Equally Vulnerable: Liberal Internationalism, the Traffic in Women and Children, and the Non-Politics of Race

March 28, 2026 by
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Scholars interested in the history of international thought usually assume that the ideas of racial equality and shared humanity were not officially fused in global discourse until the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). By contrast, this article maintains that a “nonpolitical” version of this fusion occurred three decades earlier when the League of Nations substituted the term “traffic in women and children” for what had, until then, been known as “the white slave traffic.” Unlike the League’s mandate system–which explicitly relied upon a Continue reading → Continue reading →

Charter 77 Transnational: A Local Dissident Movement in International Human Rights Networks

March 28, 2026 by
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From its inception, Charter 77 was part of a broader transnational human rights constellation. While its history has often been interpreted through the prism of the Helsinki process, this paper argues that the Charter’s transnational entanglements extended far beyond the CSCE framework. Drawing on original archival research in multiple countries, the study situates Charter 77 within three interrelated layers of postwar international human rights politics: the institutional human rights internationalism of the United Nations system (with a focus on the International Labour Organization), the intergovernmental Continue reading → Continue reading →

From Relief to Rule: Food Rations and State-Making in Iraqi Kurdistan

March 28, 2026 by
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This essay analyses the emergence of limited Kurdish self-rule within the broader framework of humanitarian governmentality from 1991 to 2003. Beginning with the emergency relief that followed Operation Provide Comfort, and extending through the Oil for Food Programme (OFFP), humanitarian aid introduced a set of administrative practices that became central to governing the Kurdistan region. At the heart of these practices were food rations. Rations not only secured subsistence but also became a key site through which humanitarian aid flowed into a wider project of Continue reading → Continue reading →

Impossible Conditions of Life: Famine, Humanitarian Management, and Genocide in Gaza

March 28, 2026 by
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This article examines how the Israeli government engineered humanitarianism in Gaza since the 2005 withdrawal, transforming it into a biopolitical regime of containment and an instrument of war. Drawing on the work of Eyal Weizman and Michel Agier, the article argues that the resulting matrix of control set the stage for starvation crimes to become a modality of genocide. It becomes clear that Israel’s humanitarian management functioned as an occupation strategy that sustained basic survival while systematically obstructing economic development, deliberately producing a state of Continue reading → Continue reading →

Populism: The Existential Threat to Liberal Democracy

March 28, 2026 by
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This study critically examines the works of three authors who analyze populist leadership and its associated political practices. The essay highlights a recurring issue in their analyses: the broad generalization and conflation of distinct political phenomena—such as clientelism, favoritism, corruption, and vote-buying—with the traits of populist leaders, rather than with the structural characteristics of the political systems in which these leaders operate. The authors’ emphasis on populist figures overlooks the fact that corrupt practices are also prevalent among non-populist leaders, legislators, and judicial actors within Continue reading → Continue reading →

If Our Bodies Will Not Tell Our Tale, Perhaps Our Ruins Will

March 28, 2026 by and
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This article examines the concept of ruins, exploring their complex relationships with power, the built environment, and society within the context of ongoing settler colonialism. It asks how ruins in Palestine might serve as silent witnesses capable of documenting and constructing a living archive of dispossession and resistance. Contrary to views that see ruins as inert remnants or results of neglect, this study proposes understanding them as active agents that connect past, present, and possible future(s). Reclaiming the agency of ruins offers a powerful means Continue reading → Continue reading →

Vulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood

March 28, 2026 by
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This introduction frames the collection of essays, “Vulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood.” This collection centers children who unsettle the dominant cultural imaginaries of childhood by examining cultural politics surrounding the adoption of Indigenous children in Canada, the incarceration of children deemed terrorists in Egypt and migration of children at the US-Mexico border as well as the protests against “gender ideology” in France and children at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. Rather than reclaiming innocence and Continue reading → Continue reading →

Diagnostic Journeys of the Indian Problem after the Sixties Scoop: From Cultural to Neurodevelopmental Exculpations

March 28, 2026 by
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What happens when an adopted child does not fit into the fantasy frame of an adoptive family? Scholars and policy makers began posing this question in Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s as adoptive placements of Indigenous children from the infamous “Sixties Scoop” era began to break down at rates that far exceeded any other demographic configurations. This phenomenon has largely been (mis)understood through reductive theories of cultural difference and race that reify historical conditions of colonization as bio-social conditions of Indigeneity itself. Continue reading → Continue reading →

“For the Girl Who Wished to be a Boy”: Revolutionary Children and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising

March 28, 2026 by
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This essay reflects on how children’s participation at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran reshapes the longstanding notion of the child as innocent and “the state of nature.” It shows how the mainstream liberal conceptualization of childhood gender variance as biomedical innate difference hinders perceiving gender dissident children as political subjects. At a time when right-wing political movements are globally mobilizing around protecting children against “gender ideology,” Iranian children’s revolt for gender justice offers a different horizon of childhood gender politics Continue reading → Continue reading →