This introductory chapter discusses the dynamic imaginative engagement of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English dramatists and audiences with French contexts and texts. It examines how Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France demonstrates the construction and representation of nationhood, as well as the intertextual relationships indicated in this study. This chapter also tries to map a range of relations between diverse French discourses and particular aspects of English tragedy.

This chapter explores the question of citizenship-building processes in relation to women asylum seekers and refugees and their civic participation not only in discrete refugee women's community associations or organisations but also in (longer established) migrant women's community associations. It first discusses the relationship between the question of citizenship, refugee women, and their associations. It then presents an overview of the establishment and development of refugee women's associations in Britain and France. It also examines the forms of activities and activism in which refugee women engage. Finally, it asks what conclusions can be drawn about these forms of activities/activism in terms of drawing this section of the population into a more inclusive model of citizenship.

This chapter considers the mother's physical presence in relation to spaces; to the geography that signifies and comprises her social function and status. The focus is upon the representation of domesticity in domestic tragedies, which turn upon the dangerous potential of motherhood in an uncertain Protestant world, and city comedies, which farcically expose the tensions and hypocrisies of an environment where social and economic considerations are shown to predominate. The complex social structures in such a world are clearly adumbrated in A Warning for Fair Women, A Yorkshire Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, where the family is the smallest unit of an integrated society that is based upon the importance of geographic locality and economic interdependence. In such conditions, maternity is vulnerable, and with it, the fragile stability of the social structures that depend upon it.

This book has grouped a number of central questions into four central pillars—the ‘four Cs’: context, causes, characteristics and consequences. Hence, the book asked: What were the contexts in which Hugo Chávez emerged? What were the immediate causes of his emergence? What policies have been implemented—in other words what are the characteristics of chavismo? And finally, what consequences is chavismo having on Venezuela? This book has also examined the socioeconomic policies of the Chávez regime to show the extent to which Chávez has departed from established globalisation processes, so gaining legitimacy and establishing hegemony; the relative levels of democracy and authoritarianism found in the Chávez presidency; and Venezuela's foreign policy placing it within Anthony Payne's theory of the ‘global politics of unequal development’. Finally, the book has argued that populism is a key explanatory concept for understanding politics in Latin America but that it is imperative to place the national context within the wider international structure in order to fully understand the phenomenon.

What impact did the legal system in South Africa have on racial violence? This chapter argues that the impact of the courts registered in two ways. Firstly, the paternalist sensibilities and a commitment to the ‘rule of law’ within the bench firmly shut the door on public and communal violence against blacks. Although the Supreme Court largely overlooked the lethal ‘pogrom’ that striking mine workers unleashed against innocent blacks during the 1922 strike, sentencing to death just one of the men who murdered innocent black bystanders, South Africa's legal system was strongly opposed to the quasi-legal ideology of ‘repressive justice’ which prevailed in the Southern states. Secondly, courts in South Africa were quite willing to accommodate private racial violence, which, whether in the form of serious assaults or murder, became an ingrained feature of race relations in South Africa.

The Labour Party government elected in 1997 was committed to an expansive legislative programme after almost twenty years in opposition, and was keen to ensure that the most efficient mechanisms were in place to secure that programme. To achieve this, the government established a Modernisation Committee to implement the necessary changes in parliament. A significant proportion of this Committee's time has been spent on efficiency matters similar to those explored previously by the Procedure Committee. The notion of modernisation has been utilised by the government to update and redesign procedures primarily (although not exclusively) for its own benefit. These changes have included alterations to the legislative process, adjustments to House sitting hours, and the creation of Westminster Hall as a parallel chamber. The Labour government's constitutional reform programme included a commitment to establish a select committee for the specific purpose of modernising the House of Commons.

This chapter highlights the prevalence of religious imposture in early modern England, including prophets, visionaries and exorcists. It suggests that the occurrence of religious individuals who claimed spiritual power and thought themselves prophets, exorcists or healers is not a peculiarity of the early modern period, but rather a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. The chapter explains that religious impostors during this period can be divided into a category of people who deliberately perpetrated a fraud, a larger category who believed in their own religious powers and role but were rejected by some contemporaries, and a category of people who functioned as puppets. It argues that the language of religious imposture had reflected the struggle between denominations since the Reformation, and was again a significant rhetoric tool in the debates over probability and certainty, and over the meaning of credulity and incredulity, in the late seventeenth century.

