Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).

Chapter 4 follows different groups of conspirators, with differing agendas, who began to find one another and come together. One group was composed of soldiers who felt that they had been passed over for promotions due to racism. Another small group that was disgruntled by a combination of low wages and racism came together in the shop of a master tailor. And a third group was composed of white professionals who were driven by republican ideas they gleaned from studying the French Revolution. For these groups to come together, there needed to be a delicate balance of maintaining secrecy while also growing the plot and preparing to reveal it publicly. This chapter demonstrates that it was the bonds of relation, and a conviction that they could take care of one another and administer society better than the state, that kept people committed to the plan as they worked through this dangerous moment of expanding the conspiracy. Seen from this perspective, their struggle constituted a definition of the political in which care, concern, rest, and the belief that the people were the seat of sovereignty were foundational to being radicalized.

A global lens on European military history exposes the racist foundations upon which European empires have gone to war around the world over centuries. The racisms and nationalisms embedded in the narration of Europe’s military past prevent it from fully making the global turn. The study of war and militarization without the global turn enables the continued avoidance of questions that inherently challenge the nationalist, patriotic, and frequently racist and misogynist foundations that have long shaped the field. Moreover, European military historiography tends to ignore the many wars of anti-colonial resistance fought against colonizing powers in the long nineteenth century. Yet they were as much a part of European military history as any other wars. To globalize European military history, scholars must include analysis of anti-colonial resistance within the standard approaches to “military history.” Situating European military history more firmly in the global unsettles assumed knowledge about European military dominance, opening new possibilities for historians to consider armed struggles against empire within the same field of study as the recognized staples of European military history.

This chapter considers how the right to freedom of thought should be viewed in circumstances of injustice. Specifically, we discuss whether the right not to reveal thoughts, the right not to be punished for thoughts, or the right not to have thoughts impermissibly altered, should ever be overridden. Examples include whether histories of genocide can justify surveillance of antisemitic or racist attitudes, whether access to thoughts may be helpful in proving intent to discriminate, and whether internet privacy protections should yield in the face of uses of social media in ways that further structural injustice. The chapter concludes that defences of freedom of thought as an ideal may be less convincing in situations of significant injustice or threats of violence.

The chapter returns to what has been called the “central paradox of American history,” the ostensible contradiction between this nation’s declared liberal ideals (“all men” being promised the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and its sanctioning of slavery, the supreme denial of liberty. It focuses on how antebellum debates (literary, political, and theological) over the moral and political legitimacy of slavery were ultimately debates over “personhood” in order to make clear that the conceptual category of the “person” (the center of liberal thought) needs to be understood as a historically contingent – rather than absolute – identity. Noting how deeply modern accounts of slavery remain indebted to the liberal presumption that slavery is wrong precisely to the extent that those enslaved possess a fixed, transhistorical personhood (a personhood that racism, ideology, or self-interest too often obscures), the chapter seeks to leave behind arguments over the conflict between slavery and liberalism and ultimately asks whether it is possible to imagine a liberatory politics that does not require the “person” to be at its center.

Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.

From the Enlightenment, liberal political economic thought, and the history of science, to the nation-building, ideas of citizenship, and border-setting that have defined European political and geographical space, and to racial capitalism and imperialism’s foundational role in shaping modern European economies, politics, law, and modernity, race has been central to modern Europe’s history, including its most painful episodes, and to the “global turn” in writing European history. Antiracism associated with internationalism, anticolonialism, and decolonization has also profoundly shaped European history and its writing – especially the “global turn.” Yet, considerations of economic, intellectual, political, religious, and other aspects of European history continue to neglect race and racial thought. This chapter examines the literature produced by the global turn on the role of race and racism in European history and reflects on its persistent marginalization in narratives of European history.

This chapter centers on the counterculture’s attitude toward “greatness,” primarily through the odd coupling of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali. The chapter addresses racism, the Vietnam War, and the rebellion against the idyllic forms of greatness furnished by the so-described establishment of the 1950s. The Beatles and Ali (and their supporters) had to come to terms with new expectations and measures of American greatness.

This chapter uses the histories of baseball (Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth) and presidential power rankings, and the reception history of Eleanor Roosevelt to unearth a sea change in greatness conversations. During the 1950s, America swapped Ty Cobb for Babe Ruth and Washington for FDR to signal a change in the value of greatness. Whereas Americans had valued greatness as a shorthand for changemaking, the postwar period witnessed a search for nostalgic heroes meant to confirm already-established ideals of this generation, later to be designated the “Greatest Generation.”

