Forum on New Histories of the Cold War

September 16, 2021 by
One comment
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. Paul Thomas Chamberlain The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace New York: HarperCollins, 2018 Lorenz Lüthi Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Kristina Spohr Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World After 1989 New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020 Are we entering a new Cold War? Recent years have seen a deterioration of relations Continue reading →

Accountants, Cartographers, and Systems Analysts, Oh My!

September 16, 2021 by
2 comments
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. At this point, we know a lot about the Cold War. In part, that has been the product of archival access. Across Eastern Europe, formerly communist states and ex-Soviet republics have flung open their archives, willing—indeed, eager—to share the closely-held secrets of the past. The passage of time, too, has brought mandatory declassifications and regular releases from national archives, foreign ministries, presidential Continue reading →

The “Cold War” and Other Frames: On the Challenges of Writing Global History

September 16, 2021 by
One comment
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. What is global history and how do we go about writing it? What does it mean for our understanding of the so-called Cold War, and for its historiography? These are the challenges that the books in this roundtable take up, as three regional specialists turn their hand to the telling of a century of simultaneous connections between far-flung regions of the world. Continue reading →

Notes from a Latin Americanist

September 16, 2021 by
One comment
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. In 2005, in his book The Global Cold War, Odd Arne Westad formulated an innovative intellectual blueprint for writing new international histories of the Third World through the prism of three southern continents’ shared struggle for postcolonial forms of political and economic sovereignty. This has given rise to new projects on the Global Cold War, particularly in its regional iterations, as these three Continue reading →

Violence, Structural Change, and Absences in New Histories of the Cold War

September 16, 2021 by
No comments
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. Thanks again to Drs. Colbourn, El-Fadl, and Krepp for taking part in this conversation. I sincerely look forward to discussing these books with the three of you. I’d also like to thank the editorial assistant for Humanity, Matthew Liberti, for proofreading this initial exchange. There are so many potential areas I’d like to touch on in our discussion: how these books build Continue reading →

Interview with Lori Allen

April 19, 2021 by and
One comment
Interview with Lori Allen (SOAS) on her recent book A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2020). The interview was conducted via email by Tobias Kelly, member of the Humanity editorial collective. Tobias Kelly (TK): Can you tell us how you came to this project and how it relates to your previous work? Lori Allen (LA): I see this book as being a prequel to my first book, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine Continue reading →

Unsettling Effects of the Human Shield Concept

April 1, 2021 by
No comments
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields is arranged as a composition of twenty two tableaux. Each vividly explores distinctive practices of human shielding by excavating diverse types of archival sources—official documents, personal correspondence, memoirs, news media, scholarly works, novels, videogames, and more. The succession of these tableaux occurs mostly in chronological order beginning with the American Civil War, and its Continue reading →

History of People in the Line of Fire

April 1, 2021 by
No comments
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. My first encounter with the concept of human shielding was in an interview I conducted with Majdi Abed Rabbo in Jabaliya, a neighborhood in Gaza City in February 2009. I was a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild fact-finding mission to Gaza following Israel’s first large scale offensive against the tiny coastal enclave—also known as “Operation Cast Lead.” Atop a pile Continue reading →

Human Shields and Distributions of Killability

April 1, 2021 by
No comments
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire starts with the story of student Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of houses in the West Bank by putting herself in the way. Corrie, a civilian, was killed in a manner that many of us will find difficult Continue reading →

Human Shields, Progress, and Agency on the Roof

April 1, 2021 by
No comments
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, is a detailed and effective mapping exercise introducing the reader to a growing field of legal and political interactions that center on the unstable dichotomy between killing and protecting civilians in war. Each of its 22 short chapters meticulously contextualizes a particular incident, a set of stories or an interface Continue reading →