As David Kilcullen would have it, contemporary terrorism is often a key element in what he defines as ‘hybrid’ warfare. The new social media, the old mass media, increasing urbanization throughout the world and the proximity of the major cities to vital waterways have helped to create situations in which new wars combine guerrilla warfare, urban guerrilla tactics, terrorism and the adroit use of the media to pose challenges that are difficult to defeat. Leftist conflicts in Central and South America, the Middle East, and India and Pakistan offer illustrations.

Public modesty became paradigmatic of a society that rendered sexuality into a threat, a shameful and dangerous activity from which one needed to be protected. The history of public modesty conceived as one of the spatialization of sexuality is a history of its "visibilization". It posits the examination of the ensemble of practices that transformed sexuality into a spectacle, that is to say, into an event whose specificity is to expose oneself. Sexual life was no longer organized by either marriage or space. We live in a sexual space that judges have incrementally constructed since the beginning of the nineteenth century without ever having raised, during the last reform of the French Penal Code, the issue of either its artificiality or its relationship with the society that we sought to leave behind. In this sense, the history of public modesty can be seen as an archeology of contemporary sexual scenography.

A brief historical overview of the discourses by which in Britain, until the late 1990s, popular genres were excluded from accounts of national cinemas, and of the gradual but very slow recognition, from the late 1990s, of these genres as worthy objects of film studies.

This chapter discusses Daniil Kharms – Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev in real life – a writer who was only able to gain limited local renown as an avant-garde eccentrist from Leningrad and a children's writer of the 1920s and the 1930s. However, he is also considered as the main example of a certain ‘Russian brand of absurdity’. The chapter shows the changes that occurred in Kharms's works, and shows that the boundaries between genres and the differences between fragment and whole are fluid in his works. It then looks at Kharms's use of the poetics of extremism, which he constantly adopted at various levels, and humour theory, which is considered as an essential approach to his work. The chapter also considers Kharms's writing, which can be closely connected to writers during and after his period.

The concept of 'political policing' took on a more important role as colonial governments attempted to maintain control throughout the end stages of decolonisation. Political policing encouraged a closer surveillance of public organisations and prominent political figures ostensibly to ensure that appropriate individuals gained centre stage at independence. In this way, the colonial police became pawns in the imperial endgame. After 1948, policing procedures acquired a different momentum indicating that the very nature of the colonial state had changed. The Special Branch emerged as an alternative and additional source of information-gathering and processing, dedicated to the pursuit of political and security intelligence, once the domain of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Intelligence-gathering within the colonies seems to have muddled along until the onset of the Second World War, when a real opportunity for change and modernisation occurred.

Docudramas require pre-production research and this is a key marker of difference between docudrama and other kinds of drama. The facts portrayed in television docudrama are subject to pre-production checks, with the script drafts constantly referring to lawyers to ensure that films are legally defensible at the level of fact. This chapter focuses on the dramatic performance itself, in terms of the realisation of the docudrama in front of the camera-eye and microphone-ear, and in terms of what actors do when they act. It provides the comparisons between the television studio and the theatre space, between the activities taking place within each, and between the relative juxtapositions in the two spaces of performers, crews, and audience. The theatrical process depends upon a specific occasion when audience and actors meet in the same time and space.

The documents in this section explore production and commerce: the effects of monetary affluence, the guilds and markets, government interventions to stimulate production, to regulate exchange, and to control the city's population. Population growth was so strong that before 1300 several cities had to limit immigration from the countryside. Alongside production there developed the techniques and skills of international trade and finance, particularly in Tuscany, and where these were combined with production, there was strong economic growth and enrichment. In Italy 'between 1050 and 1300, population, wealth and resources concentrated in cities and commercial activity to a degree without precedent in the ancient or medieval world'.

This chapter explores several of Samuel Beckett's works, where one can find traces of the absurd. It first takes a look at traces of Kafka in Beckett's work, and then studies the prose fiction of Beckett's prewar period, a period that covers three works: Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy. This is followed by a discussion of Beckett's foray into drama, wherein Endgame and Waiting for Godot are examined. The chapter also explores the Kharmasian trace in Beckett, views Watt as the epitome of Beckettian absurdism and considers the nature of the absurd in terms of Beckett.