The chapter introduces Churchill’s army career between 1895 and 1900, but does so from an important new perspective: using his exploits in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa to explore the origins of his lifelong interest in intelligence and clandestine operations. It argues that his first foray overseas to Cuba was in the ‘well-established tradition of the British amateur spy’ but that he maintained his interest in military intelligence thereafter through the connections he made to support his writing and journalism on the Indian north-west frontier, while attached to Kitchener’s expedition in the Sudan and later as a war correspondent and then soldier in South Africa. The author looks at the intelligence lessons that Churchill learned, including the power of guerrilla insurrection, the importance of properly resourced intelligence services, the comparative roles of the civil and military intelligence arms and the need for a managed relationship with the press.

This chapter engages the reproductive subject of international human rights law, a subject who conceives, gestates and births, or seeks to avoid them. Reproduction is a fascinating site for the critical study of gender and law because it necessitates grappling with bodies.1

This chapter is concerned with the last period of Churchill’s premiership and leadership of the Conservative Party. It focusses not just on the last part of his ‘Indian summer’ when back in office but also on the tempestuous moves and motives of the Conservatives to compel his retirement in an age before party leadership elections. It also examines Churchill’s manoeuvres to frustrate these ambitions and continue in power. While many studies have examined how British politicians gain the leadership of political parties, there has been less analysis of their inevitable fall. The chapter is written primarily from the Conservative perspective since, until the 1965 Douglas-Home Rules which established leadership elections and procedures, so-called customary processes existed to enable, largely without public knowledge (and even beyond the engagement of many Conservative politicians themselves), the emergence, and removal, of leaders ‘for the good of the party’.

The vision of the self promoted by the law is of an isolated, independent, self-sufficient, autonomous man. Far from the reality of our vulnerable, caring, relational selves. The rights the law tends to protect are well suited for the legal self: those of autonomy, privacy and self-determination. They are unsuited for the reality of our existence in which autonomies are mixed; meaning is found in sharing experiences; and flourishing is discovered in the mingling of our lives. The legal self privileges particular activities, those traditionally seen as the world of men, and downplays the importance of caring, traditionally seen as the world of women. This side-lining of care, and the aggrandising of what is labelled ‘economically productive’, helps sustain and reinforce patriarchal oppression of women.

In Salisbury, Connecticut, ‘gender trouble’ took place during a local election in 1843,1 as the ‘sex’ of one voter was contested. Allegedly, the Whig Party had introduced – what was contested as – a woman into the electorate. Determining the ‘sex’ of the voter was necessary to judge whether the ballot could be validly cast. A medical expert was summoned. An imperforated penis and a small testicle were found. This discovery temporarily resolved the dispute, and the person was admitted to the vote. On Election Day, however, the voter was denied electoral rights. Since the ‘sex’2 of the voter was subject to further controversy, two more doctors were called in to consult. The presence of a testicle was established, thus ‘legitimizing’ the vote. Yet a few days later, it became known that the individual menstruated. A third examination was deemed necessary, which led to the discovery of a uterus. The person, referred to as ‘the hermaphrodite’,3 was concluded to have ‘unduly used the right to vote’.4 This story widely reverberated.5 Not only had it shed light on what ‘sex’ was understood to be, it also hinted at the ultimate reason for gender-based rules of political franchise: What would have happened if a woman had been able to slip into the electorate? Furthermore, why should this or that specific biological characteristic be the determining factors in this case? Such ‘gender troubles’ were not limited to the public sphere. For example, the French Court of Cassation had to decide on the ‘sex’ of one of two spouses to determine the validity of their marriage in 1903. That court relied on the external appearance of genitals.

The words ‘terror’ and ‘terrorized’ are not new to discussions of gender-based violence. Indeed, these words are often used to describe the lived experience of gender-based violence.1 Likewise, the association between gender violence and other forms of extreme violence, such as torture, has already been established in international law.2 On the one hand, the recognition of this association allows for greater awareness of the gravity of this particular form of violence. On the other hand, this association has encouraged an overall harshening of punishment and a criminal-law approach to violence. This has been particularly notable in the field of international crime, where there has been a significant increase in the volume of norms criminalizing gender-based violence – many of which have paid special attention to sexual offences, which are now even included in the Rome Statute’s Article 7 as one type of crimes against humanity.

The chapter examines Churchill’s role on the international stage and his summit diplomacy with Roosevelt and Stalin. Faced with the surprise collapse of France in 1940, he was forced to seek new partners, assiduously courting the United States while seizing the opportunity of an alliance with the Soviet Union. The result was that he had to juggle the conflicting demands of Roosevelt and Stalin, embarking on strenuous personal diplomacy in the face of declining British influence. The chapter reviews the key decisions of the major meetings before looking at their postwar legacy in Churchill’s attempts to advance European reconciliation and his ultimately unsuccessful bid to resume summitry with the Soviet Union.

