Chapter 5 analyzes the 2012 play Uzbek, an autobiographical solo-show about the author’s experience as an Uzbek migrant at the age of 19. Untangling the themes of the play, this chapter illustrates how, by artfully playing the space between sincerity and irony, Uzbek draws out the paradoxical nature of official documents in contemporary Russian culture and thereby addresses the precise complexities of the form in which it is performed. In this way, the chapter demonstrates how Russian documentary theatre artists ask their audiences to consider the contradictory status of documents as material testimonies that represent the untrustworthy aspects of official discourse in post-Soviet culture and, simultaneously, as influential arbiters of individual experience.

The international law of armed conflict grants rights and imposes duties upon the non-participants, which are known as neutrals and the relevant legal regime as neutrality. Occasionally it is conceded that in certain circumstances a neutral may offer assistance to one of the belligerents on the basis of benevolent neutrality. A neutral has the right to permit belligerent troops to take refuge in its territory, but must intern them and prevent them from taking any further part in the conflict. If the neutral is a party to the Prisoners of War Convention, their treatment, if interned, must at least equal that required for prisoners of war. Subject to any regulations imposed by their government, neutral nationals may continue trading with either or both belligerents, but the articles involved are liable to seizure as prize.

This chapter responds to issues surrounding mega sports events using a study of the political and international relations dimensions of South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Football World Cup. The findings presented confirm the importance of foreign policy in the political ambitions held for the event and provide discussion points concerning the position of middle powers within the international community and the policy tools available to them. They also highlight how the value placed on the foreign policy potential of the event, such as the perceived opportunity to demonstrate parity of status with the developed international community, reduced the capacity to pursue or protect domestic policy interests. This notwithstanding, positive outcomes were perceived in a range of areas which suggests that hosting events in developing country contexts may provide valuable opportunities to advance domestic and foreign policy interests if more is known about the true nature of the opportunities presented and how to realise them.

The Epilogue argues that parable was a form of religious storytelling actively explored by late medieval writers, both in their translations of well-known scriptural narratives and in their creation of original tales. It presents a case study focused on the tearing-of-the-pardon scene from Piers Plowman. While showing the parabolic qualities of that narrative, the formalist reading illuminates the epistemological aims of some Middle English storytelling. Writing a parable for his own time, Langland constructs a spiritually and socially formative tale centred on a paradox – the notion that a works-based soteriology is itself a form of pardon. Instead of making definitive statements about salvation, Langland’s parable teases readers into open-ended intellectual and ethical enquiry.

This chapter focuses closely on the origins of the Opium War, particularly its immediate trigger(s).The chapter examines how the Sino-British opium trade and its related issues were imagined and disputed in the immediate run-up to the First Anglo-Chinese War. It reveals that although the opium trade was closely interwoven with the ensuing confrontations, the debates on the subjects of opium, crisis and war can each be examined in its own right. Moreover, despite the fact that, in April 1840, the Whig government won the vote on its motion for war by only a small majority, the actual inclination to vigorous invention in the dispute with China was in fact greater than the voting results appear to indicate.

How being embodied shapes people’s experience of the world is an area of growing interest, with physical presentation understood as a resource in the production of identity and power. This chapter explores how the body, clothing and displays of emotion ‘spoke’ within courtrooms, shaping social and legal power relationships. Performances of dress, physical appearance and emotion could all be used to judge manly behaviour and character and so were implicated in the construction of justice. Men whose bodies or clothing suggested poverty undermined claims to a masculine character formed through respectability and a beautiful body. Eccentric men disrupted such norms, offering alternative readings of the male body. Through the press, such performances contributed to debates around Irish identity, civilisation and nationhood.

A non-international conflict has traditionally been one in which the governmental authorities of a state are opposed by groups within that state seeking to overthrow those authorities by force of arms. In accordance with the fundamental principle of customary international law concerning the independence of a sovereign authority, this type of conflict has traditionally been regarded as falling outside the ambit of international law. Apart from Article 3, common to the 1949 Conventions, the first major attempt to introduce international legal control of non-international conflicts by way of a statement of black-letter law is Protocol II, 1977, relating to the protection of victims of non-international conflicts. In non-international armed conflicts, as in those of an international character, civilians are to be protected against the dangers arising from the conflict.

Chapter 1 investigates how writers reconciled the labour politics of late medieval England with a Gospel story that subverts common economic practices. The post-plague economy, marked by labour shortage, depended upon the full employment of all able-bodied individuals, yet the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard features a landowner paying workers for a full day when they only worked a single hour. Middle English translations reveal sharp disagreement over whether the parable affirms or condemns contemporary socio-economic structures. The chapter initially focuses on translations within sermons and identifies a prominent trend to retell the parable in ways that encourage work in traditional social roles. It then argues that the well-known rendition of the Vineyard parable in the Middle English poem Pearl should be read as a counter-narrative challenging a predominant homiletic discourse: the Pearl retelling dismisses the analogies between the human and divine realms upon which the sermons depend and rejects the notion that salvation could depend upon prescribed social practices.

This chapter focuses on ekphrastic writing in the work of the American artist Raymond Pettibon – mostly pen-and-ink drawings with varying amounts of written texts – in order to explore and question the implicit opposition between the verbal and the visual that underlies many critical definitions of ekphrasis. It demonstrates how Pettibon introduces textual fragmentation and nonlinearity through his complex responses to and paraphrasing of ekphrastic authors, which opens up writing to the contingencies usually associated with drawing. Similarly, Pettibon’s texts are surveyed for typographic, orthographic, and chirographic characteristics, which emphasize writing’s status as simultaneously visual and verbal. The artist’s texts thus appear as though they have been written twice – graphically and verbally – marking them both inside and outside language. This transgressive power of the graphic in writing is traced via Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trait, that stroke or feature crucially linked to the gaze, which marks the space between the visible and invisible. The chapter proposes that this quality makes Pettibon’s work reducible to neither the discourse of language nor that of the image.

At the core of this chapter is the development of Old Poor Law historiography after 1750. The chapter argues that the thrust of such historiography has moved inexorably to a greater understanding of the lives and words of the poor. In this context, medical welfare has been sadly neglected. Historians have felt that sickness was so ubiquitous that the sick poor themselves cannot and should not be the subject of discrete study. The chapter disagrees.