This chapter reviews the discursive effects that the Democratic Security Policy (DSP) has on the construction and production of political identities. It investigates the discursive formations which characterise ‘state’, ‘nationals’ and ‘others’, and the material practices that hail collective subjects to adopt those specific subject positions. By spreading in/security practices throughout society, the DSP discloses how the power of in/security is a force that mobilises and produces. It became the instrument that enabled the exceptionality of war to become the normalcy of politics. It is shown that peace appears to be a derivative of security. Since Colombia appears to be a democratic nation under the threat of terrorism, peace and politics have to be sacrificed until security is achieved. A secure peace is one of the effects of the logic of in/security depicted in the DSP.

This chapter explores the various forms of housing available in the cities in the 1930s. It concentrates on the so-called ‘communal apartment’ which became one of the defining features of Stalin's Russia. The conditions in barracks and hostels were hardly conducive to ‘cultured’ living. Given the conditions in barracks and hostels, it was comparative luxury for a family to have a room of its own in a ‘communal apartment’ or kommunalka. The communal apartment facilitated state control over citizens, and even persuaded them to participate in the process. The housing crisis inevitably had a major impact on personal relations. Housing management had played a major role in identifying candidates for disenfranchisement during the first Five Year Plan, but their role diminished with the introduction in December 1932 of the so-called internal passport. Disenfranchisement was brought to an end in 1936.

This chapter analyses the relationship between alterity and the conception of ‘democracy-to-come’ that emerges in the later writings of Jacques Derrida. It argues that though the letter of democratic politics signifies its meaning as rule, the spirit of democracy is its radical openness to the alterity of others, and that, in this meeting between democracy's letter and its spirit rests the only hope for democracy. It contends that this willingness and openness, this alterity at the heart of political action is the very essence of democracy.

The historians produced a number of local studies of National Socialist Extermination Policies, which suggested that local contexts were as important in the study of the 'Final Solution' as the central directors of the Nazi regime. This chapter begins with a brief narrative of the transformation of the archival base for Holocaust historiography since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War has transformed the political limits of Holocaust historiography, especially in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The chapter provides the impact of the new material and the regional variation and diversity of the 'Final Solution'. Randolph Braham published both documentary readers and historical narratives which found the 'Final Solution' in Hungary the result of a Nazi blueprint for genocide, more or less personally implemented by Adolf Eichmann. The chapter also provides some thoughts on the implications of the historiography for the Holocaust metanarratives.

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of ‘literary ignorance’. It studies the question of literary ignorance in relation to the question of ignorance – what it feels like and what it is like to be ignorant – and defines literary ignorance as the inability of adults to make themselves understood to children. The chapter also identifies other aspects of human ignorance, including the literary history of ignorance. Several arguments that are studied throughout the book are also presented.

This chapter examines the legislative output of the European Union in terms of the Third Pillar and in relation to key legislative and agency developments in counter-terrorism and police co-operation. It considers the developing implementation gap which could undermine the European Union's claims to credibly ‘add value’ and evaluates the contribution of agencies such as Europol and Eurojust in counter-terrorism efforts. This chapter suggests that in comparison to the remainder of the Third Pillar's matters of common interest, counter-terrorism seems very much the poor relation both in terms of the quantity and quality of instruments used and the initial pre-September 11 plans for future development.

This chapter examines the way in which alterity is visually represented in Western media coverage of humanitarian disasters in the global South in terms of either pathologisation or victimization. It contends that the visual representation and mediation of distant events and persons have had an unprecedented constitutive power for the way that liberal democracy engages with alterity. This chapter establishes the representational and institutional conditions within which a humanitarian scopic regime operates and explores the aporetic nature of this regime's engagement with otherness and the dynamics through which it cannot but simultaneously negate and produce alterity in a manner that problematises the democratic imaginary. It also explores how cosmopolitan visuality posits alterity as both a fundamental problem and a challenge for democracy.

This chapter analyses the Third Pillar in order to establish the broader context in which the European Union's (EU) progress in counter-terrorism and police co-operation is made. It examines the proposed establishment of an ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’, which has been the overall objective of all internal security co-operation since the Treaty of Amsterdam. This chapter suggests that the AFSJ failed to address fully the concerns of the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) at the institutional level and argues that it will take significantly more political will than thus far been on show to overcome some of the outstanding conceptual questions regarding how the AFSJ can be successfully implemented.

This chapter notes how the book developed and introduces the themes of the study. The project grew largely from comparative and Russian literature, from work on Vladimir Odoevsky. This work developed to involve biographical research, criticism and translation. Such tentative beginnings were driven into some sort of initial focus by an entirely fortuitous invitation from a publisher to supply an introduction to a reprint of a valuable and neglected edition of Odoevsky's ‘Romantic Tales’. The four titular figures introduced here are being used towards an at least partial tracing of certain European literary developments, or ‘pathways’ into modern fiction.

It was fortunate that, in the nineteenth century, the circumstances in which people in Gibraltar found themselves were eventually conducive to an improvement in material living standards. The important contextual elements facilitating economic activity included, first, the political stability and legal infrastructure provided by colonial authority and, second, investment, eventually, in public services such as water supply and improved sanitation. It is possible that the circumstances for natives of Gibraltar began to shape a British Gibraltarian identity as ‘better off’ in comparison with the ‘other’ across the frontier. It is therefore important to consider for the twentieth century what happened to Gibraltar's occupational structure and to the material rewards that accrued to Gibraltarians. This chapter explores how Gibraltarians earned a living during the twentieth century, focusing on such economic activities as import and export, tourism, finance and gambling, and also looks at occupations, living standards and health.

The main concern of this book is the violent spiral of war that is created by the security programme of the Colombian state. The thesis is that the state security discourse contributes to shaping political identities in such a way that the writing of war is intermingled with the writing of peace, ultimately involving the moulding of political imaginaries in Colombia. The book concentrates on the Democratic Security Policy (DSP) as an example of how security discourses constitute political identities, illustrating how the promise of in/security written into the DSP ultimately feeds the violence it pledges to halt. It then describes how the danger of narco-terrorism contributes to the creation of attributes of both ‘self’ and ‘other’. This chapter provides an overview of the chapters included in the book.

Housing policy in reality amounted to simply trying to deal with the housing crisis in the cheapest way possible. It was claimed that women had the most to gain from communal living. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ resulted in enormous damage to the housing stock. It also led to the drastic depletion of the population. Both led in a need for more and better housing. Communal housing continued to exist alongside the single-family apartment. The Soviet Union may not have succeeded in bringing about genuine communal living, but it did bring together people from very different professions and educational backgrounds, placing them in the same districts, streets and apartments. Housing remains a problematic issue in post-Soviet Russia, but in a different way; instead of the ‘equality in poverty’ of the Soviet period, there is now a sharp differentiation between the housing of different socioeconomic groups.