This chapter analyses the multifaceted impact of the arrival of thousands of refugees in Macau, showing how relief activities depended on the pragmatic interplay and cooperation of different state and non-state actors. Focusing on Chinese refugees from Shanghai and Guangdong province, and on Portuguese Eurasian refugees from Shanghai and Guangzhou, the chapter details how an unprecedented refugee influx constituted both a crisis and an opportunity for the territory’s administration, local population and the refugees themselves. These wartime refugee waves led to the emergence of a peculiar wartime cosmopolitanism in Macau, which sprang from new flows of people, capital and ideas from major treaty-port metropolises.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

Chapter 3 turns to the Congo crisis, examining the imperial continuities and neo-colonial character of the infrastructural support provided by the ONUC mission during the first phase of the intervention. This chapter establishes the obstructive and productive influences of the ongoing presence of Belgian capitalists and colonial officials on the UN mission. It also examines how the UN staff used the access of technical assistance projects, such as the radio station and airport, to control the political future of the nation. This chapter explores how UN officials’ recast their strategies of paternalistic rhetoric, cultural exceptionalism, and anticommunism as international expertise in security and peacebuilding. UN staff’s political interference in the Congolese constitutional crisis in September 1960 was the first in a series of ONUC crises that ignited international controversy and criticism of the UN leadership’s decision-making, damaging the organisation’s relationship with the Afro-Asian bloc and threatening the future of the UN peacekeeping project.

How did the concept of an international military become a popular diplomatic option in the twentieth century? Chapter 1 establishes how international organisations, such as the League of Nations and the UN, disrupted the state monopoly on war thus helping to pave the way towards the armed peacekeeping project. It traces post-war debates on the UN’s role in nuclear disarmament and examines the UN leadership’s experiments in intervening directly in conflict contexts. Inspired by the UN’s observer presence in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the first secretary-general, Trygve Lie, proposed the creation of a UN Guard to protect the organisation’s field-based staff. Although the UN Guard failed to achieve meaningful diplomatic support, the idea of an international force - organised, trained, and uniformed by the UN - demonstrated the UN leadership’s aspirations for the organisation to shift into militarism. The chapter concludes by examining the diplomatic negotiations and logistical construction of the UN Command in Korea, examining how the UN leadership’s efforts to involve the organisation in the field were limited during this period by US hegemony and logistical superiority.

The end of the ’spirit of Bandung’ in the late 1960s coincided with the passing and retirement of most of the key UN officials involved in the development of the peacekeeping project. By 1971, the Cold War obstructed the UN forums from authorising any new armed peacekeeping missions. Weaving together the contributions of previous chapters, the conclusion reiterates the how UN peacekeepers’ racial prejudices and technocratic logic perpetuated international hierarchies of power, colonial structures, and further suppressed the self-determination of peripheral or minority populations. It addresses the role of the UN peacekeeping missions in supporting - if not, openly enabling - the United States’ anticommunist aggression across the Global South during the decolonisation period. Rather than being passive in this process, however, this book has demonstrated how the UN officials agreed that anticommunism was a peacebuilding strategy for global security. Ultimately, peacekeepers’ unique role in the field shaped the formation of the post-colonial international order, embedding uneven hierarchies of race, expertise, and diplomatic power within newly independent nations and populations.

This book models the impact of UN peacekeeping missions, exploring the variety of diplomatic, geopolitical, and legal functions played by the international UN officials whilst deployed to violent conflicts across the Global South. By adopting a comparative approach to the first armed peacekeeping missions – United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) deployed in Egypt, Opération des Nations Unies (ONUC) in Congo, United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) in West Papua, and United Nations Peacekeeping Force (UNFICYP) in Cyprus – each chapter traces how organisational interests and racial prejudices shifted from mission to mission, unearthing the granular colonial continuities perpetuated by the field-based staff. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book transcends UN headquarters-centred approaches that currently dominate the historiography of international organisations to access the role of mid-level peacekeeping bureaucrats in shaping the post-colonial international order. In doing so, this book traces unexplored continuities between late colonial administrations and the dramatic rise in peacekeeping missions from the late twentieth century onwards. This book illuminates these patterns and ruptures in peacekeeping practices during the formative years of UN peacekeeping and highlights the multifaceted functions played by mid-level UN bureaucrats in shaping the formation of the post-colonial international order.

Chapter 2 offers a new perspective on the evolution of the first armed peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), during a period of geopolitical transformation within the UN Security Council and General Assembly as a number of newly independent nations joined the organisation as member-states. It explores the expansion of the Afro-Asian bloc’s voting weight and the heightened diplomatic engagement of middle-sized states, such as India and Canada, as involvement in peacekeeping became a source of political power within the UN’s international forums. Once on the ground, the UNEF mission shifted international perceptions of the organisation from a simply deliberative forum to an active military participant. Reflecting on this shift in the field, mid-level peacekeepers and participating troops began to cultivate a distinctive peacekeeper identity through a mission magazine, underpinned by their Orientalist understandings of their space of deployment and the liberal cosmopolitan ideals of the UN Charter.

Although the North Atlantic was plunged into crisis in the early 1970s, radicals proved unable to seize the opportunity as they entered a crisis of their own. In France, to a degree unparalleled elsewhere, prominent former radicals not only disavowed anti-imperialist internationalism but rallied behind the rival human rights internationalism. In so doing, they brought with them a set of experiences, which strengthened human rights activism. Despite their fading fortunes, and the growing strength of their rivals, radicals struggled to reinvent anti-imperialist internationalism. But they found themselves trapped in an uphill battle facing one obstacle after another. One of the most devastating blows was the internecine war between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Revolutionaries in all three countries had developed a revolutionary strategy based in Leninism, joined hands in the struggle against imperialism, and claimed they were transitioning to communism together. Now they slaughtered each other in the name of national self-determination. Although the Third Indochina War did not destroy radicalism, it severely destabilized radical politics. While much of this failure can be traced to deeper histories of colonialism, imperialism, and American intervention in the region, revolutionaries, and the ideas that guided them, played a role as well. In this context, the idea of the right of nations to self-determination specifically, and the Leninist problematic more generally, suffered a terrible blow. The horrific events in Southeast Asia deepened the gnawing crisis of Leninism, which would ultimately bring down the project of anti-imperialist internationalism as such, creating a perfect opportunity for the rival human rights internationalism to take the stage.

The connection between literature about war and humanitarianism is complex. The war novel tends towards a human rights ethos that demands accountability for war atrocities. These novels express antiwar views, whereas humanitarianism’s genealogy in the laws of war reflects an acceptance of war as inevitable. Humanitarian discourse deploys a narrative paradigm that sees human suffering in war through trauma. In fiction, it frequently foregrounds the role of doctors and nurses as witnesses to war’s suffering. The resulting attention to victims’ disempowerment effectively reinforces the global inequality of lives and is problematic. This chapter argues that postcolonial literature of war offers a counterwitnessing that exceeds the affective accounts of trauma narratives and foregrounds the breach in humanitarianism’s imperative to save lives. Postcolonial literature’s critical engagement with war centers on the achievement of radical equality and visibility of all lives.

In this chapter, Hesford examines the humanitarian imperatives of contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking campaigns and their calculated appropriations and parasitic logics. She considers in what contexts, under what conditions of visibility and legibility, and in support of what political investments are humanitarian tropes deployed? To better understand the contemporary anti-slavery movement’s perpetuation and parasitic appropriation of humanitarian tropes, Hesford turns to the rhetorical mediation of human trafficking subjects and their stories. Understanding these mediations, she argues, is important because how trafficking subjects and their stories are framed sets the parameters for public recognition and political action.