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This book explores the reflections of women in the global North whose "doing good" work is aimed at improving conditions for other women. Drawing on interviews with women NGO workers in seven different European countries about their experiences and perspectives on working on gendered issues affecting women in the global South, this book looks at the ways in which the work they do is embedded in power structures and inequalities.

Cover -- Title page -- Copyright page -- TABLE OF CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- List of illustrations -- List of figures -- INTRODUCTION -- SECTION 1 - HISTORIES/LEGACIES -- The library as knowledge broker -- Parallels in the history of women's/gender studies and its special libraries -- Institutionalizing activist legacies -- SECTION 2 - PRACTICES -- Searching for women in the archives: collecting private archives of women -- Core feminist texts in Europe online: teaching with the FRAGEN database -- Teaching gender-sensitive English as a foreign language through databases: local practices and beyond -- (Re)searching gender in a library -- Information as a tool for the empowerment of women -- SECTION 3 - UTOPIAS -- Reflections on Glasgow Women's Library: the production of cultural memory, identity and citizenship -- Beyond the bun lady: towards new feminist figurations of librarianship -- ANNEX -- CONTRIBUTORS.

This article investigates refugees' labour to gain inclusion within the 'host' community, drawing on interviews with male Afghan former interpreters employed by Western armies. It makes an empirical contribution by centring them as active agents rather than as passive tropes in the racialised and gendered discourses of the 'War on Terror' and Western migration policies. It offers a synthesis between concepts from three fields: migration as translation, migrant masculinities and the battleground of conditional inclusion. By focusing on migrants' self-translations in dialogue with translations of their bodies and stories by host-country institutions, I trace three strategies: insertion, subversion and exemption. While Afghan interpreters largely fail to be recognised as needing protection from harm, their insertion and subversion of discourses of protection based on service are more successful. Finally, they counter their interpellation as dangerous bodies with a strategy of exemption that can be momentarily successful but remains ultimately precarious.

AbstractBrokers have long been scrutinised for their purported disloyalty, but brokers' own attachments and expectations remain largely neglected. This article contributes to scholarship by shifting from the much‐discussed betrayal by brokers, to betrayal of brokers. It maps three forms of betrayal—interpersonal, institutional and ideological—drawing on unique empirical material, including interviews with Afghan interpreters who worked for western armies. It argues that the betrayal of brokers is facilitated by conditions of reduced demand and weak social ties in an unequal global order. When brokers' remit is largely dictated by their patron, brokers stand more to lose than to gain.

Exchange between postcolonial and decolonial thought has been hampered by intellectual and political divisions despite a shared concern with decentring colonial hegemonies. Against the grain, this article brings the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos into conversation with Gayatri C. Spivak's, centring on one key converging issue of concern – human rights. I argue that both thinkers share what I call a 'reluctant commitment' to a human rights framework, while recognizing its tainted history and current instrumentalization for hegemonic imperial ends. I identify and weave together the strands that form the basis for their reluctant commitment, their critique of human rights, and their proposals for a reconfigured framework of human rights. The article maps how Spivak and de Sousa Santos aim to reconfigure a liberal human rights frame by suturing it to alternative ethical systems, including responsibility-based systems and other conceptions of dignity. It shows common patterns in their work, including their concern that binary global divisions undermine the supposed universality of the human rights framework and the risks of equating law with ethics. Tracing the deconstructive and reconstructive strategies at work in Spivak's and de Sousa Santos' writing helps to break down the walls between decolonial and postcolonial scholarship.

This article offers an innovative contribution to research on military masculinities by – counterintuitively – drawing on the experience of civilians, namely Afghan locally employed civilians (LECs), such as patrol interpreters. Centering the analysis on Afghan LECs' own gendered experience of war, this article forms an important counterpoint to the racialized hypervisibility of Afghan men in the discourses structuring the "War on Terror." The article's argument unfolds along two lines. On the one hand, it disrupts discourses that portray Afghan men as radically Other by demonstrating the parallels between Afghan LECs and Western soldiers, such as in their military coming-of-age stories and motivations for enlistment. On the other hand, it introduces the notion of "segregated brotherhood" to capture the everyday differentiations and inequalities that frame the relationship between LECs and Western soldiers. While this article's primary aim is to analyze the gendered experiences of LECs as under-researched but essential actors in the military missions in Afghanistan, by "returning the gaze" I also cast new light on the masculinities of Western soldiers, exposing their dependencies on locally recruited civilians, especially interpreters, thereby challenging masculinized accounts of Western soldiers' autonomy and neo-imperial power/knowledge.

This article develops a novel analytical framework for capturing the multiple, competing configurations that the migration-security nexus invokes in discourse and practice, combining insights from critical migration and security scholarship. The framework's application is illustrated with an empirical case study of the protection and relocation of Afghan and Iraqi former local interpreters and other locally employed civilians working for Western armies. The analysis demonstrates that locally employed civilians (LECs) are simultaneously considered security actors in the East and security risks in the West, the 'best and brightest' causing brain drain and potential terrorists when crossing borders, both 'model migrants' and threats to western values. By uncovering the nexus's multiple configurations and its contradictions, the framework supports the project of denaturalizing the migration-security nexus, while also showing that the discourses and practices justified through its various configurations include the legitimation of border violence and the denial of protection to migrants.