Several critics have noted that longitudinal documentary kinship with soap opera is usually in the form of a general reference to their status as 'never ending stories' rather than to any deeper structural affinity. The long doc work includes Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. Both long docs and soaps rely on viewers being able to form relatively strong empathic bonds with a number of central characters. Just like producers of television soaps, long doc filmmakers become sensitively attuned to the potential that lies in long docs' serial mode of presentation. Both long docs and soaps are classic examples of an open form of narrative that addresses its audience in a markedly different manner from 'closed' narrative forms.

This chapter evaluates the role of political economy and domestic institutional arrangements in the materialisation of hegemonic discourses. It examines whether the nature of political economy is sufficient to account for the materialisation process of hegemonic discourses and evaluates how useful is the ‘goodness-of-fit’ hypothesis found in Europeanisation studies. This chapter also analyses whether the combination of the nature of political economy and the nature of interest representation can account for the materialisation process of hegemonic discourses.

This chapter studies Shakespeare's Richard II, a play that naturally figured in Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France, and reviews its relation to the propagandistic La Guisiade. It focuses on Shakespeare's play as a tragedy instead of history, and considers what the French precursor has to show about the phenomenon of the psychologically self-destructive tragic hero.

This chapter turns to the Gorbachev era, investigating the more honest appraisal of the housing crisis which appeared in the press, the move towards a private housing market, and the end of a socialist housing policy. It also examines the ways in which both the housing crisis, and the new approaches to the problem were discussed in Ogonek and Rabotnitsa throughout the Gorbachev era, and how the socialist approach to housing which had characterised the previous seventy years was overturned. The housing shortage inevitably encouraged speculation in the distribution of living space. Privatisation would encourage more financial investment in the construction and maintenance of housing, relieve municipalities and enterprises of their responsibilities in relation to the housing they currently owned, and give people more choice and control over their lives. The propiska or registration system remained an impediment to the creation of a genuinely free market in housing.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about the ‘crisis’ of democracy that is manifest in the increased violence provoked by radical difference or alterity in Western democratic communities and its significance for the thinking and the practical development of democracy today. This volume examines the debates about the relationship between democratic community and intolerable or violently untolerated ‘others’ and the debates about the nature of identity and the possibility of radical democratic critique. It explores the relation between democracy and alterity with respect to power, with respect to the production of subjects and citizens, and with respect to political intervention and resistance. It also analyses the nature of democracy as alterity with respect to the nature of political critique and with respect to the aporetic quality of democracy itself.

This chapter focuses on the second cycle of contention in Italy from 1972 to 1977. It describes the phases of innovation of the movement in the period 1972–3, its diffusion in 1974–6, and its engagement in 1976–7. This chapter contends that the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) played a determining role in the engagement phase, steering it to a conclusion which turned out to be disastrous for the movements and for the party itself. It discusses the contribution of the women's liberation movement to the rising phase of the cycle and explains how the movement's stress on culture, ideology and personal relationships promoted a withdrawal from the political sphere which helped it to weather the repression and demobilisation of the late 1970s.

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.

Previous democratic regimes in Venezuela, preceding the emergence of Hugo Chávez, failed in the long term to establish policies aimed at lessening social divisions thus losing popular legitimacy. Chávez exploited this lack of legitimacy and presented an alternative model seeking to democratise the political space, furthering participation of the popular classes and thus gaining the legitimacy denied the previous puntofijista regime. Central to this strategy was the use of discourse dividing the social space along antagonistic lines—el pueblo versus the oligarchy and partidocracia. This chapter examines the socioeconomic policies of the Chávez government, using a structure drawn from Susan Strange's book States and Markets based on four areas of political economy—finance, production, security and knowledge. Strange's framework of analysis for international political economy is based on four basic values: wealth, security, freedom and justice. This chapter also discusses Chávez's populism and how his government is seeking to alter the position of Venezuela within the wider international framework of globalisation.