Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron and the Caribbean

March 3, 2026 by
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Abstract As much attention as Sylvia Wynter’s critique of Western Man has garnered during the past decade by scholars engaging with her essays of the 1980s to 2000s, her 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron foreshadows and dramatizes many of the concerns of the later theoretical writings. Reading The Hills of Hebron as a novel about limited and limiting conceptions of the human places Wynter’s thought into the context of the debates about human rights taking place in the context of decolonization during the 1960s. Remembering these debates, Continue reading → Continue reading →

From the NIEO to NAFTA: Mexican post-Revolutionary Interpretations of Economic Development and Human Rights

March 3, 2026 by
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Abstract This article revisits public debates in Mexico around two distinctive causes that found an undeniable impulse in the 1970s: the international demands to rebalance the financial and commercial agreements towards enhancing economic growth in the least developed countries and the global human rights agenda. The article traces the Mexican government’s interpretation of these causes and their intertwinement back to the 1917 Constitution that resulted from the Mexican Revolution and argues that this root created a common sense among a variety of unexpected actors which, Continue reading → Continue reading →

French Responses to the Bosnian Crisis: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and Memory

March 3, 2026 by
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Abstract This article explores the use of multidirectional memories in humanitarian and interventionist discourses in France during the first half of the 1990s. It does this through two sets of responses to mass violence: from 1991 to 1995 following the break-up of Yugoslavia, and during 1994 in Rwanda. While the Bosnian crisis, as many called it at the time, extended over years, the genocide in Rwanda took place over the course of a hundred days. In both cases, however, outside responses consisting of emergency relief Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Return of the “savage”: Gaza and the Dark Side of International Humanitarian Law

March 3, 2026 by and
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Abstract Following the 7 October 2023 attacks, scholars have offered myriad legal views arising from the ongoing hostilities. What is missing from these debates is an exploration of the “dark side” of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which, as classically conceived, was not developed for urban wars or for conflicts between states and armed groups resisting occupation or colonialism. It was originally developed in the late nineteenth century on a clear distinction between the international (European) and colonial spheres. According to this distinction, conflicts between so-called Continue reading → Continue reading →

Kaunas to Khan Yunis: Aharon Barak’s Dissent, Ontologies of Partition, and the Cunning of Unintended Geography

March 3, 2026 by
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Abstract The ongoing violence in Gaza is upending one reigning liberal exceptionalist justification after another. A poignant illustration of this is Judge ad hoc Aharon Barak’s dissenting opinion on the provisional measures requested by South Africa in its suit against Israel in the International Court of Justice for breaching the Genocide Convention. In his dissent, Barak illustrated his experience as a Holocaust survivor in Lithuania in a manner unusually personal as a matter of judicial opinion. This, I argue, reveals the stark limits of the Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Expert’s Wife: Mobility, Family and Respectability in the Making of Israel’s Foreign Development Service

March 3, 2026 by
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Abstract This article examines the roles played by the wives of Israeli development experts in sub-Saharan Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Literature on international development experts has attended to how ‘portability’ and cross-cultural dexterity facilitated the diffusion and implementation of specific development agendas (Moon and Mehos, 2011). Less attention, however, has been paid to the influence of experts’ spouses, children, extended families and households on motivations to take international postings or on their professional performance in situ. Drawing on feminist insights and approaches to Continue reading → Continue reading →

Majdal Shams and the Instrumentalization of Despair

November 6, 2024 by
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Majdal Shams has long been a heartbreaking place. Since June 1967, when Israel launched its blitz on the Golan Heights as part of the shock-and-awe campaign of the Six Days War, the village has been split in two. During the Naksa, thousands of local civilians were pushed north by the invading Israeli soldiers; the remainder steadfastly remained. As a consequence, today half of the community live, displaced, under unchallenged Syrian sovereignty, north of the 1967 ceasefire line; the other half of the community live just Continue reading →