Filmic reality is dependent on the attitude of an individual to see the film as a part of reality instead of its representations. This chapter focuses on the works of André Bazin who goes beyond political modernism and its logic of illusion versus reality in the cinema. His writings on the ‘Ontology of the photographic image’ and the ‘Myth of total cinema’ appear fundamentally to cement his approach to cinema as one that is unflinchingly representational. For him, cinema has the capacity to create reality in a specific way, one that conceives of modes of life in an ‘authentic’ manner. The kind of authenticity Bazin envisages is explicitly non-representational—it has nothing to do with reflecting, representing or capturing reality, and instead is about creating modes of life that are to be considered ‘real’.

This chapter addresses sovereigntist discourse. Sovereigntism bears similarities to the legalistic discourse in as much as it equates order with the rule of law. Yet according to sovereigntists, legal institutions have to be embedded in constitutional structures, which the international society of states is largely lacking. For this reason, sovereigntists consider the domestic level of states as the only viable and legitimate venue for the enforcement of human rights. They emphasise that courts are only able to guarantee due process if they are incorporated into the constitutional structures and democratic checks and balances within a state. For sovereigntists, international legal institutions rest upon the consent of single states. Viewed from this perspective, advocates of sovereigntism also criticise the universal aspirations of the ICC, as it claims to have jurisdiction over citizens of non-party states.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement laid down procedures for the accelerated release of prisoners affiliated to groups that had committed to a ‘complete and unequivocal ceasefire’ and acknowledged the need to ‘facilitate the reintegration of prisoners into the community by providing support both prior to and after release, including assistance directed towards availing of employment opportunities, re-training and/or re-skilling and further education’. This chapter explores the extent to which prisoners have managed to leave behind inter-community mistrust to attempt societal reconstruction from below, within a context of hostility towards them beyond their immediate community of support and personal difficulty in achieving reintegration into mainstream society. The activism and negotiation associated with civil society is evident in the vast array of non-governmental organisations operating in Northern Ireland. Community restorative justice schemes brought former prisoners into ever-closer contact with state agencies and moved armed groups away from the arbitrary dispensing of local ‘justice’. The chapter again indicates the greater level of social capital within republican communities, affording a greater level of opportunities for developmental work for republican prisoners.

As far as the modern food economy is concerned, the willingness of retailers to respond and adapt to consumer preferences should not be underestimated. European consumers' distrust of GMOs has elicited an unmistakable response from major food retailers throughout Europe. In the case of the major food scandals, scares and crises discussed in this book, the risk politics of the food economy has been shaped by happenings that give every appearance of being well beyond control. However, in order to exercise a greater degree of choice than people have now, they need to be much more prepared and much better equipped to act with our fellow citizens to shape risk politics.

This chapter discusses the phenomenological roots of hermeneutic studies and forms a link to narratives accounts of identity. It then focuses on a turn in international relations that is concerned with meaning and which is tied into the real world relations of global politics through narratives. It considers the role of radical phenomenology as one of the roots of interpretivism, which in turn has influenced narrative. It also examines the theme of narrative identity and discusses founding events and storied culture. The chapter ends with a section on the literary international relations.

Passing is typically associated with a period stretching from post-Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement (the 1890s to the 1960s) or, even more specifically, yoked to the years of the Harlem Renaissance. According to Gayle Wald, by the time John Howard Griffin's memoir, Black Like Me, appeared in 1961, ‘passing was already beginning to “pass” out of style for African Americans, going the way of Jim Crow buses and segregated lunch counters’. This book examines texts in which protagonists not only play at racial and gender identities, but where authors play on the boundaries between novel and other types of textual production, between fiction and history, between novelistic genres, between author(ial persona) and protagonist. It analyses novels that pass as memoirs, as well as narratives whose dramatic impetus often derives from embedded documentation: letters, emails, poems, medical reports, dictionary or encyclopaedia entries. The book argues that passing and postmodernism make compatible bedfellows, and that only by revealing the instability of the category of blackness can the equation of ‘race’ with ‘blackness’ be disputed and ultimately dismantled.

This chapter investigates whether Europeanisation has been a catalyst for change in the pattern of governance in Ireland. It presents a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of Europeanisation on Ireland and relates the various conceptualisations of Europeanisation to the Irish case. This chapter contends that while Europeanisation has influenced changes in Irish policy-making and implementation, the impact of Europeanisation was mediated by domestic forces. It also analyses the way in which key variables such as intergovernmental relations, political parties and cultural values have been affected to differing degrees by Europeanisation.

This chapter highlights the importance of prisoner releases in peace processes beyond Northern Ireland. Where the terms of such releases are ambiguous, or freedom is used overtly as a bargaining chip, the beneficial effects are often only brief. The chapter offers a set of ‘ideal-type’ conditions for prisoner releases, to maximise the chances of such measures making a positive contribution to sustainable peace. It also highlights how the literature on demilitarisation, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) has tended to overlook the centrality of prisoner releases to a successful peace process. Moreover, the focus has often been upon the mechanics of demobilisation of ‘armies’ at the expense of a serious consideration of whether those former combatants have adapted their political views. Disarmament as part of the overall DDR process represents a dilemma for governments. Former prisoners and other combatants often form part of the newly reconstituted armed forces, as has happened in Namibia, Tajikistan and Cambodia, among other countries.

This chapter presents an analysis and interpretation of the World Social Forum (WSF) process. By its nature, its subject matter is broader and more discursive than the more specific case studies, but it also deals with the fundamental issues of solidarity, democracy, and grassroots engagement. More than any other development, the WSF process has come to embody the new democratic and participatory ideals of the broader international resistance against neoliberalism with its aspiration to provide an open and enabling space for debate about alternatives to neoliberalism.

This chapter examines how the legislative frameworks within which the agencies work affect policy. It reports the influences on policy of organisational problems within the Garda Síochána and of the traditionally difficult relations between the Defence Forces and their civilian overseers. The Garda was vulnerable to government pressure when conducting the re-evaluation of Irish national security policy after 9/11. The entire Defence Organisation became tied into a policy focus on the new generation of overseas mission. The top command structure of the Defence Forces is problematic for national security policy. It is noted that Air Corps management estimates that regaining jet aviation pilot and maintenance capabilities to prevent and intercept threats could take many years. The model of historical institutionalism has helped to identify and explain the significance of key moments in the development of Irish policy. The system of centralised political control poses difficulties for national security policy.

This chapter discusses the enemification—or the cultural construction of an enemy—and its location within a wider body of work on colonialism and post-colonialism. It addresses the argument that stories play an important role overlapping the gap between culture and politics. The next section discusses the issue of heroic stories that are grounded in myths, which helped create a narrative of resistance in Kosovo and Chechnya and polarise the Serbian and Russian sense of collective identity. This chapter also reviews ideas of narrative and plot, and reviews these ideas in relation to culture and empire in Russia.

This chapter covers the legalistic discourse which achieved a hegemonic position in the course of the debate about the ICC. The legalistic discourse draws upon the Enlightenment tradition and adopts its emphasis on progress understood as rationalisation, legalization and the professionalisation of politics. According to legalists, the ultimate telos of progress in international relations consists of a just and peaceful international order that is based upon international law. Moreover, proponents of legalism hold that such an international order has to be symmetrical in the sense that all states are considered as equal regardless of their actual size and power. A specific feature of the legalistic discourse is the fact that it comprises two different strands. The first perceives the international society of states as the most vital point of reference for human rights, whereas the second puts the world society of individuals to the fore.