Four weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, US Senator John Kennedy accused the Biden administration of indirectly providing over $17 billion to Moscow as Putin was gearing up for war. In August 2021, the International Monetary Fund had indeed approved a historic $650 billion allocation of Special Drawing Rights to help member countries struggling with the Covid crisis. Russia benefited from these money transfers, as did Iran, China, and Myanmar, notwithstanding the authoritarian consolidation of these regimes. Kennedy's op-ed sparked a debate about the lack of transparency in the use of crisis resources and led to the adoption in the United States of the ‘Russia and Belarus SDR Exchange Prohibition Act’, which bans currency transactions with these countries through the IMF, following the imposition of 2,500 sanctions by the US Treasury since February 2022. The op-ed also reignited a decades-old debate over whether international organisations such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) should be held accountable for supporting authoritarian and corrupt governments or interfering in the politics of sovereign nations.

This article focuses on Jewish political stances in early post-war and post-Holocaust Poland and explores why so many Polish Jews supported the new communist-dominated regime after 1945, despite the fact that only a small minority held communist political views. While acknowledging the impact of Holocaust experiences, the weakness of the Polish Jewish community after the war and the widespread perception that the communist regime was the only possible bulwark against post-war anti-Jewish violence, this article offers a different perspective in foregrounding the inter-war experiences of Polish Jews. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English, this article argues that inter-war experiences shaped Polish Jews’ understandings of the emerging post-war social and political system, as well as their political stances towards the new state.

Intelligence services have played pivotal and distinct roles in European political history since the Second World War, ranging from their position as a stronghold of authoritarian regimes to their role in protecting democracy from anti-democratic forces. Democratisation therefore requires the depoliticisation of intelligence services to prevent their reuse as tools of political oppression. Paradoxically, many examples show that the politicisation of intelligence often occurs in a context of democratisation. This article explains this paradox. It focuses on the persistent politicisation of the Greek intelligence service in the decades following the demise of the junta regime and its democratic consolidation (1974–2008). It shows that subsequent governments fought fire with fire in their efforts to democratise the service: they countered the junta heritage of the intelligence service by keeping it closely under their control and, consequently, aligning it with governing party interests. Moreover, a vibrant bottom-up, party-aligned labour union within the service became the main vehicle for the politicisation of the organisational culture. This research uses original oral history interviews with former service personnel, newspaper publications and parliamentary debates on the service between 1974 and 2008. This is the first research on the Greek intelligence service based on such large-scale, longitudinal and diverse empirical data collection. The results of this research are relevant beyond the specific case of Greece, as they point to the wider mechanisms of politicisation of intelligence services, especially in former authoritarian regimes in Southern and Eastern Europe.

Jewish resistance to the destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has stirred many scholars; however, some areas of war-torn Europe remain neglected in this respect, for instance Italy and Italian-occupied territories. This article aims to unearth the Jewish history of Jewish resistance in the Italian province of Dalmatia between June 1941 and September 1943, emphasising longer evolution of political ideology, personal networks and social organisations that fostered and sustained resistance. Based on either as-yet unknown or rarely used testimonies of the Holocaust survivors who spent the war years in Dalmatia, this article argues that these are crucial to understand why and how Jewish politics in inter-war Yugoslavia enabled Jews to self-organise and to start and sustain open resistance to fascism.

This study focuses on women’s hunger demonstrations and lootings in occupied Antwerp in May 1941. These actions were not just expressions of social discontent but also political actions in the form of illegal propaganda against the occupier. Through specific cases of demonstrations and looting, the first part of this article explores the pattern of these actions and the involvement of participants, local and German police and mayors. The second part provides a general picture of women’s demonstrations and lootings in Belgium and Antwerp, discussing the chronology and repression of these actions and the social profile of the participants. This article tells the story of resistance by working-class women, a perspective still largely absent from resistance historiography. It shows how an explicit female perspective allows us to write a history of female resistance.

One of the most famous catchphrases to describe the First World War was H.G. Well's ‘war to end all wars’. Once an idealistic slogan, it is now mainly used sardonically as a tragic depiction of what felt at the time to be the longest and bloodiest war of the age. But Wells described what in 1914 seemed a plausible outcome of the war: this was expected to be the last great conflict between nations before an international order was finally established. This view was later shared by another well-known liberal internationalist, Alfred Zimmern, who advocated for a treaty that made war a crime in any circumstance and a covenant to substitute the old order of ‘power-politics’ with ‘responsibility-polities’. As one of the chief interpreters of the League of Nations (LON), Zimmern remains a symbol of the contradictions of the institution in its quest to establish a ‘new order’ through the rule of law. However, this new order was not destined to last, as the League's life was short, eventful and ultimately tragic.

Critiques of police brutality and dire warnings about public safety are a seemingly inescapable topic of controversy today, saturating headlines and political campaigns all over the world. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted huge protests across the United States, with activists denouncing yet another episode of excessive police violence against a Black man. As Covid-19 lockdowns kept people tethered to their homes, protests echoed globally, affirming solidarity in the value of Black lives and critiques of police violence. In Europe, marchers filled the streets everywhere from the United Kingdom to Poland, and, notably for this essay, in France. France, of course, did not need an American example to reckon with police misconduct. Since at least the 1970s, French activists have been calling attention to the way that police violence is directed disproportionately at economically marginalised banlieues and socially marginalised immigrant populations. In 2018, French citizens witnessed the brutal policing of the gilets jaunes, a populist movement that criticised economic inequality and President Macron's neoliberal policies. With horror, they read stories of protestors battered by police batons, grenades, and tear gas, losing hands and eyes in the fray. More recently, in June 2023, the police murder of Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, following a routine traffic stop, reopened old wounds. ‘Who, exactly, do the police serve?’, protestors asked. Certainly not Nahel.

The Centenary of the First World War saw unprecedent prominence given to the ‘colonial contribution’ in commemorative discourse. While this newfound public recognition sometimes relied on simplistic and sanitised narratives of the war, scholarship produced in the period has greatly enriched understandings of how conflict was experienced by colonised peoples. In this article, I explore the utility of one of the key conceptual innovations of the Centenary, the Greater War, for the analysis of colonial experiences of the conflict. I do this by considering three key questions: Can the Greater War framework facilitate new comparative histories of violence in the war? How do its expanded chronologies account for colonial contexts? Can we adapt its conceptual frameworks to better integrate colonial histories? Exploring the potential answers to these questions will point to new avenues of research that can ensure the colonial is effectively incorporated into our narratives of the global conflict.