Chapter five analyses the period between 1914 and 1989. Several sociological theories frame this period as one of rational planning, certain knowledge and control. Such beliefs were certainly prominent but they were related to uncertainty: The First World War ended in the fall of empires and social upheaval. Intellectual and political reactions were threefold: art emphasized a fractured world, social sciences accommodated uncertainty and political ideologies claimed to banish uncertainty and offered total control. Totalitarian states blended promises of certainty and determinism with a world of omnipresent threats and dangers. The Second World War was heavily influenced by their conviction that they had uncovered the hidden laws of history. After 1945, the advent of thermonuclear weapons caused widespread existential uncertainty. I interpret the strategy of deterrence as a pragmatic expression of minimal communication in an unpredictable world. The experience of insecurity and a breakdown of international society also spurred scientific ontologies of certainty. Modernization theory and Marxism dominated post-war social science and created the strategies that reaped tragedy in Vietnam.

This is a general presentation of the book. The central thesis of the book is that the law of neutrality remains relevant in contemporary international law because of in an armed conflict, third non-participating States do not remain unaffected. There is a presentation of the basic argument in each chapter.

I look at India’s role as a hub of circulation of military personnel. During the second half of the eighteenth century, India was a battlefield between the British, the French and Indian powers, in which soldiers of various provenance were mobilised, but most important was the rise of the sepoy armies of the East India Company. Apart from contributing to the establishment of British preponderance in India, the sepoys were also used in expeditions abroad, starting with their participation in an assault against Spanish Manila in 1762. Eschewing an exclusive focus on the military aspect, I scrutinise the archive of sepoy deployments outside India for information about how ‘ordinary’ Indians dealt with foreign lands and foreign people. I pay particular attention to the role of Indian soldiers in the two world wars. I present a case study based on the censored mail of the Indian expeditionary force soldiers sent to France in 1914–15, a rich trove of observations sometimes bordering on ethnographic reportage. After independence, India’s armies continued to play a global role as the largest manpower contributor to UN peacekeeping. I also look at India’s contribution to world peace.