From 1961-1965, the Medical School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem taught four cohorts of medical students from developing countries, mostly African. This article explores the program through the theory of hospitality. First, we find that hospitality is constructed and enabled by international interests. Second, those interests build a status which has unexpected consequences that reveal sorts of hosts, welcoming and xenophobic. Third, as an outcome of the international structure of student exchange, the guests' response to the terms of hospitality was mitigated by their privileged status as international medical students. On the one hand, they appreciated Israel as a model of post-colonial state-building; on the other, they criticized the racist reactions to their presence.

This article examines policies adopted by the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (CTW) toward Europe’s Middle Eastern and South Asian colonies. It argues, first, that, under the pretext of protecting women from traffic, the CTW provided colonial powers with justification to monitor and restrict the international mobility of women traveling alone. Second, it demonstrates that the League adopted colonial racial assumptions about the sexuality of colonized women, and thus perceived them as less deserving of protection from forced prostitution. Third, it argues that the CTW thus helped perpetuate and justify differential treatment of foreign and indigenous women in Europe’s overseas colonies. The article relies on the CTW’s protocols, on the traveling commissions it initiated, on country reports to the League, and on protocols of the conferences it initiated dedicated to traffic in women in the “East.”

Following World War I medical discourse and practice increasingly concentrated on the ability to contain and channel the sexuality of young men on the move. This article examines how colonial and international authorities in the interwar period sought to contain the presumed damages resulting from soldiers’ and sailors’ interaction with prostitutes. As mobile men, this article argues, they had largest potential to carry microbes and parasites to their next station or port of call. As low-ranking soldiers or workers, they could be effectively policed and monitored. Within their military or labor hierarchies, they were subjected to measures that could not be applied to the general population. Finally, lower-class men were a convenient other for the emerging middle class and its dream of sober, hard-working men and respectable families. This article first zooms in to three examples of British and French attempts to contain venereal disease and hence the sexuality of lower-class men: British-colonized Egypt and Palestine, and French-colonized Morocco. It then turns to sailors, whose sexual interactions and their medical consequences became a matter of international policy, as embodied in the International Labor Organization. This article follows several sites – ports, BMCs and ex-pat entertainment venues, as nodes of mobility, and the ways in which different authorities tried to monitor the encounters created between prostitutes and patrons, North African and European bodies, soldiers and civilians, humans and germs.