In recent years scholars have devoted a great deal of attention and theorisation to the body in history, looking both at bodies as metaphors and as sites of intervention. These studies have tended to focus on the analysis of bodies in a national context, acting for and acted upon by the state, and similarly the ever-expanding study of masculinity continues to try to define hegemonic masculinities. But what if we direct our gaze to marginal bodies, in this case Blackshirt bodies who act against the state, and a political movement that commits assault on the body politic? This article examines the centrality of the body and distinctive gender codes in the self-representation, the performance and practice, and the culture of Britain's failed fascist movement during the 1930s. The term ‘body fascism’ has taken on different and much diluted meaning in the present day, but in the British Union of Fascists’ construction of the Blackshirted body, in the movement's emphasis on the embodiment of their political religion through sport, physical fitness and public display of offensive and defensive violence, and in their distinctive and racialised bodily aesthetic illustrated in their visual and graphic art production we come to understand Britain's fascist movement as a product of modernity and as one potent expression of the convergence between populist politics and body fixation.

This article examines the evolution of Greece's foreign policy from a position of relative detachment to an increasing involvement in international affairs that eventually led to the country's realignment with Britain during the Abyssinian crisis. It is argued that Greece's foreign policy shift was a result of an interplay between a perceived threat of Italian revisionism, Britain's reappearance in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Abyssinian crisis and domestic political dynamics that led to the defeat of Eleftherios Venizelos who favoured a foreign policy detached from combinations of great powers.

Whether in war, occupation or peacekeeping, whenever foreign soldiers are in contact with the local population, and in particular with local women, some of these contacts are intimate. Between 1942 and 1945, US soldiers fathered more than 22,000 children in Britain, and during the first decade of post-war US presence in West Germany more than 37,000 children were fathered by American occupation soldiers. Many of these children were raised in their mothers’ families, not knowing about their biological roots and often suffering stigmatisation and discrimination. The question of how these children were treated is discussed in the context of wider social and political debates about national and individual identity. Furthermore, the effect on the children of living outside the normal boundaries of family and nation is discussed.

The Danish integrated rural development project in the Bangladeshi district of Noakhali (1978–92) was in many ways the largest aid project in the history of the Danish aid agency, DANIDA, and was intended to break new ground by reaching the poorest and weakest directly. Despite elaborate planning and a small army of Danish experts, however, the project failed to reach the targeted groups and would ultimately be viewed as a partial fiasco. By analysing the historical context of the project, this article will show how both the project and the problems it encountered were a by-product of the basic principles of the Danish aid policy developed in the 1960s and 1970s: the same factors that produced the high level of Danish aid spending and the will to embrace new agendas in development assistance such as the ‘basic-needs’ approach also created a number of problems with regard to the implementation of Danish policy on the ground.

Despite the present-day attraction of ‘security’ as an attention-grabbing word in politics and the public sphere, the study of security is a missing chapter in many state-of-the-art surveys of historical literature. Its central relevance for the modern statehood has been obvious for centuries in the European context. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-seventeenth-century Leviathan, written in the context of the devastating English civil war and previous religious wars, government was given the fundamental role in guaranteeing security. Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals have constantly debated Hobbes's ideas and concepts about security and societal peace. Especially after the second world war, security has found major attention in the fields of International Relations and its sub-discipline security studies. Security studies evolved during the nuclear age and were originally foremost about the study of the threat, use and control of military force, as one proponent of security studies, Stephen Walt, stated. They were mainly concerned with military strategy and giving policy advice to the military. Since the cold war, the study of security has come a long way. Most importantly, as Emma Rothschild has reminded us, during the past two decades or so, the concept was first extended downwards from states to individuals, upwards from the nation to the biosphere and horizontally from the military to the economic, social, political and environmental. It is the reflection of this dynamic change in theory, methodology and empirical research that connects most of the books under review in this article.

‘Development’ as a ‘process of enlarging people's choices’ is omnipresent. Constituents of global society – governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), multinational corporations, the media and individual actors – are deeply involved in its practices and discourses. At universities around the world, development studies mushroom, and development research has become a darling of the social sciences. In particular, development assistance has become big business, involving the flow of $136 billion dollars in 2009. But more significantly than before, development issues and especially development assistance have become contested terrain, too. While the millennium development goals defined by the United Nations in 2000 and designed to halve global poverty by the year 2015 call on donor and recipient countries to increase their efforts, critics of development assistance are multiplying.

The year 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the great revolts of 1968. As always, the occasion gave rise to impassioned debates. In Germany they were stimulated by the historian and 1968 veteran Götz Aly, who compared the ‘sixty-eight’ to the ‘thirty-three’ generations (the Nazi student body of the early 1930s), and postulated ‘parallels in German history’, continuities and ‘similarities in the approach to mobilisation, political utopianism and the anti-bourgeois impulse’. Following the thirtieth anniversary in 1998, which triggered a flood of scholarly publications, we have had ten further years of research into the recent history of the 1960s, up to the fortieth anniversary in 2008. In 1998, the central question was still to remove the 1960s protest movements from the realm of myth and to establish the ‘year of protest’ (i.e. 1968) itself as a subject for historical research. Since 1998, the aims of international research have been to develop a global comparative analysis of the movements and to contextualise them historically. Particular attention has been devoted to locating political protest movements in the overall process of socio-cultural transformation through the ‘long 1960s’.