Race is intricately woven into my personal history and identity, partly because I grew up in Alabama when Jim Crow laws kept a tight grip on institutions and core aspects of daily life. I came of age on the heels of institutional change that outlawed racial segregation and discrimination in public spaces and expanded African Americans’ access to opportunities in higher education. These occurred alongside social change that shifted away from Eurocentric conformity and celebrated Black culture and identity. In this chapter I situate within this broader sociohistorical context my pathway to a career in developmental science and my perspectives, intellectual pursuits, and contributions. I also discuss how these institutional and social changes shaped the discipline through their influence on the racial composition of doctoral programs, ascendant conceptual and ideological perspectives on African American children, adults, and families, and scholars of color engagement in professional organizational leadership and editorial activities.

In developmental processes and outcomes, the individual and the context are inextricably connected throughout the lifespan. As an individual from an unorthodox background, my academic career is full of continuities and discontinuities, as one of the most influential books from my advisor, Jerome Kagan, asserted. In retrospect, my upbringing gave me the cultural, ethnic, minority worldview. From the start my education gave me the opportunity to have essential intellectual tools and eventually become bicultural and critical of our academic field. Consistently and strategically, my scholarly, administrative, and volunteer work led to questioning and pushing boundaries of the dominant academic canon; this was achieved by making critical connections with like-minded scholars and institutions, and working directly at the top of mainstream scholarship, educational institutions, and professional organizations. A contextual developmental analysis of my academic trajectory provides evidence of the constant, powerful dialectic relationship of the individual and the context. It all makes sense now.

Oscar Barbarin has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Maryland, and North Carolina as well as Tulane University. His scholarship examines social context, ethnicity and child development, particularly the impact of racism and material hardship on socioemotional development. He has studied the development of children with life-threatening illness, urbanization in South Africa, and quality of early childhood settings. His research has centered on boys of color and the identified auspicious conditions that promote their mental health, social competence and emotional resilience. These conditions include (a) systems of caring, (b) structures supporting their self-regulation of behavior and emotions, and (c) interpretive frameworks by which affirming familial relations, culture and spiritual values provide boys of color a sense of connection, purpose, and an understanding of their place in the world. He has proposed that paradoxical attributions are a key cognitive strategy in maintaining emotional balance by affirming personal agency.

To survive the city and the war, displaced families and friends needed to keep themselves and each other physically, socially, mentally, spiritually, and culturally safe. This chapter is about this discussion of self-preservation and what this entailed when, to many, the war and displacement risked societal disaster. It explores the debates and projects that were built within new churchyards, evening schools, and social spaces, where men and women argued over what integrity and moral order looked like. Social and cultural projects – from night language schools and clan associations to childcare circles and neighbourhood vigilante gangs – all involved setting out definitions of responsibility and standards. They also raised questions about the practical meaning of being displaced ‘southerners’. In a stressful expensive city and a fragmenting southern war, this chapter explores how people developed different limits of mutual support and kinship, and understood their political community based on different standards of Blackness, shared history, and knowledge.

This is the third and final of the book’s mini-studies of dignity. Jumping forward in time again to twenty-first-century South Africa, this chapter revolves around an object that bears on an important aspect of what many people today understand by dignity: the toilet. As one campaigning slogan has it, ‘sanitation is dignity’. South Africa is a country in which there exist large disparities in the distribution of sanitation services, with black South Africans considerably less well served than white South Africans. The chapter follows the efforts of poor black communities to secure or defend sanitary dignity through litigation and public protest.

Khartoum’s war-displaced residents had to fight for safe space to live, work, and think, and over the late 1980s and early 1990s this was a battle over bulldozers, deportations, exploitation, and exclusion. This chapter sets out this fight over the city under the al-Ingaz regime’s civilising project from 1989, from the perspective of its new residents. To them, this was a project not of forcible acculturation but of silencing, exclusion, and disciplining of an exploitable labour force. Former residents explain their choices in navigating these forces to make measures of security and neighbourhood safety, including their renaming of space in this new displaced city. The political geography that this period of state violence and popular resistance created by 1994 sets the terrain for the rest of the book.