This chapter draws from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, postcolonialism, and critical place-based pedagogy. We use selected constructs from these theories to analyse and address concerns identified in our qualitative studies related to early childhood education and care (ECEC) pedagogies that support migrant families’ transnational identities and practices in the particular context of Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa). Aotearoa is a country with a history of colonisation by Britain, and it continues to address the impacts of colonisation on Māori, the Indigenous people. Postcolonial theorising seeks to understand and theorise restorative pathways beyond these impacts.

This chapter considers the process by which an intelligence transfer of power took place in British India. This event ran parallel to, but was conducted in a very different manner and resulted in quite different outcomes from, the political decolonisation of South Asia. The chapter examines plans hatched by the British Security and Secret Intelligence Services to maintain an intelligence foothold in the subcontinent and unpicks how such schemes fostered a bitter and protracted struggle for bureaucratic power and influence between MI5 and MI6. It probes debates held at the highest levels within the British government over whether covert action should be undertaken in independent India, by whom, and to what purpose. It interrogates the efficacy of Indian agency in negotiating the security challenges confronted by an under-resourced post-colonial state, and that counterparts in the West (and the Eastern bloc) saw as a valuable Cold War prize.

For millennia, health and disease have shaped human society in profound and fundamental ways. While events such as the Justinian Plague and ‘Black Death’ decimated the European populations in the sixth and fourteenth centuries respectively, arresting urban development and impacting the relationship between church and state, the introduction of European and African diseases into Latin America is believed to have caused the deaths of up to 90 per cent of some of the continent’s indigenous populations. Biological weapons used during World War I led to international moratoriums on their use, even as more recent ‘naturally occurring’ events extending from the 2003 SARS outbreak, the 2013–16 West African Ebola outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic have had widespread social, economic and political impacts.

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 202–13). Notwithstanding this confusion, nationalism is typically characterised as both an important form of cultural identity and a pervasive political ideology affirming that territorial communities called nations are necessary for human flourishing and that each nation should therefore be accorded a degree of autonomy in determining its own affairs (Woods et al. 2020: 813).

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.

This chapter illustrates how the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. It argues that departure and arrival reified the networks on which the Italian community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government avoided repatriation out of fear that the displaced population would disrupt the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. Seeking to locate themselves in this Cold War Mediterranean, Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the camps and holding centres. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community.

This chapter examines the departure from Egypt from the perspective of oral history and personal collections. It shows how repatriated Italians remembered their departures, and their reception and integration in Italy. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of imperial nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate how departure and arrival evoked different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. Considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and the reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership for repatriated Italians in relation to other migrant departures to and from the Mediterranean.

Returning to some of the themes addressed in Chapter 3, this final chapter considers the wider social responsibilities of archaeologists working in southern Africa in the twenty-first century. Matters discussed include gender and racial equity within the discipline itself (especially with respect to South Africa), how best to relate the work done by archaeologists to the wider public, heritage management and conflicts over this (including the restitution of cultural sites, property, and human remains), the roles of contract archaeology, university teaching departments, and museums, the importance of publication, and the potential for developing post-colonial approaches to the interpretation of archaeological evidence. In highlighting possible future research trends, the chapter concludes by emphasising the need for work that is both intellectually sound and socially engaged and by reiterating the global significance of southern Africa’s immensely long and varied archaeological record.

Chapter 5 argues that an alternative ontological basis, derived from non-Western ontologies, is both possible and urgent for renewing sustainable development. It analyses how the voice of the Global South; particularly Africa, can improve the discourse on sustainable development by evolving a view on the importance of customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms as law. It echoes the idea of ‘ecology of knowledges’ and the legal value of reviving non-Western epistemologies for sustainable development. The spotlighting of ethics, customary norms, and other forms of local and Indigenous knowledge as legal norms has been done before. However, in this book, I extend the discussion even further and do so through a comparative analysis with other bodies of legal ideas and normativity like transnational law, legal pluralism, and social construction as law in themselves. In this process, I give these ideas a unique twist for the purposes of the overall critical perspective of this project by demonstrating their usefulness for foregrounding customary law or Indigenous knowledge as law. The discussion refracts the idea of reimagining sustainable development praxis through the lens of oft-neglected African legal cosmologies, and how such experiences can provide helpful signposts in Africa and elsewhere.

This chapter explores two competing Catholic conceptions of social justice. The first strand of Catholic social justice, rooted in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and subsequent papal interventions, promoted a social order based upon traditional familial structures. This ‘organicist’ ideal of social justice originally aimed at combatting Marxism, the ills of industrialization, and the erosion of the Church’s influence in European public life. Although the Vatican-endorsed model of social justice predominated within the Church, not all Catholics embraced the anti-Communism and emphasis on the patriarchal family that ‘organicist’ social justice ideas promoted. The second, more decentralised strand of Catholic social justice – the ‘radical’ model – sprang from disagreements within the Church on how to respond to socialism, workers’ rights, dechristianisation, and decolonisation. ‘Radical’ social justice enjoyed support from grassroots activists, theologians, reformers, and other Church leaders who endeavoured to empower the powerless in their societies and, from the 1950s and 1960s, around the world. Both strands of social justice upend conventional distinctions between the political left and right, while also bridging the national and the transnational. By problematizing the political and spatial categories commonly used to discuss social justice, this chapter offers a useful corrective to existing social-justice narratives.