1. Aim of the chapter – After having clarified the meaning of the notion of “illegal occupation” and how it relates to non-directly affected states’ and international organisations’ aggravated responsibility in case of serious breaches of jus cogens (see supra Chapter 1 and also infra Chapter 5), this second preliminary chapter focuses on the actual object of this study: business activities of private corporate actors in or pertaining to (illegally) occupied territories. What are they? How may they impact illegal occupations and potentially render aid or assistance to the maintaining of situations created in serious breach of jus cogens? What does international law have to say about them? These are but some of the questions which will be zoomed in on in this chapter. In the broader framework of this book, this chapter mainly aims to provide insight into the potential connection between private business conduct in or pertaining to illegally occupied territories and the maintaining of illegal occupations. This is crucial as it facilitates the understanding of which forms of corporate conduct may fall within the ambit of the obligation advanced in this book: a duty incumbent on home states and competent international organisations to regulate potentially harmful private business activities in or pertaining to illegally occupied territories based on their aggravated responsibility in case of serious breaches of jus cogens – more in particular, the duty of non-assistance.

Having considered the nature and effectiveness of network adaptation under Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, this final chapter reconnects these important empirical and comparative insights with the wider conceptual debate about the impact of European Union (EU) membership at the national level. It employs the innovative strategic-projection model of Europeanisation to examine the extent to which strategic adaptation in the UK and Ireland can be attributed to wider domestic reform processes or to developments at the EU level. In other words, do the changes outlined in this study simply reflect the political decisions and distinctive leadership styles of Blair and Ahern (agency) or can they be attributed, at least in part, to the shared, longer-term impact of European integration (structure). It considers five potential independent variables: national change agents, domestic administrative opportunity structures, domestic political opportunity structures, technological change, and European integration. In order to disaggregate the potential EU effect further, the section on European integration is broken down into the four modes of Europeanisation: effective obligation, strategic adaptation, intergovernmental learning, and administrative optimisation.

This chapter focuses on four elements which best reveal the tie that binds the seemingly closed symbols of the play Fur (2000). A Play in Nineteen Scenes, by Migdalia Cruz. The first and most evident element is the allusion to William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Next, the images of cannibalism and their history expose how Cruz challenges the objectification of women's bodies by inverting standards of ‘appropriate female behaviours’ related to eating and maintaining the ‘ideal body’. This then provides an opportunity to reflect upon the traditions of consumerism and spectacle that have been an integral part of Western history and its relation to individual, racialised bodies. Finally, the chapter offers some solutions to the symbolism of hair versus fur, and its relation to human behaviours that have successfully controlled and defined these bodies. These elements demonstrate that Fur (2000) is in fact a text about colonialism, its evolution and how it is incorporated in the female body.

This chapter examines what Africa means to actors clustered around the state: MPs, officials and those working with them during the Tony Blair era. How is British policy in Africa different from policy in other parts of the world? Why does Britain engage in it? What do the actors involved get out of it? British engagement in Africa is represented as being driven by moral compulsion, in contrast to other parts of foreign policy which are discussed more in terms of British interests or political questions. Under New Labour, Africa gradually came to embody the ethical dimension of foreign policy, and speeches, statements and publications by Labour ministers reinforce this perspective. Speeches from the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders and development spokespeople could as easily have been made by members of the government. Was there a consciousness that the three main political parties were broadly in line over Africa? Was this something they found difficult or that they enjoyed? This chapter argues that Britain's Africa policy can be viewed as representing a sense of the good state.

This chapter notes that New Labour provides an important case study, given that the Labour government was responsible for determining and implementing British foreign economic policy during the period in question. The Labour Party's move to ‘the right’ is one of the most important changes in the ideological landscape of British politics in recent years. The policy focus here is on the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and its main successor the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), and to a lesser extent the Department for International Development (DfID), as the bodies responsible for foreign economic policy.

This chapter begins by considering how the interviewees have used computer-mediated communication (CMC) to mobilise participation. It explains the use of CMC to assist (international) networking and the organisation of environmental activism. In addition to mobilisation, CMC has been used by the interviewees to facilitate networking and to boost solidarity among activists. CMC has been used by activists to create, or reinforce existing, linkages with other groups, both nationally and internationally. There were significant impediments to the use of CMC in mobilising participation and in developing new global linkages. A key hindrance to the use of CMC to mobilise participation was the poverty of online engagements. Interpersonal relations can be difficult via email, and online involvement can be transitory. The chapter concludes that rather than mobilising new cohorts of participation CMC serves to strengthen existing networks.

Gothic preserves the illusion of darkness death, and sexuality in a world given over to the omnipresence of virtual light and life on screens. Where do simulations begin or end? Does horror or abjection counter their thrust or feed the cool machine with a fleeting bite? Ascriptions of ‘Gothic horror’ attempt to register repulsion at the enormity and excess of their act: its horror lies beyond reality or hyperreality even as it is rendered almost palatable in fictional and generic terms. To simulate vampirism is undertaken with the aim of breaking through sanitised screens of hyperreality, of finding something real in blood and horror. Violence, horror and abjection, in being rendered figures of excess, are opposed to or cast out of hyperreality only to the extent that their excision gives simulations some bite. Ghosts and spectres kept on returning in Gothic romances, popular dramas and spectacular entertainments. In his account of the discursive formation of modernity, Michel Foucault comments upon the function of monsters in processes of biological classification.