Where Are the Coast-Watchers’ Bones?

In October 1942, five British civilians and 17 New Zealand coast-watchers were executed by Japanese military forces, at Tarawa, Gilbert Islands (Kiribati), in the central Pacific. The bodies were buried in a mass grave, the location of which became obscured when the Japanese constructed military fortifications. A battle was fought at Tarawa in November 1943 whereby the US Marines defeated the Japanese defenders and took control of the island. In the battle more than six thousand men died and their bodies were buried in hastily prepared and often unmarked graves. Since the end of the war the remains of hundreds of Americans and some Japanese have been located and recovered from Tarawa but nothing among the remains has been identified as belonging to the 22 British subjects. A problem in locating the grave of the British has been a lack of any record of its position. In this paper the authors consider the documentary evidence including an important map and a report on the first attempt, using local knowledge, to locate the grave. The specific area of the grave is identified, the date of the executions is confirmed and the reasons behind the order to execute are discussed.     

Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide

Social scientists have extensively debated the virtues, pitfalls, and practical effects of open dialogue and truth-telling versus silence and concealment in global post-conflict endeavours for justice and reconciliation. This article addresses these debates not by endorsing practices of either talk or silence, but by investigating the practical dilemmas faced by Rwandan youth born of rape committed during the 1994 genocide as they find themselves caught in dual cultural imperatives to reveal and to conceal the circumstances of their origins. On the one hand, the post-genocide moment has seen the rise of truth-telling and self-revelation through testimonial practices in settings like post-genocide trials and reconciliation or peace-building workshops. On the other hand, silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship in Rwandan cultural practice, and youth participants struggled with the stigma of having been born of genocidal rape. We argue that the youths’ ambivalent and sometimes contradictory moral evaluations of talking about versus hiding their origins highlight the challenges and complexities of identity and belonging in post-genocide Rwanda, since their very existence draws them, their mothers, and their perpetrator-fathers into ongoing relationships. These youths’ lives and experiences speak to larger and powerful conundrums at the heart of what it means to live with legacies of violence, including what should be said or remain unsaid, and how the very opposition between revealing and concealing can be confounded by social and cultural variances in the meaning of “truth.”     

From The Iron Curtain to Franco’s Spain: Right-Wing Central Europeans in Exile

After the Second World War, anti-communists of different backgrounds from Central and Eastern European countries decided to settle in Franco’s Spain, where they sought safety and a place to live during the Cold War. This article will provide an overview of their political profiles and assess the reasons these exiles chose Spain, a country excluded from the United Nations until 1955 and led by Francisco Franco. The article also shows how they settled in the dictatorship linked to the Nazis and Italian Fascists, and the ways in which they continued their struggles against Communism with public and private resources.     

Moshe Dayan: “Israel’s No. 1 Hero” (in America)

This study explores how and why Moshe Dayan became the symbol of the modern Israeli hero in American culture. Through an examination of variegated evidence it is possible to discern patterns that illustrate the ways Dayan’s image crystallized, first, in the American Jewish arena, and then more broadly, in wider American public consciousness. With his trademark eye patch and irreverent personal style, Dayan, who more than any Israeli military-political figure captured the imagination of American Jewry, became not only the most recognizable sabra on the American scene but also a chief exemplar of the “new Jew.” Beginning with the War of Independence (1947–49) until roughly the Six-Day War (1967), Dayan symbolized Israel’s youthful, virile, and savvy hero struggling to build a home against all odds. From the Yom Kippur War (1973) to the Camp David Accords (1978) and his death, he came to exemplify a generation of Israelis who wrestled with the Jewish state’s existential geopolitical challenges. Investigating Dayan’s public persona enhances our understanding of his impact on the American arena – the man and the myth – and the ideational linkages so critical to the developing bond between the United States and Israel in the second half of the twentieth century.     

Atomic structures: the architecture of nuclear nationalism in India and Pakistan

Abstract

A half-century after their completion, India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) stand out as unchallenged architectural advertisements for ‘nuclear nationalism’. Elsewhere, Atoms for Peace reactors made no pretence to architectural refinement. In the right hands, however, ‘Cold War Modern’ could express the hard power of the nuclear age. For India and Pakistan, these nuclear laboratory complexes became the public faces of the peaceful atom that held out the promise, and masked the peril, of the atomic age at home and abroad, and deliberately deflected attention away from clandestine nuclear weapons programmes. BARC and PINSTECH, envisioned as cornerstones for self-confident and self-reliant programmes of nuclear physics, embodied the paradox of postcolonial science, necessarily borrowing from the West but determined to break the cycle of dependency, in defiance of Western expectations.     

Feminist geopolitics,everyday death,and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram

Women's everyday experiences in war remain occluded; moreover, the bodily impacts of war remain hidden, masked by masculinist accounts of warfare that too often glorify heroic male combatants. In this article, we contribute, first, to the ongoing project to understand violence in everyday life and, second, to the understanding, specifically, of women's experiences in warfare. We do so through a reading of the diaries of Dang Thuy Tram, a female Vietnamese doctor who lived and died in the Vietnam War. By drawing on feminist geopolitics, coupled with the insights from emotional geographies – and specifically, those of love – we focus on two main themes: the emotional transformation of death and life, and the care of life amidst pervasive death. We conclude that an emotionally grounded feminist geopolitics is necessary to challenge masculinist accounts that normalize, naturalize, and glorify war.     

Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

This article looks into what happened to the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. The author first outlines the historical context in which these children lived and the manner in which they recounted and recorded their memories much later. In combination with new archival research on social-welfare policy and ‘re-education’ of former National Socialist youth, this puts the discourse that dominated the Dutch debate, that is, the discourse of the ‘innocent child’ harshly punished by society, in a different light. The framework of the innocent child being punished by a cruel society obscured our view of experiences that did not fit this mould. Furthermore, it made the values and norms that were current during the reconstruction period disappear from the picture: the bad memories of children of collaborators partly originate in policy that was considered normal in those days. This, however, should not obscure the impact of the vulnerable social position which these children experienced after the war.     

Policing the Desert: The IOM in Libya Beyond War and Peace

The war that took place in Libya in 2011 forced 1.5 million people to leave the country. Many of them, from sub‐Saharan Africa, were helped to return to their countries of origin by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). This paper questions the purely humanitarian nature of the IOM intervention with references to its activities before and after the conflict. It shows that this organization has long participated in the implementation of European migration policies in Libya, and more widely in the Sahara, without being accountable to any people. Through the replacement of local politics by international crisis management, the Sahara is gradually integrated into a zone of international bureaucratic expedience. War and humanitarian intervention appear as contingencies in the progressive implementation of a global system of surveillance, spatial control and management of mobility in Africa.     

What Remains: Repatriating and Entombing a Canadian Unknown Soldier of the Great War in the Nation’s Capital

This article chronicles and contextualizes the creation of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Canada’s capital. In so doing, it traces the myriad considerations, as well as complexities — political, procedural, and practical — that abounded in bringing this major memorial installation into being, namely the repatriation, from a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in France, of a Canadian unknown soldier of the Great War and his ceremonial reburial in Ottawa. Moreover, it argues that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated within an existing monumental space, functions, in the coinage of geographer Owen Dwyer, as an allied symbolic accretion to the National War Memorial.