Theories of securitisation have been indispensable in shedding light on how governmental security politics operate through discourses or institutions. Key theorists have noted their state-centredness, but they have yet to remedy this. The focus on the state, moreover, has led to a neglect of how virtuous bodies, supra-national bodies, might become mixed up in security politics. This book takes the rare step of applying such theories to supra-national organisations and politics and, importantly, allegedly virtuous ones: judicial human rights in Europe and, to a lesser extent, other regions. It explores how such human rights organisations, devoted to holding state power in check, might be complicit in governmental security agendas to the extent of losing their role as neutral arbiters of state actions to involvement in state-led security politics and, therefore, contributing to the demise of their own animus: the protection of bodily vulnerability. It links the socio-legal study of human rights with the politics of securitisation and with European Studies, re-appraising the aspect of the European Project that anticipated closer harmonisation and integration of nation-states through the operation of supra-national courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

It begins by contemplating the relationship between human rights, embodiment and vulnerability and seeks to foreground the body in human rights. Then it moves on to demonstrate and explain the subordination of international rights to national security through the question of embodiment, the most fundamental of human rights being to protect bodily integrity. When the human body has become an object of securitisation, for example in relation to the veiled woman, where have judicial human rights in Europe stood? While non-governmental human rights organisations have lobbied against repeated bans on the veil by various European countries, without evidence and with deference to states’ ownership of security matters, the ECtHR has contributed to the precarity of veiled Muslim women – signaling a failure to denounce gender-based violence. This is contrasted with the United States, which allows public veiling, but whose destruction of bodily integrity in the name of security has been manifest in other ways, most obviously in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

My aim is to tease out the contextual background to the way women’s bodies (and to a lesser extent, men’s) have been treated by judicial human rights.

Introduction: Spiritual Relationalities of the Ocean

The history of the creolized spiritual practices of the African Diaspora in India and the Indian Diaspora in South Africa unpacks complex narratives of “sacredscapes” ( Jeychandran 2019, p. 17) that emerged around the Indian Ocean littorals during the movements of the slaves and indentured laborers. Makrand Mehta in “Gujarat Sufis, “Sants,” and the Indian Ocean World in Medieval Times” (2019) observes that “along with the exchange of commodities, information, and ideas, knowledge was also shared” (p. 163). The movements of the indentured Indian laborers to South Africa and the African slaves to India gave birth to “multiple worldings in an emergent world of many worlds” (Uimonen and Masimbi 2021, p. 35) through the development of porous and fluid creolized spiritual practices in their respective geographical spaces in the forms of coastal shrines and transoceanic worship cultures. The creolization is specifically visible in terms of the emergence of transoceanic and interreligious folklores; the preparation of creole foods as offerings to gods, goddesses, and devotees; the usage of Afro-Indian creole languages in religious songs; and the usage of multicultural worship procedures.

It is also important to note that with respect to the creolized spiritual practices of the Indian Diaspora in South Africa, this chapter has exclusively focused on the spiritual practices of the Indian indentured laborers because the Hindus who came as passenger Indians mostly from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh rejected any forms of transcultural influence on Hinduism, adhered to high caste puritan religious practices, and did not regard the indentured Indians as “genuine” Hindus because of their tendency to interweave Hindu spiritual practices with local African and other spiritual practices. The economically flourishing situation of the Hindu passenger Indians enabled them to bring in Brahmin priests from India (Kumar 2012; Lal and Vahed 2013). The Brahmin priests were brought from India because they were “informed largely by the Sanskrit ritual texts” (Kumar 2012, p. 392) and could assist the high-caste Hindu passenger Indians to re-establish their puritan Hindu practices in South Africa. Such an adherence to high-caste puritan Hindu religious practices has led to the foundation of organizations like, South African Hindu Mahasabha and the Hindi Shiksha Sangh.

