The awkward years: defining and managing famines, 1944–1947

Abstract

Famines in the years immediately after World War II occurred during a period of global flux, as international famine response evolved from its ambitious, early twentieth century goals toward more modest, technocratic objectives during the second half of the century. For economists, social scientists and politicians immersed in the world of emergency food aid, these were uncertain, awkward years for famine relief. Herbert Hoover’s idealistic large-scale projects of famine relief that had dominated the first three decades of the century had been proven to be expensive and of limited efficacy, but Cold War loyalties had not yet taken over as the primary logic behind large-scale humanitarian assistance projects. Ultimately, when faced with famine conditions between 1944 and 1947, states and experts balanced a call to action against pragmatism that recognized famines were also politically expedient events that could weaken rural resistance to governance and simplify wartime and postwar administration. Ultimately, both science and humanitarian concerns learned to orient themselves toward economic expediency in these awkward years.     

CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM

The contributions to the collection under review offer a wide range of treatments of ways in which German colonialism intersected with aspects of domestic German culture and politics, with particular attention to the larger global setting in which the German colonial empire existed between 1884 and 1918—or was remembered up to 1945. The review situates and critiques the contributions in interpretive contexts based on general suggestions by one of the editors, Geoff Eley. These include a context in which “colonialism” and “imperialism” are recognized as specific discursive constructions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another in which the causal focus in interpreting colonial phenomena is placed on exchanges that constituted an accelerating globality with which available conceptual modes (including colonialism and imperialism) could not keep pace, a third that complicates the categorical distinctions usually made between types of imperial program, and a fourth that aims at replicating on a much broader and more flexible basis something like the concept of “social imperialism” that forty years ago dominated interpretations of German imperialism. The essay ends with a view of how such an interpretive framework might be constructed.     

Isolation Through Humanitarianism: Subaltern Geopolitics of the Siege on Gaza

Scholars have argued that in attempts to achieve geopolitical goals, siege often results in covert assaults against civilian populations. In the Gazan context, siege subjects are rendered as surplus to the Israeli state, and are therefore isolated and deprived of basic human needs as well as human rights. In 2006, siege was enacted against Gaza, enforced by the Egyptian and Israeli militaries. As a consequence, the population of Gaza is isolated from the exchange of goods, services, people, and ideas. This article begins with an analysis of siege as a violent process and as a subset of occupation practices. Using ethnographic data collected in Gaza between 2009 and 2014, this article mobilizes the methods and approach of subaltern geopolitics to undermine the notion of siege as a humanitarian alternative to war. This study reveals the micro‐scale, graduated nature of siege and its impacts on the civilians living in Gaza.     

Margaret Cavendish contre Robert Hooke : Le duel impossible

In 1665, Robert Hooke published his major work in microscopy, Micrographia, a defense of experimental philosophy. The following year, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published at her own expense a treatise and a novel that undermined the basis of this new science. The dispute broke out at the initiative of the Duchess, in the context of a vast controversy about the legitimacy and the efficiency of optical instruments in natural philosophy. All the figures of the dual are used, except one: the counterattack. Cavendish, indeed, was alone on the battlefield. Is it possible to call a dual a battle with only one combatant? This particular case of dispute that stops owing to the shortage of combatants is the subject of this article.     

Auf gute Nachbarschaft!

Companies' community involvement turns out to be spatially relevant and–in many cases–to be focused on the near surroundings of the place of business. Some companies strategically align their involvement in order to systematically address local challenges. The essay at hand addresses the subject of corporate social responsibility from a local development perspective. Using the example of two family-owned enterprises based in Duisburg, Haniel and Grillo, it illustrates how socially committed companies can get involved with their local community by acting as good neighbours. Furthermore, it argues that socially committed companies can function as producers of space concerning matters of urban and local development. The specific local settings as well as the economic conditions of the local community serve as an explanatory background of the companies' involvement. The cases presented in this paper prove the firms' specific knowledge of local development needs and possibilities. This makes them qualified partners for local government actors and civil society actors. Thus, in the future, it is worth addressing corporate local responsibility from a governance point of view both in theory and in practice.