Shaping the Transnational Sphere

Shaping the Transnational Sphere
Author: Davide Rodogno
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 178238359X

In the second half of the nineteenth century a new kind of social and cultural actor came to the fore: the expert. During this period complex processes of modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and nation-building gained pace, particularly in Western Europe and North America. These processes created new forms of specialized expertise that grew in demand and became indispensible in fields like sanitation, incarceration, urban planning, and education. Often the expertise needed stemmed from problems at a local or regional level, but many transcended nation-state borders. Experts helped shape a new transnational sphere by creating communities that crossed borders and languages, sharing knowledge and resources through those new communities, and by participating in special events such as congresses and world fairs.

Transnational Public Spheres

Transnational Public Spheres
Author: Mohammadbagher Forough
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040176631

This book offers the first systematic theorisation of transnational public spheres from non-Western, spatial, and infrastructural perspectives. The current era is characterised by transnational challenges, such as climate change, pandemics, and financial crises, that cannot be adequately addressed by national public spheres. Public spheres, defined as arenas of collective communication and action, are the cornerstone of any people-centred system of governance. This book puts forward a transnational public sphere theory and focuses on spatial, infrastructural, and non-Western perspectives, thus adding to the public sphere theory and practice at both national and transnational levels. The author offers a new conceptual construct, “the right to space”, as a way of transnationalising the theory and addressing its efficacy issues. Providing conceptual clarity on the public–private distinction, this book examines the historical roots of the public sphere in both Asia and Europe, establishes the methodological and ontological foundations for a theory of transnational publics, and analyses contemporary empirical instances of transnational publics in both Asia and the West. This transnationalisation is crucial now that authoritarianism is on the rise and democracy is in decline worldwide. A timely addition to the literature, this book will be of interest to researchers in international relations, political science, political theory, sociology, media and communication, cultural and literary studies, and Asian studies.

The Politics of Service

The Politics of Service
Author: Daniel Maul
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110675919

This book provides the first comprehensive history of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the central aid agency of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, from 1917 to 1945. Implying a thoroughly transnational approach, it sheds a light on the important role American Quakers played in the emergence of a humanitarian sector both within the USA and beyond. Through the Quaker lens the book adresses important tensions inherent to the history of humanitarianism in the 20th century: Following the AFSCs aid operations from the First World War, through post-war Germany and Soviet Russia to the Spanish Civil War and into the Second World War, it deals with the AFSC’s conflicting roles as a specifically American aid organization on the one hand and its position within transnational religious and pacifist networks on the other and it opens a window to processes of professionalization, the development of a humanitarian “market place” and the complex relationship of religious and secular strands in the history of international relief.

Child Migration and Biopolitics

Child Migration and Biopolitics
Author: Beatrice Scutaru
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429756542

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary analysis into the lives of migrant children and youth over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day. Adopting biopolitics as a theoretical framework, the authors examine the complex interplay of structures, contexts and relations of power which influence the evolution of child migration across national borders. The volume also investigates children’s experiences, views, priorities and expectations and their roles as active agents in their own migration. Using a great variety of methodologies (archival research, ethnographic observation, interviews) and sources (drawings, documents produced by governments and experts, films and press), the authors provide richly documented case studies which cover a wide geographical area within Europe, both West (Belgium, France, Germany) and East (Romania, Russia, Ukraine), South (Italy, Portugal, Turkey) and North (Sweden), enabling a deep understanding of the diversity of migrant childhoods in the European context.

Humanitarianism in the Modern World

Humanitarianism in the Modern World
Author: Norbert Götz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108665470

This is an innovative new history of famine relief and humanitarianism. The authors apply a moral economy approach to shed new light on the forces and ideas that motivated and shaped humanitarian aid during the Great Irish Famine, the famine of 1921-1922 in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine, and the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They place these episodes within a distinctive periodisation of humanitarianism which emphasises the correlations with politico-economic regimes: the time of elitist laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century as one of ad hoc humanitarianism; that of Taylorism and mass society from c.1900-1970 as one of organised humanitarianism; and the blend of individualised post-material lifestyles and neoliberal public management since 1970 as one of expressive humanitarianism. The book as a whole shifts the focus of the history of humanitarianism from the imperatives of crisis management to the pragmatic mechanisms of fundraising, relief efforts on the ground, and finance. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe

Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe
Author: Fabio Giomi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000592375

Since the 1980s, neoliberals have openly contested the idea that the state should protect the socio-economic well-being of its citizens, making ‘privatization’ their mantra. Yet, as historians and social scientists have shown, welfare has always been a ‘mixed economy’, wherein private and public actors dynamically interacted, collaborating or competing with each other in the provision of welfare services. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of welfare by developing three innovative approaches. Firstly, it illuminates the productive nature of public/private entanglements. Far from amounting to a zero-sum game, the interactions between the two sectors have changed over time what welfare encompasses, its contents and targets, often engendering the creation of new fields of intervention. Secondly, this book departs from a well-established tradition of comparison between Western nation-states by using and mixing various scales of analysis (local, national, international and global) and by covering case studies from Spain to Poland and France to Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thirdly, this book goes beyond state centrism in welfare studies by bringing back a host of public and private actors, from municipalities to international organizations, from older charities to modern NGOs. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Humanitarianism and the Greater War, 1914–24

Humanitarianism and the Greater War, 1914–24
Author: Elisabeth Piller
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526173239

This book provides fresh perspectives on a key period in the history of humanitarianism. Drawing on economic, cultural, social and diplomatic perspectives, it explores the scale and meaning of humanitarianism in the era of the Great War. Foregrounding the local and global dimensions of the humanitarian responses, it interrogates the entanglement of humanitarian and political interests and uncovers the motivations and agency of aid donors, relief workers and recipients. The chapters probe the limits of humanitarian engagement in a period of unprecedented violence and suffering and evaluate its long-term impact on humanitarian action.

The World beyond the West

The World beyond the West
Author: Mariusz Kałczewiak
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800733534

No matter how one defines its extent and borders, Eastern Europe has long been understood as a liminal space, one whose undeniable cultural and historical continuities with Western Europe have been belied by its status as an “Other” in the Western imagination. Across illuminating and provocative case studies, The World beyond the West focuses on the region’s ambiguous relationship to historical processes of colonialism and Orientalism. In exploring encounters with distant lands through politics, travel, migration, and exchange, it places Eastern Europe at the heart of its analysis while decentering the most familiar narratives and recasting the history of the region.

Agency in Transnational Memory Politics

Agency in Transnational Memory Politics
Author: Jenny Wüstenberg
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2020-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789206952

The dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.