The transcontinental and transoceanic exchanges of people and cultures between India and the continent of Africa got regularized with the arrival of the European colonizers. Before the arrival of the Portuguese in India, the movement of Africans to India was not regular and was not restricted to slavery (Toninato and Cohen 2010). As discussed in Chapter 1, Africans with diverse professional affiliations arrived in India with diverse professional intentions. On May 20, 1498, when Vasco da Gama reached the coast of Calicut from the East African coastal town of Malindi, he was received by “two North African merchants from Tunis who reportedly spoke both Spanish and Italian” (Alpers 2014, p. 68). This encounter between Christopher Columbus and the Africans shows the professional and linguistic diversity that the African immigrants had in India before the arrival of the European colonizers. It was with the arrival of the Portuguese colonizers in India that the African slaves in India were racially dehumanized and compartmentalized. As the Portuguese came to India, they brought with them African slaves from Mozambique, Eritrea, Somalia, and South Africa, which diversified the already existing population of Abyssinian slaves in the country (Shah et al. 2011; India Today Web Desk 2016; Vallangi 2016). The Portuguese subjected the African slaves to severe states of existential inhumanity, as they did with the indigenous communities in other parts of the world. As a result, many slaves escaped from the clutches of the Portuguese into the forests of Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Gujarat. This is how the African settlements in Gujarat came into existence.

The sociocultural diversity of the African Indians in India can be traced back to the different names by which they are known. Historically, the African Indians in India were known as Siddis and Habshis. Several narratives revolve around the origin of the term “Habshi” and “Siddi.” According to Fitzroy Baptiste, the term “Habshi” can be traced from the ancient Egyptian word “Khebtsi,” which was used to refer to the people of Punt (ancient Ethiopia) (Baptiste 2008, p. 121). Sergew Sellassie, in her book Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History upto 1270 (1972), mentions that ancient Ethiopia was also referred to as “Neter” by the ancient Egyptians, which means the “the land of the Gods” (p. 21). Many historians claim that the “Habshis” were referred to those Africans who came to India from Ethiopia.

Introduction

Diplomacy is the art of managing international relations (IR) through the negotiation of alliances, treaties and agreements. It is concerned with dialogue in areas of mutual interest, aiming to reduce conflict, whilst proposing a peaceful tool for negotiation (Lee & Smith, 2011, p. 11).

Health has been a subject matter of diplomacy for a long time. However, as Kickbusch and Ivanova (2013, p. 13) note, the relationship between health and diplomacy has become more pronounced since the nineteenth century, as this was the moment when nation-states enhanced the development of transportation. Consequently, this development facilitated the greater exchange of merchandise and people throughout the globe. However, the greater circulation of individuals and goods increased the risk of transmission of diseases.

While developments in transportation were underway, significant advances in science and technology were also being achieved. These alleviated the tensions surrounding the outbreak of pandemics, and even foregrounded the idea of invincibility in society with regard to public health threats. Such advances thus created the idea that humankind was up to date with the latest possibilities of detecting, preventing and combatting diseases, due to the expertise acquired by experts in the field (Fidler, 2005, p. 185).

This restored optimism was soon obliterated by the occurrence of an epidemic – the outbreak of cholera in Europe from 1821 to 1851 – which crushed international trade and the new prospects brought by science. Measures were implemented to control this outbreak, such as quarantine, which were met with disapproval. According to traders, these measures represented immeasurable financial loss without compensation. A conservational idea was even put forward that some states should apply quarantine measures to boost unfair trade (Kickbusch & Ivanova, 2013, p. 13).

This example shows that for a long time, politics that were tailored towards preventing and combatting health threats tended to raise concerns and ended up being polemic. This reinforces the complexity of health and well-being as societal concepts, as well as the powerful influence that health has in other political, social and economic arenas. The COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences in 2020 show that not much has changed in how states and international organisations manage health crises.

Much of the mistrustfulness and debates that were part of the cholera outbreak in the nineteenth century, such as the economy versus human lives, lockdown and quarantine and information limitations, were repeated during the COVID-19 health crisis.

