This chapter assesses whether diversity has a tendency to lead to more conflict or to friendly contact in Britain and the United States, evaluates the effect of diversity for whites and for minorities, and studies the connection between diversity in a locality and how community-minded and communally active its citizens are. It also discusses communal life in both countries and measures the combined effect of the potential channels, which could weaken or strengthen community life.

This chapter introduces the ghost story, which previously incorporated a wide range of serious social issues. It examines the development of the belief in ghosts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. It then tries to explain how to read the spectre, before ending with a detailed summary of the next eight chapters.

This chapter examines a theory of spectrality that relates it to a specific field of economics. It shows that the connections between economics and the ghostly relate to the perception of paper money, at a time when such promissory notes were redeemed for gold. It reveals that paper money was previously considered as spectral money (not ‘real’), and like ghosts had a liminal presence. This chapter also aims to present a new theorisation of the spectral that allows a re-reading of the economic contexts of the nineteenth century.

Nuclear energy has peaceful applications and non-peaceful applications. The centrepiece of all political efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons lies in attempting to harmonise the proliferation of nuclear reactors with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. What all nuclear reactors have in common is nuclear fuel, which must contain at least some uranium in the form of the isotope uranium-235 (or very much more rarely 233), or plutonium, or both. This is usually described as ‘fissile material’. This chapter is about nuclear technology and the technical interconnections between commercial and military nuclear programmes. It also discusses the spread of nuclear technology and the use to which it has been put by a number of states, both inside and outside the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to bring them close to or even take them over the nuclear weapons threshold. Moreover, the chapter provides an overview on critical mass and nuclear bombs, the differences between the United States and its natural allies over nuclear proliferation, radioactive waste and nuclear accidents and uranium enrichment.

‘Safeguards’ is the slightly euphemistic term officially used to describe the measures taken by the Agency (or Vienna Agency) independently to verify the declarations made by states to the International Atomic Energy Agency concerning their nuclear material (principally enriched uranium and plutonium) and the uses it is put to have peaceful ends. This chapter looks at safeguards in the context of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, whose effectiveness requires centrally organised carrots and sticks. The deterrent apparatus is in two parts: the first involves the timely detection of an unauthorised diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to military purposes; the second part is the adverse consequences for the state in question of having been caught (economic sanctions, at a minimum). This chapter is much more concerned with detection and how this might most reliably be ensured in the triple context of: the limited resources for nuclear inspection; the requirement minimally to disrupt the national economic life of states; and the necessity of respecting the principle of sovereign equality between states.

This chapter notes that the central premise of the study is an attempt to move towards a greater historical understanding of the condition of ‘the forgotten’ citizens in Northern Ireland—the victims of political violence—and to make recommendations as to what can be done to empower them as part of the transition from conflict to peace. The book focuses on victims' rights in Northern Ireland as a matter of political, social, cultural and legal priority. It aims to make a genuine contribution to the theoretical foundations of transitional justice and truth recovery.

This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.

This chapter discusses what happens when discomfort with diversity is given an airing, which is what happened during the British campaign of 2005, and observes that the media sometimes treat facts on immigration with outright contempt, which can help distort public opinion. It also shows that words are powerful – by increasing anxiety – but the extent to which they do so depends on the number of immigrants that are living locally.

This chapter considers the ‘illegal’—but not necessarily illegitimate—aspects of citizen politics, including terrorism. It considers a number of different forms of political engagement, all of which share the feature of being unrelated to representative democracy. Citizen government and involvement include a broad range of activities, legal as well as illegal, new as well as old. The discussion turns to the mechanisms through which the citizenry can be consulted other than the ballot box.

This chapter begins with an overview of the main political traditions in Scotland, examining how party autonomy goals have been shaped by different ideological discourses. Then, it examines how parties conceptualise the ‘nation’ and Scotland's position within Britain and Europe. Next, it introduces the European dimension, with consideration of party responses to European integration since 1979. It argues that Scottish parties have continuously re-positioned themselves on Europe. In the early 1980s, Labour and the SNP opposed European integration as a Conservative free-market project that would undermine Scottish values. This changed in the late 1980s with a new emphasis on the social and political dimensions of integration. Labour and the Liberal Democrats began to view subsidiarity as intrinsic to Scottish devolution, whilst the SNP re-conceptualised the EU as an alternative arena to the UK for security and trading opportunities.