How do we construct sexual citizenship? Put differently, how do we as a society identify those whose sexual conduct and identities as sexual beings are consistent with our notions of citizenship and the public good? Often, identifying the ideal sexual citizen means identifying the traits associated with sex and sexuality that we deem useful, beneficial and productive – the kinds of sexual conduct we value, reward and encourage. But, as is often the case when constructing ideals, our understanding of that which is normatively desirable and desired is often informed by its foil – that which is decidedly undesirable. In this regard, the construction of a normative ideal of sexual citizenship has been tethered to the production of the sexual outlaw – those individuals who live their lives outside of the bounds that constrain citizenship. But it is not just that the law’s construction of the ideal sexual subject depends on the construction of its foil (the sexual outlaw); law also constructs sexual citizenship in ways that are deeply gendered and raced.

The British Empire provided the context in which both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt came to maturity and defined and aggravated their differences as national leaders. The chapter begins by comparing the shared beliefs and values of Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt on empire and race before showing how Franklin Roosevelt emerged from his cousin’s shadow to develop a hostility towards the British Empire inspired by genuine idealism as well as calculating pragmatism. It documents the tension between Churchill’s imperialism and his appreciation that American participation in the war was the key to victory, examining the differences between the two leaders before looking at their wartime relationship through the lens of their very different responses to events in the British Empire, especially in India. Churchill’s dispute with Roosevelt on the subject of the British Empire went to the heart of the relationship between a Democrat president who wanted to create a new world order imbued with American values and a Conservative prime minister who aimed to maintain the old world in all its glory. This disjunction threatened the stability of the wartime alliance.

The chapter sees India as a stain on Churchill’s reputation. As a young officer, Churchill spent twenty-two months in India, representing his longest concentrated stay outside of Britain, but his prejudice against Anglo-Indians meant that he engaged only with the elites of British India and remained isolated. The Empire and its permanence became the bedrock of a deep-seated conviction just at the time of India’s nationalist upsurge for self-rule and independence. He condemned the Amritsar massacre but thereafter opposed all ideas for Indian political evolution. The fact that he held no responsibility for India affairs apart from May 1940 to July 1945 did not stop him speaking about the subcontinent. His campaign against the India Act of 1935 was conducted at enormous political cost to himself and left the leaders of the Indian independence movement embittered, contributing to Hindu–Muslim polarisation. During the Second World War Churchill manipulated Britain’s response to the Indian independence movement, titling policy in favour of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. His response to the Bengal Famine has to be framed in terms of race.

Lawyers, judges and scholars often see the domain of the family as distinctive, namely as affective rather than instrumental, sharing rather than distributive, distinguished from the functioning of both the state and the market by its altruism, intimacy and sacredness. They also often consider family law as exceptional, as occupying a distinctive domain and operating differently than its private law counterparts such as contracts, torts and property law or its public ones such as criminal, administrative and constitutional law.1 We begin from the premise, however, that the law that regulates and shapes the experiences and situations of members of a family arises, too, in these other domains. Family law encompasses not just the rules and doctrines associated with the formation, operation and dissolution of families (traditional family law) but also laws of the market and the state that regulate and shape the definition and operation of families.2

In terms of gender equality, law is a fundamentally ambivalent artefact. It can certainly be a vector for progressive change, as documented in several of the contributions in this volume. Indeed, law has played a crucial role in many decisive battles and victories for gender equality globally, from the extension of political franchise to all those that were initially excluded therefrom (such as women, racialized minorities, servants, dependants, etc.),1 to the more contemporary steps in the confirmation of a principle of equality among sexual orientations, gender identities,2 family arrangements and so on. Accompanying a number of social and political struggles, law has helped tackle forms of discrimination and exclusion that were once entrenched in law and channelled claims of equal recognition and equality of opportunities relevant to the dignitarian, redistributive and participatory dimensions of equality.3

Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.

Churchill has become the archetypal embodiment of the modern war leader, in part as a result of his own writings, but this chapter strips away the layers of hindsight and looks in detail at the challenge he faced in 1940 and the actions he took in response. By making himself minister of defence, he united the civilian and military administrative machines and established a streamlined decision-making process at the heart of government. He led from the front, both through the projection of his image and through his distinctive oratory. His strategy was to weather the immediate crisis and then to find means of taking the fight to the enemy, even if it meant prioritising the Mediterranean over the Empire in Asia, while also courting the United States and seizing the opportunity of the Soviet alliance. The strain undoubtedly took a toll on his health and, as the war progressed, his room for manoeuvre became more limited and fractures began to emerge over the future, both within his government and in his relations with his key allies.