However insightful these observations are, we should go beyond fatalism. We must look for answers about how vulnerable women’s (and other) bodily rights might be secured. This demands a look at the public sphere’s relationship to human rights’ realisation. Democracy depends on a space where legitimate dissent is visible and full participation in public life is facilitated (Habermas, 1991). However, a procedural approach (proposed by Habermas) is too limiting when it comes to religion. Religion poses a particular problem for this conception of the public sphere because of the confusion around the assumption that while religion and churches are in the public domain and we need to listen to them, religious groups must use the language of the secular public space. In secular countries, this transforms those who visibly identify with an outcast religion into second-class citizens and bypasses the fact that religion is not merely a collection of beliefs but a way of life. Identifying with a religion – and expressing this through dress – is a communal activity. There are Muslims and Jews who might practise in communal religious activities with-out sticking precisely to the word of the Quran or Bible. We need to turn this idea on its head and propose that the public sphere needs to adjust to recognise manifestations of religious identities. We need to go beyond this dichotomy to ensure that Western universalism does not reject women’s dress, hence human dignity, by erasing and assimilating Muslim woman, and to challenge why institutional religion had to retreat to the private sphere to accommodate Western modernity. Its removal from the political realm explains why new religions are now mobilising to reclaim the public sphere (Butler, 2012). Human rights are a potential tool for protecting women’s bodily precarity but are limited by their Western-centric commitment to a private–public divide (Nussbaum, 2005).

In this era of dissent and difference, Göle (2017b) asks whether a genuine European public sphere that recognises diversity is in the making or the unmaking? That is, can it be a viable public sphere for people identifying openly with religious practises or not? There are clear adverse signs, as we have seen the rise of Islamophobia and the rise of the far right, often the main carriers of opposition to practises such as veiling.

Irish nationalist antiquarian and (mytho-)historical, literary, political, folklore, racial, and other range of commentaries about Ireland through the medium of “Iranian” referentialities (past and present) were among the many divergent instances of locating Ireland in a world historical setting. Both full-fledged and residual traces of theories of “oriental” origins of the Irish reappeared well into the early twentieth century, but with rapidly diminished frequency and declining power of persuasion, at least in Irish historical circles. Such works were still being produced during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and even after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. A case in point is the references to Scythians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, in Seumas MacManus’ 1921 The Story of the Irish Race. This was despite the fact that such theories were compellingly cast aside as legendary and mythological in the new historiographic models that emerged in Ireland after the latter decades of the nineteenth century and were further reinforced by the likes of Patrick Weston Joyce, Eoin MacNeill, Mary Teresa Hayden and George Aloysius Moonan, or Alice Stopford Green in the early twentieth century. In her 1925 History of the Irish State to 1014, Alice Stopford Green noted the past appeal of legendary accounts of ancient Ireland by casting her glance over a much broader time frame than just the period since the eighteenth century:

By the time Henry O’Brien's The Round Towers appeared in 1834, Thomas Moore (1779– 1852), who participated in the public pillorying of O’Brien, was awaiting the publica-tion of the first volume of his The History of Ireland, which offered an alternative oriental account of Irish origins. Appearing in 1835, this first volume of what became a four- volume history of Ireland from the earliest times until the middle of the seventeenth cen-tury covered the period up to the Norse invasions (beginning in the late eighth century). As already noted in the previous chapter, Moore's book too was destined to be assailed by George Petrie for its particular theory of the Round Towers. At the time of the publication of The History of Ireland, Moore was already a distinguished Romantic poet and dramatist, the pre-eminent Irish nationalist balladeer, an indefatigable champion of Catholic rights in the United Kingdom, and a supporter of the campaign to repeal the 1801 Act of Union. The Dublin-born Moore, who spent most of his life in England, continued to be regarded as “The National Bard of Ireland” in most Irish nationalist quarters even after the emergence of the Young Ireland literary circle in 1842 with its new divergent patterns of nationalist poetic sensibility. The Young Ireland poet Michael Joseph Barry dedicated his 1845 edited volume of nationalist poetry to Moore, with the collection containing some of Moore's own works. The poet and a founding member of Young Ireland, Thomas Osborne Davis (d. 1845), who was originally to have edited the aforementioned collection of nationalist poems, hailed Moore “as our greatest poet.” Davis, who was otherwise critical of Moore's grandiloquent style, wrote of Moore in the Young Ireland mouthpiece The Nation (Dublin):

