Chapter 2 explores the regional context and significance of Tivinat’s capture and imprisonment in the strategic port of Dieppe in the province of Normandy. Establishes the importance of Normandy’s connections with the Huguenot diaspora in England and cross-Channel connections and conflicts. Focuses on the development of the Reformation in Dieppe and its connections with Beauvais, the Huguenot leadership and local nobility, its progress during the first religious war (1562–63) and ongoing conflict with local Catholics. In particular, relations with regional and town governors were fraught, resulting in heated confessional clashes during the second and third wars of 1567–1570. The link between these events and the role of the governors in enabling Tivinat’s interrogation is established, too, as Norman connections with the cardinal of Châtillon’s exile in England. Examines the career of Tivinat’s interrogator, Michel Vialar, president of the parlement of Rouen, and his contribution to confessional tensions in the region through prosecution and fiscal exactions as well as interpersonal clashes with fellow judges. Discussion through detailed examples of the contemporary challenges of crossing the Channel by boat provides further context for the experience of Tivinat and other couriers.

Chapter 2 introduces the Iraqi diasporas in the UK and Sweden, their migration waves, and the sociopolitical reasons for leaving Iraq and migrating to each hostland. It highlights the importance of the socioeconomic profile of each diaspora, which affected their transnational connections to Iraq, and how they could involve themselves rebuilding Iraq. In the United Kingdom, political and religious elites, and upper- and middle-class professionals contributed to London being an oppositional hub for Shi’a Islamist Parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi National Congress, and the Iraqi National Accord, as well as other liberal and leftist figures. The socioeconomic profiles of the UK diaspora also provided the diaspora with the material power and networks to influence hostland and international policymakers. Meanwhile in Sweden, the socioeconomic profile of the Swedish diaspora, made up of largely refugees and less-skilled individuals, affected its ability to contribute directly towards Iraq, redirecting mobilisation towards the diaspora in the formation years, and later, once settled, towards the hostland audience in the late 1990s. Mobilisation was channelled through Swedish civil society and in collaboration with civic groups and parties, reflecting Sweden’s tradition of politics through social movements.

From the Frontier Wars to contemporary conflicts, this chapter considers the role of Australian poetry in shaping understandings of war. It includes early critiques of British command during the Boer War and national mythmaking around Breaker Morant. It then considers the patriotism and propaganda of poetry in World War I and the generation of the Anzac or digger myth in national identity. It considers the role of humour and the vernacular in popular poetry, and writing from the homefront. It traces the change in attitudes as World War I continued and resulted in a heavy loss of Australian lives. The chapter also considers poetry written during World War II and the Vietnam War. It considers how writers experimented with form and imagery to create a vehicle of protest, as well as to navigate disillusionment and loss. The chapter considers poetic engagements with a movement into perpetual war and conflict in the late twentieth century, including the role of media. Lastly, it considers the voices of asylum seekers and the role of poetry in protesting and critiquing government policy around border security.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.

Food shortages impacted some countries more severely than others. They also did not affect everyone equally within societies. Access to food determined new social hierarchies in wartime. Rising costs of living everywhere meant that a higher part of household income had to be devoted to food. Worsened material conditions sharpened old social divisions and created new ones. In many cases, it was easier for the rich to still obtain food despite rationing, which fed resentment against the comparatively better-off. The term ‘profiteer’ and its equivalent in other languages came to define the perceived enemy, which lived in opulence during times of scarcity and took advantage of the reduced circumstances of others. Employees on fixed incomes were particularly hit by the changing economic conditions. For middle-class people whose identity was linked to their class status, the struggles they experienced to obtain basic consumption goods were experienced as déclassement. Hunger both weakened and strengthened the spirit of community: outsiders, including a growing number of war refugees, were increasingly perceived as additional mouths to feed in a context of dwindling food supplies. Hunger thus transformed the self-perceptions of many Europeans and their positions within established social hierarchies.

Akbari describes what it means to have a human body in the digital age and argues that datafication has transformed the materiality of the body in its very flesh and bone. This transformation is especially dangerous in uncertain spaces, such as borders and refugee camps, where identity becomes crucial and only certain categories of human bodies can pass. The consequences to those experiencing datafication of their bodies at the border are harsh and severe. However, the deliberate unruliness of the border paves the way for these spaces to become technological testing grounds, as evidenced by the development of technologies to track fleeing populations for the purposes of contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Akbari’s text oscillates deliberately between academic thinking, autobiographical accounts, pictures, and poetry, thus clearly denoting the discomfort of the human being living in a Code|Body.

Perceptions and bias help explain animosity over food supplies between urban and rural civilians. While differences in rural and urban hunger existed in some places, caution should be exercised when attributing the destitution of urban dwellers to greed or acts of self-preservation by rural farmers. Greater proximity to major food sources did not always equate to greater access to food. Furthermore, proximity to food in both urban and rural areas was not fixed, but changed over the course of the war and its aftermath. People fled or were forced from their homes in both urban and rural areas. This movement of people blurred rural and urban distinctions as people from the countryside flocked into cities and people in the cities took shorter trips to the countryside to search for food. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of predominantly urban children travelled temporarily to rural landscapes in the early 1920s. Analyses of anthropometric measurements of school children in Germany and Austria suggest that rural and urban differences were small. During the War, children in Vienna may have suffered more nutritional deprivation overall then in other parts of Austria, but after the War, Viennese children had the fastest rate of recovery.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce xenophobia against Latinx immigrants. It begins with the story of Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, a boy from an Indigenous Maya village in Guatemala, an exceptional student who migrated to the US with his sister, was separated from her, and died in custody of US Border Patrol in 2019. The story of family separation of Carlos illustrates anti-immigration policies and xenophobia against asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants in the US. Informed by Latinx critical race theory (LatCrit), this chapter discusses who are Latinx people, some popular myths about them, and how they are treated in the US under laws such as Arizona SB 1070 that criminalized undocumented immigrants. It examines the differences between internal and international migration, voluntary and involuntary migration, and emigration and immigration. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on 9/11, the War on Terror, and Islamophobia. It ends with a discussion of Carlos Hernández and the need for immigration reform.

Chapter 2 chronicles migration to Western Anatolia and the immigrant and refugee experience with local natural resources therein. It examines how newcomers viewed, understood, and interacted with the natural environment and the significance of their skills, know-how, experience, and ideas in understanding economic and socio-ecological changes in Izmir and its surroundings in the late Ottoman Empire.

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.

This chapter examines West German efforts to admit refugees from Chile. It argues that the rhetoric of antifascism mobilized by the Chile solidarity movement was influential during the government of Willy Brandt (1973–1974), because the key pillars of the Social Democratic Party (youth organizations, trade unions, and regional party structures) endorsed the admittance of refugees as antifascist fighters, and members of the Free Democratic Party also sanctioned the admittance of refugees from Chile. However, following Helmut Schmidt’ accession to the chancellorship in 1974, securing political asylum for refugees from Chile became far more challenging and nearly impossible for political refugees from Argentina. This is because Schmidt and fellow government officials opposed left-wing solidarity during a time in which the focus shifted towards stabilizing the economy and combating left-wing terrorism. The government’s stance forced the solidarity movement to emphasize their humanitarian motivations. As the case of Helmut Frenz’s engagement demonstrates, the politics of emergency coexisted with a market-critical understanding of the violence perpetrated by the Chilean military regime.

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.