This essay explores a domain of geopolitical conflict called “covert netherworld” that has been a seminal in world politics for the past half century and likely to become more central in the century to come. During the Cold War and its aftermath, covert netherworlds formed worldwide through confluence of four essential elements: reliance of modern states on covert methods for power projection at home and abroad; the consequent emergence of a clandestine social milieu populated by secret services and criminal syndicates; a complementary illicit economic nexus that sustains non-state actors and sometimes state security; and finally, spatial dimensions that range from a narrow criminal or covert milieu to entire countries or continents. When these elements align, this netherworld can attain the sheer geopolitical power to shape the course of national and international events. To lend substance to these generic elements, the essay explores three arenas of widening geographical scope. At the local level in the southern Philippines, a regional netherworld fostered Islamic insurgency and state counterinsurgency, while national elections were sustained by an illegal lottery, shaping the character of an emerging polity. At the transnational level, France's postcolonial hold on the West African region dubbed Françafrique constrained corruption within state-mediated circuits and entrenched elites at both ends of this bilateral exchange. By contrast, U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan and Central America had divergent outcomes influenced by their degree of congruence with the narcotics traffic, demonstrating that the covert netherworld can exercise sufficient autonomy to be treated as a significant factor in world politics.

In this article, I trace how return migrants (former labor emigrants) from Andalusia, Spain draw on their regional history of emigration as a resource for claiming the moral authority to assess immigrants from the global south. By comparing their own migratory experiences and those of new migrants, Andalusians renegotiate competing ideas about their region's membership in Europe, a question with renewed political saliency during the ongoing economic crisis. Specifically, they use comparisons to claim a more central place in Europe for Andalusia, while at the same time eschewing moral culpability for Europe's mistreatment of labor emigration. To do so, Andalusian return migrants mobilize discourses of migrant suffering at various geopolitical scales of belonging, often mapping Andalusians’ experiences of emigration and return onto the region's historical trajectory of Europeanization. The scaling up and down of discourses of migrant suffering in the context of historical narratives of migration enables Andalusians to claim moral superiority based on their non-European, migrant past while also claiming European belonging in the present. Memorializing and assessing migrant suffering thus become forms of discursive work that help construct the political and moral limits of Europeanness. Through analysis of this process, I call for a more central focus on return migration and the intersection of multiple kinds of population mobility in migration research and in the study of European unification.

Situated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

This article considers the question of collective identity formation in the Arab Gulf by looking at the distinctive ways in which the genealogies of the dominant kinship collective of the United Arab Emirates, the Banī Yās confederation, have been represented by that country's cultural and heritage-making institutions. I look comparatively at two high profile, state-sponsored, Emirati genealogical projects, one a site, and the other a text, and investigate their significance from a historical and ethnographic perspective. I find that the relatively weak religious gravity of the United Arab Emirates allows for unorthodox representations of kinship at the national level, that women do not necessarily buy into these representations yet contribute in their own ways to a kinship nationalist discourse, and that genealogy is nonetheless a particularly fraught idiom for binding together an ethnically heterogeneous society like the Emirates. Approaching the public representation of genealogies through an integrative framework, this article sheds light on important themes in modern Emirati and broader Gulf social and political life, including the complicated place of religious norms in a newly fashioned Muslim nation, the influence of gender on conceptions of kinship and nationhood, and the challenge ethnic heterogeneity poses to an Arab ethno-national project.

This article examines the recent emergence of homophobia among Muslims in Singapore. While Islamic scriptures were used to justify homophobia, interpretations of these holy texts regarding non-normative sexualities have always been diverse. The anti-homosexuality exegesis of Islamic scriptures gained traction in a particular constellation of contemporary politics. When the state broached a discussion over whether a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality should be repealed, evangelical Christians were the first to vigorously support the retention of the law. Evangelical Christian homophobic discourses were soon reproduced by Muslims, whose own conservatism has been rising in recent years. Longstanding state biases against Muslims (who are mostly lower-working-class Malays), however, restricted the expression of their religious conservatism, which makes it useful for them to perform good citizenship by standing alongside evangelical Christians (mostly middle-class Chinese). This article demonstrates that Muslim homophobia has complex roots and explanations that cannot be reduced solely to Islam.

Like most modern institutions in nineteenth-century non-Western states, modern school systems in 1870s Japan and Egypt were initially mimetic of the West. Modeled on the British South Kensington method and on its French equivalent, drawing education in Japanese and Egyptian schools was taught not as an art but as a functional technique that prepared children for modern professions like industrial design. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Kensington method of drawing education had lost its popularity in Europe, but more than a decade before its decline Japanese and Egyptian educators began teaching children genres of drawing that did not exist in European schools. In 1888 drawing education in Japan saw the replacement of the pencil with the brush, which was recast from the standard instrument of writing and painting of early modern East Asia to an instrument that came to represent Japanese art. In 1894 drawing education in Egypt saw the introduction of “Arabesque designs” as the Egyptian national art. This transformation of drawing education from a functional method that undergirded industrial capitalism into an art that inscribed national difference marked the end of the mimetic moment. On one hand, a national art served to make the nation into an autonomous subject that could claim a national culture in what was becoming a world of cultural nations. On the other, a national art helped to make the nation into an aesthetically seductive core whose magnetic appeal could bring together the national community.

How did the Japanese Empire, while adamantly adhering to assimilationism, manage the politics of colonial difference in the interwar years? How should we situate the seemingly exceptional conduct of Japanese colonial rule from a comparative perspective? To examine these questions, this article analyzes the mindsets of mid-level colonial bureaucrats who specialized in social work. Social work became a major field of political contestation in the post-World War I period around the globe. Policies on social work tested colonial officials regarding their assumptions about state-society relationships and Japan's assimilationist goals. Their debates on social work reveal that by the end of the 1920s colonial officials in Korea had reached a tacit consensus to use a particular analytical lens and ideological goal that I call “ruralism.” In the ruralist paradigm, these officials viewed Korean society as consisting of “rural peasants” and understood Korean social problems as primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism was a product of many overlapping factors, including pressures to integrate colonial society into the imperial system, the empire-wide popularity of agrarian nationalism, global discourses that increasingly dichotomized the “rural” and the “industrial,” and the rivalry between the colonial government and the metropole. How social work officials re-conceptualized the colonial masses and attempted to engage with social problems under the rhetoric of assimilationism showed a similar dynamic to the “developmental colonialism” that prevailed in the French and British empires after World War II.