Introduction

In ‘Go to Hell’ (S03E11), the penultimate episode of American Horror Story: ‘Coven’ (2013–14), nineteenth-century New Orleans socialite and serial killer Madame LaLaurie is disguised as a heritage worker and gives a tour of her ancestral home. Asked by a member of the crowd when they will get to see the attic torture chamber used to inflict punishment on her slaves, she tries to dodge the question before attempting to clean up her bloody past, denying the existence of the torture chamber and claiming that the room was used for storage and ‘the firm but humane correction of Madame LaLaurie's domestics’. After the tour, she is confronted by the witch Queenie, who retorts, ‘I see you finally got that makeover, guess you figured you could make over a little history too’, to which LaLaurie responds, ‘on the contrary, I’m here to set the record straight, this historical site was nothing but a house of lies before I came back’. As this sequence illustrates, the stakes surrounding history and which versions of historical events are given legitimacy are immense. In addition to cultural institutions such as museums, archives and heritage sites, historical fiction dramas such as ‘Coven’ has provided audiences lacking formal training as historians with an accessible means to engage with the past. However, historical fiction also raises questions regarding how fictional representations of history interpret the past, as well as which versions of historical events make it to the screen.

This chapter will consider the figure of the witch constructed by ‘Coven’ through a multi-methodological approach that draws from television studies, adaptation studies and early modern history, seeking to contextualize representations of female agency and monstrosity within relevant televisual and historical contexts. As co-authors, our respective research interests have been influenced by the disciplines of media studies and history. By examining discursive struggles between historians and media scholars, this chapter seeks to engage with representations of history on screen beyond discourses of authenticity and fidelity. The first section of this chapter will consider how American Horror Story has adapted witchcraft history and witch belief in ‘Coven’, arguing that rather than being ‘lost in translation’, such beliefs have entered ‘into a broader public domain of critical reception and audience review’ through their circulation as public history (Greig 2019, 99).

The good years alternate with the bad, and the often-quoted parable about fat cows and lean cows has lost none of its vivid meaning. However, the evolution of contemporary societies toward capitalism has had an impact upon the phenomenon of alternating years of crisis and prosperity.

Until the eighteenth century, production remained largely agricultural; thus, crises were almost always agricultural. As fickle as the seasons and the harvest, famine is its most sinister form. Nowadays, thanks to the means of transport and communication, famines have disappeared, but industrial and commercial crises have become more frequent.

We shall distinguish between crises of production, consumption, circulation and distribution. However, if we encounter these different crises in isolation, we also encounter them together as general crises of production, consumption, circulation and distribution.

In his Cours de philosophie positive, Auguste Comte writes, ‘Strictly speaking, the progress of civilization does not run along a straight line; rather it moves through a series of unequal and variable oscillations around a mean which always tends to prevail.’ Nothing is truer even from an economic point of view.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, economic growth has ceaselessly followed depression. In very general terms, we could say that the world economy went through a period of growth between 1845 and 1873, followed by a period of decline between 1873 and 1894, followed by a new period of growth between 1895 and 1920 and a new period of decline starting with the crisis of 1920. In more specific terms, we note periods of depression between 1845 and 1873 and between 1895 and 1920; while periods of growth occur from 1873 to 1874 and from 1920 to 1931.

The general overproduction crisis occurs at the point where a growth period lasting three to five years intersects with a depression of a similar duration. It is moreover a periodic crisis.

