The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Chapter 6 examines the devastating toll that the development of the hydropower nation took on people’s lives. In Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, over 430,000 people were forced to leave their homes and communities due to the construction of the Sanmenxia Dam. This chapter focuses on the resettlement of over 7,000 residents from Henan to Gansu, revealing how the state’s pursuit of hydroelectricity not only altered the Yellow River’s physical landscape but also caused irreparable harm to the affected communities.

Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter argues that the Nazi regime produced a specific variety of capitalism, referred to here as völkisch capitalism. The focus of the study is on the contradiction between Nazi settlement policy, imbued with anticapitalist rhetoric, and the capitalist practice of settlement in the annexed territories during World War II. It is shown that the settlers were treated as capitalist subjects, that state compensation for the property of resettled “ethnic Germans” was organized by the Deutsche Umsiedlungs-Treuhandgesellschaft mbH (German Resettlement Trust Company) (DUT) as a private company, and that the DUT carried out this practice both through private-sector auditing techniques and through a partnership with private banks on behalf of the public sector. The directors of the DUT, German bankers whose careers stretched unbroken from the Great Depression to the West German economic miracle of the 1960s, followed this völkischthinking of the years 1933–45 and practiced it to the best of their capitalist knowledge during World War II.

The Briggs Plan is well known, but this chapter shows it instituted much more than a civil–military executive committee system and ‘population control’ through resettlement. Instead it aimed at a broader ‘geodemographic’ control of people and space, including ‘things’ such as food. It intended this to variously weaken insurgent–rural population links, provide ‘cover’ for the popultion to refuse what insurgents asked of them and create killing grounds as it forced insurgents to approach resettlements in more predictble ways. This chapter shows multiple individuals threatening resignation as the staggering scale of the plan – over 1 million were moved – tested people to the limit. It ends with promising signs but also still-high incident levels and rising concern in the wake of the killing of the high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in October 1951. It also reminds us that even as geodemographic control was tightening and the first amenities for the resettled appearing, Briggs’s idea of clearing successive area was going nowhere. The operations were just too short, and too short of covering entire communist committee districts, to stop the MCP regenerating afterwards.

This chapter reviews socioenvironmental issues related to Chinese engagements in Africa. By investigating the behaviors of Chinese enterprises in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and extractive sectors, the author depicts diverse challenges in various sectors. Large state-owned enterprises and small private businesses demonstrate departing performances and understandings regarding socioenvironmental responsibility. The Chinese government constantly urges Chinese firms to improve socioenvironmental practices because of reputational concerns, but China lacks the legal framework and monitoring mechanism to effectively influence its enterprises’ operation overseas. Weak regulation in Africa often leaves problematic behaviors there unpunished. In this context, Chinese business associations and banks provide pragmatic assistance to promote corporate social responsibility among Chinese investors. In spite of a recent move toward convergence with international norms, China diverges from the West on evaluating the socioenvironmental impacts of industrial projects in the developing countries. As industrialization inevitably alters the original societal structure and natural environment, China does not insist on intact socioenvironmental preservation in developing countries. Large infrastructure projects such as dams are rather viewed as necessary for developing countries to mitigate the impact of global climate change. Emphasis is laid on balancing economic growth and socioeconomic transformation under concrete circumstances so that the development can sustain.

The chapter looks at categorisations as a form of ‘othering’ in the context of European refugee resettlement. Selection categories in resettlement provide insights into states’ preferences, when given the possibility to effectively select refugees before they present themselves at the border. As such, categorisations in such programmes are ways of 'othering' within the group of ‘others’, excluding but also including according to three logics: humanitarian, security, and assimilability. The chapter provides a panoramic view of official selection categories of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), European Member States, and the European Union (EU). The analysis shows that, while resettlement is framed as a humanitarian policy for the ‘most vulnerable’, some European states’ programmes and recent EU propositions indicate that besides a humanitarian logic, security and assimilability logics of ‘othering’ also draw the boundaries of access to this privileged form of refugee protection.

Part I of this book focused on EU policy and explored the ways in which crisis politics intensify longer-standing practices of governing migration through which the deaths and vulnerabilities of people on the move are rendered regular and acceptable. Drawing attention to the various policy mechanisms as well as to dynamics of power and violence that constitute this process of normalising death and vulnerability, it situated contemporary practices of governing migration in the context of a modern European tradition of humanism that is embedded in colonial dynamics and that ultimately fails in its attempt to maintain the security of home. By showing how the so-called Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015–2016 was prompted by a series of border deaths in which biophysical violence and processes of ultra-precaritisation emerged in shocking terms, Part I highlighted the abandonment of people on the move to the environmental forces of the Mediterranean Sea and to situations of harm on arrival to the EU as casualties or survivors. Yet, while the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ opened opportunities for consideration of the ongoing colonial legacies and the human conceits embedded within a modern European tradition of humanism and manifest in EU practices of governing migration, the political response was at best limited. Showing how the situation provoked a further toleration of biophysical violence and ultra-precarity on the part of EU governing authorities, Part I argued that EU practices of governing migration rest on the engagement of a form of humanitarian government in which appeals to human dignity reflect longer-standing racialised hierarchies between worthy and unworthy lives. Nevertheless, it also hinted at the importance of moving beyond a critique of humanism, humanitarianism and human dignity, to explore how alternative responses to border deaths challenge a divisive politics grounded in concerns to secure home. Part II thus shifts attention from the mobilisation of dignity by governing authorities to its mobilisation by allies of people on the move, exploring how different pro-migration activist interventions have emerged in terms that produce solidarity and hope for those embroiled in a so-called crisis. Each chapter in Part II examines a specific intervention in its material and discursive dimensions and considers how – and to what extent – the intervention contests the policy mechanisms and dynamics of power and violence through which death and vulnerability are normalised. As such, Part II not only undertakes an analysis of three different interventions in their own right, but also considers their potential – as well as their limitations – in mobilising the concept of dignity towards the creation of alternative horizons of solidarity and hope.

This chapter examines the release scheme for the women’s forces and the steps taken to help prepare servicewomen for re-entry into civilian life. It also recounts the deliberations within the service ministries leading up to the inauguration of the permanent women’s services in 1949. These, for the first time, afforded women an opportunity to forge a career with the British armed forces.

As a general rule once a trust is fully constituted the terms are binding on the trustees and the provisions of the trust must be carried out. Occasinally where circumstances have changed there is scope to vary the trust usually in the event of an unforeseen event arising. This chapter examines when the terms of a trust can be varied. The court holds inherent jurisdiction to vary the trust in certain circumstances but the jurisdiction is limited. There are several statutory provisions that give the court jurisdiction to vary a trust but the statute with the widest range of powers is the Variation of Trusts Act 1958. Under the Act the court can authorise a variation on behalf of a range of beneficiaries including any person with an interest both vested and contingent and who by reason of infancy or incapacity is incapable of assenting. It also includes a category of beneficairies who may become entitled if certain events occur in the future. Exercise of the jurisdiction depends on whether it is for the benefit of the beneficiaries and this is dependent on whether a benefit can be shown both financial and non-financial. The jurisidiction is very wide but cannot be exercised if the court believes there is a resettlement as opposed to a variation.