Historical analysis of the UK government's policy towards European integration is mostly confined to the ‘official’ sphere, that is government, civil service and professional diplomacy. Non-governmental actors within the wider field of para-diplomacy such as policy entrepreneurs or elite foreign policy think tanks have not yet been systematically incorporated in this history. This article explores when and under what circumstances such diplomatic actors can influence government foreign policy formulation. The case explored here is that of Miriam Camps (1916–94), a scholar, former US diplomat and senior researcher at Chatham House. Camps utilised her Chatham House contacts, including key Foreign Office officials as well as her wider transnational network, to influence the Foreign Office's stance on the so-called ‘empty chair’ crisis of the European Economic Community in 1965/6. The article argues that during the crisis Camps acted as a policy entrepreneur with the aim of advancing her own ideas and changing the UK government's position towards the European Economic Community. Besides demonstrating the influence of unofficial diplomats on policy formulation, the article also contributes to the growing literature on the varied roles of women in international relations and diplomacy.

This article provides an empirical study of the inner workings of an institution at the ideological heart of the Nazi state, the SS courts, and analyses how they applied SS law in cases involving unlawful sexual conduct, and how they evaluated the racial characteristics of SS men standing trial. The article demonstrates (1) that the SS courts promoted what has been referred to as an ‘unlimited’, radical ideology. However, the analysis will also reveal how the SS courts during the war (2) gradually climbed down from a position of ideological purity when faced with realities at the front; and (3) despite their ideological core features, in several ways operated as a legal-rational bureaucracy. Towards the end of the article, the ramifications of these findings will be discussed in light of literature concerning the role of law and ideology in the Nazi state and the Third Reich's complicated relationship with modernism.

On 7 March 2022, Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, and Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, demanded that ‘unaccompanied and separated children fleeing escalating conflict in Ukraine must be protected’.1 They insisted that children should, once they crossed Ukraine's borders, be immediately registered, offered safe spaces, reunified with their families, and receive emergency care.2 Under no circumstances should children who came with their families be separated, and everything should be done to protect children from exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence.3 However, since then, countless children from Ukraine who have crossed the borders unaccompanied have become victims of human trafficking and exploitation. Tens of thousands of children in Ukrainian state institutions or who had been orphaned prior to the war could not be protected. They were deported to Russia, many were interned in reeducation camps, and many were forcefully adopted by Russian families or moved into foster care.4 Since the war started, children have again become a means of warfare. The current war against Ukraine once more demonstrates how vulnerable children can become when they are separated from their families. Children have, once again, become targets of massive human rights violations and of crimes against humanity.

During the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944–5), a woman sold ration cards on the Noordplein, one of the busiest streets in Rotterdam. She was paid twenty guilders for each ration card. Her buyers, in turn, resold the coupons for sugar, butter or bread separately in order to make a higher profit. They could make up to 150 guilders per ration card. Not far from there, in Amsterdam, people went to the corner of Rozendwarsstraat to fraudulently buy coupons for bread or wheat cake on the black market. Anyone with seven guilders could buy a slice. Considering that some people only earned twenty-two guilders a week, not everyone could afford to go to the black market for extra calories. Both of these stories were told by women who survived the Dutch Hunger Winter, and are included in Ingrid de Zwarte's recent monograph. They illustrate some of the important contributions that have emerged from recent historical works in the related fields of Hunger and Food Studies. They demonstrate the agency of ordinary and marginalised subjects, particularly women, in the face of scarcity. They reveal the importance of the coping strategies people developed, which allows us to think of these individuals beyond their traditional status as passive victims of scarcity. And they show us how, in the context of hunger and famine, ideas of what was normal or acceptable behaviour could be transformed.

There are not many other cases when one single book about history, written by an academic, not only provoked a massive and stormy nationwide debate involving mass media, political leaders and bishops, but also unleashed processes that strongly influenced the self-perceptions of a nation, opening the way for ground-breaking new historical research and, at the same time, for political responses which had a tangible impact on the direction in which the whole country moved. It was all achieved by a not very long historical essay (around 100 pages in Polish, 170 pages in the subsequent English-language edition, excluding photographs, maps, indexes) by Jan Tomasz Gross.1 Its subject was the massacre of almost all Jews (the number is still debatable: between several hundred to 1,600 – the latter number claimed by Gross) living in the small town of Jedwabne in German-occupied Poland, committed by their Polish neighbours in July 1941. After its Polish debut, the book was translated into thirteen languages.