The study of crises implies the examination of periods of growth and periods of depression and, as these crises are general, the examination of production, consumption, circulation and distribution in periods of growth and of depression. A historical study will help us demonstrate the identity of the phenomenon in time and, subsequently, its scientific validity. A theoretical part will enable us to describe the characteristic features of the economic phenomenon.

Recently, and for the first time in history, the interval between the periodic crisis and the recovery has been filled by an unprecedented monetary and credit crisis as a distant consequence of the 1914 war. We cannot deal with this in any detail without going beyond our subject. However, we have tried to state the essential and to show in particular that it cannot be considered as a crisis of the capitalist system: it is the logical, inevitable result of the massive recourse to credit and resulting overproduction which prevented mankind from running out of food, equipment, arms and munitions during and after the war, until the end of reparations. Here we have situated the role of the United States, explaining the violent crisis to which it fell victim. Understanding this crisis, its antecedents and causes, is of great consequence. The crisis has been resolved, and if humanity can maintain the benefits of peace, it will not be repeated. It did not prevent the traditional recovery from taking place. This recovery is most original, at times spontaneous and at times managed [dirigée] by the state. We have described it in some detail. It was marked by the decrease in interest rates, induced everywhere, and achieved in England and in the United States thanks to the open-market policy and elsewhere (in Germany and Belgium) by other methods.

Currency devaluations have also preceded and primed the recovery, restoring profit margins that had declined as a result of the world disruption. And here we have found new empirical confirmation of the method of explaining alternating periods of growth and depression through profit variations.

Massive gold movements and capital migrations have posed unprecedented problems for central banks and exchange stabilization funds: countries will have to be protected against large and sudden variations in discount rates likely to hinder the economic recovery or stem the prosperity.

Finally, the literature devoted to the ‘planned economy’ is far too abundant, with recovery plans occupying too large a place for us to remain silent on the topic. The managed monetary policy [monnaie dirigée] of the planned economy has retained our attention, without gaining our support.

On numerous other points we have made revisions, corrections and updates.

In this preface, we have limited ourselves to indicating the essential new findings. We hope that this summary will justify in the eyes of our readers the publication of this fifth edition.

Since the publication of the third edition of this book, the problem of alternating periods of growth and depression has been the subject of numerous publications. Efforts have been made to observe, explain, prevent and cure. Statistical, theoretical and therapeutic work on this topic has covered considerable ground. Yet the sheer scale of this work entails an inevitable imperfection.

But the facts themselves place the problem of crises at the forefront of our concerns. In 1929, a period of very brilliant growth gave way, in the United States, to a depression of rare intensity. The world has suffered this contagion ever since, in 1930 and 1931.

In the field of observation of the general flow of business, economic cycles and the economic conjuncture, we note that everywhere specialized services for statistical research have been created: the Harvard Economic Service, the Institut für Konjunkturforschung in Berlin and Vienna, the London Economic Service and others. Following the example set by France already in 1908, other countries have now surpassed its efforts. The economist and the businessman now enjoy an impressive number of indexes and graphs to adapt, superimpose and compare. We are almost tempted here to speak of overproduction!

For even though new statistical methods have provided us with valuable additional information, we have sometimes abused these figures. Their misuse has been particularly careless. The spirit of geometry has tried to eliminate the need for finesse; here too, reasoning has tried to ignore intuition and the imponderables that influence economic phenomena, as they do man himself. Political economy would be more successful if we appealed to the methods of biology, rather than to the still very precarious procedures of meteorology. The failure of the so-called barometer method is no longer contested today. Facts have shattered the barometers. The use of statistics should not be mechanical.

In the realm of theory, the same reservations apply. The monetary implications of crises have inspired numerous important works. Quantities of money and credit are meant to constitute the driving force of the economic world. For variations in the quantity of money provokes corresponding movements in profits. We certainly do not deny that profit is the engine of the modern economic world, acting in its variations as both an accelerator and a brake. But we doubt that quantities of money, through their influence on prices, are sufficient to explain variations in profit.