining binary gendered categorisations that (re)establish the masculine as strength.

In April 2014, two months before the start of the World Cup, 2,500 Brazilian Army and Marine soldiers occupied Complexo da Maré. They would stay there for the next fifteen months. The occupation of Maré was the culmination of Rio’s once-heralded Police Pacification Units, a public security program intended to recapture the state’s monopoly of violence from drug-trafficking gangs in hundreds of favelas throughout the city. This chapter begins by tracing the confluence of factors which led to the Brazilian military’s intervention. A mix of participant observations, interviews, and newspaper accounts then document the military’s arrival and their various operations and activities to combat gangs and gain the support of the local population. The chapter proceeds to analyze how and why each of Maré’s gangs responded differently to the challenges of occupation, arguing that the military lacked the capacity to fully expel or dismantle them though their presence shifted the dynamics of rival competition and threat, which produced the divergent gang responses observed.

Chapter 2 addresses the history of Byzantine Africa 533–46. It argues that the principal challenges to imperial rule in Africa came from within the administration, rather than external pressure from hostile ‘Moorish’ groups as has conventionally been assumed. These internal tensions were manifested most clearly in a series of mutinies and revolts within the army, leading ultimately to a coup, probably in early 546, when the Dux Numidiarum Guntharith seized authority in Carthage. That many of the leading figures in the administration seem to have come to terms with this tyrant testifies to the weaknesses within the imperial system, and the challenges which faced John at the time of his landing around six months later. This chapter briefly explores the nature of relations between frontier commanders and their ‘barbarian’ neighbours, many of whom aspired to office within the imperial system. It suggests that the ‘Moorish’ crisis John faced in 546 (which had smouldered for three or four years by that stage), was the direct consequence of internecine struggles within the imperial system, as allies increasingly acted in their own interest

In 1941, Iran watched its neutrality violated as Allied forces launched an amphibious attack on its borders. The invasion was described as a justified and necessary incursion on a country accused of harboring a German fifth column and of accommodating a small community of Italian and Japanese nationals. The offensive also proved the most efficient way of opening and controlling supply lines to the Soviet Union. America also deployed a large contingent of troops and several advisers. While Iran remained a hub of espionage during the war, the impact of the occupation had a serious impact on the daily lives of Iranians, who grappled with food shortages, imposing foreign soldiers in their communities, and a typhus epidemic. Iran emerged as a relatively small, but vital, player in the international conflict. However, it suffered tremendously, as the war generated domestic instability and unrest.

In 2013 China Central Television aired a news bulletin with a provocative headline: ‘Japan is snatching our islands using the pretext of environmental protection!’ This fiery denunciation was a reaction to the announcement by the Yamashina Institute that a new variant of Steller’s albatross had been discovered nesting on the disputed Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Islands. Might this accusation by Chinese state media might have a kernel of truth to it? This chapter begins by exploring the politics of heritage preservation in Okinawa under US occupation, before showing how nature conservation on the Senkaku became tangled up in the sovereignty dispute over the islands in the 1960s. Shortly before Okinawan reversion to Japan, the naturalist Takara Tetsuo helped stoke a nationwide panic about Taiwanese fishermen ‘poaching’ seabird eggs on the Senkakus. Later, in the early 2010s, Japanese nationalists led by Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō used nature conservation as a pretext to lobby the central government to take harder line on the dispute.

The Republic of Cyprus was founded on bi-communality: it is a unitary state with a single citizenship, but the state is divided on the basis of nationality into two communities, a Greek majority and a Turkish minority. The constitutional breakdown of 1964, the Turkish invasion of 1974, and the subsequent refusal of the Turkish community to participate in the institutions of the state have given rise to a number of unique problems of citizenship and nationality. Turkish Cypriots remain citizens of the Republic of Cyprus, a state that they refuse to recognize, while at the same time residing within a political entity (North Cyprus) that the international community does not recognize. The interplay between citizenship and national descent in the peculiar situation of Cyprus offers an ideal case study for exploring the concept and boundaries of citizenship and its relationship to the concept of nationality.

Chapter 3 traces the historical origins and evolution of legal debates on the ‘protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict’. It examines legal developments and interpretive efforts of scholars to expand the reach of the traditional jus in bello to account for conflict-related environmental degradation and ‘illegal’ resource exploitation, until the more recent attempts to look beyond the laws of armed conflict and war crimes into IEL and HRL. By charting the different formulations of environmental destruction/exploitation in rules governing war, this chapter sheds light on the changing ideas on the relationship between nature, conflict, and humanity, and the problems/possibilities with ongoing conversations in the field.

In 1815, France remained an autonomous state, occupied by Allied troops. The aim of the occupation was to defuse Bonapartist sympathies, and it was marked by indirect rule by the Allies. After the Battle of Waterloo, the Allies addressed the financial dimensions of peace and collective security: deliberations on restorations and compensation made the tensions between the Allies’ interests visible, as Prussia’s demands to bleed France out were weighed against Metternich’s concern about the ‘Jacobin spirit’, and the more moderate positions towards France of both Britain and Russia. Demilitarization and the restoration of the Bourbon regime were achieved by means of a systematically applied military occupation. However, the objectives of fighting Bonapartism, stabilization and the matter of reparation payments had not been settled. ‘Armed Jacobinism’ continued to be a threat to the moderate occupation of France by the Allies.

Having laid the groundwork for debates about jazz reception in Germany in ,explores jazz in the years of immediate postwar occupation in Germany: from the fall of the regime in 1945 to the founding of the GDR in 1949. During these years, Berlin, the former Nazi capital, served as the epicenter for the formerly Allied occupying powers to engage in ideological battle. During this time, both Soviet and Western allies employed culture, music, and jazz as key tools of the postwar rebuilding effort, with each side using jazz as a political tool to sway audiences toward democratic or socialist ideals. This chapter details the prominence Soviet policymakers assigned to music of African-American descent, recruiting it for propagandistic purposes, and shows how jazz served as entertainment for troops in the Western sectors. Charting the political developments that led to the creation of the GDR in 1949, this chapter further explores the personal experiences of German jazz fans in the late 1940s, whose experiences offer key accounts of racial segregation in the American sectors alongside the impact of Soviet propaganda of the time.