Chapter 3 examines Obama’s rhetorical employment of the taboo as the situation in Syria progressed. Whatever his views against intervention, Obama would engage with the taboo as a core theme of his rhetoric on Syria. This is explained as a strategic move on the part of Obama; explicitly, that it comprises the construction of a strategic narrative. While his inadvertent reference to the taboo forced him towards a more interventionist stance, this also gave him the discursive tools to limit expectations for greater action to a policy that – while this did not reflect his preferences perfectly – was a significantly better fit with his desires than full-on intervention.

China's growing economic presence has both facilitated and been complemented by an increasing global political activism and self-confidence that amounts to a new Chinese foreign policy. Growing engagement with the wider East Asian region has become an important element of Chinese foreign policy since the 1990s. During the 1990s, Chinese foreign policy emphasised the primacy of economic growth and the consequent need to avoid being unnecessarily entangled in disputes with the West or controversial international issues. Taiwan has the potential to severely disrupt China's relations with the rest of the world. The relationship between the US and China is the most important in the world. From the global economy to global security and from climate change to human rights, China will play a major role in global governance.

This chapter explores an alternative mode of poststructuralist resistance which seeks to reconfigure contemporary notions of reality, rather than merely highlighting the simulated nature of all representations of the real. It examines specific performance models that attempt to circumvent the mediation process inherent in the representational practice, in their rejection of a theatrical framework that 'stages meaning' and thus mediates between its material and its watching audience. The chapter argues that Jean Baudrillard's later writings, contrary to popular opinion, do offer us a distinction between two different orders of the real; the real as mediated representation as distinct from the real as directly experienced. It analyses the ideological implications of performance models that would seek to evade the limitations of theatrical representation by offering their participants a more direct and experiential access to a reconfigured reality.

Several scholars have attempted to tackle the definitional ambiguity of political cartoons. Cartoons focused on the action of the Middle Eastern countries, leaders or populations were coded as dealing with regional issues. Far from being a single-issue conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is plagued by a multiplicity of insecurities. Israeli and Palestinian cartoons respond to diplomatic initiatives and outbursts of violence, despite dramatic differences in political freedoms, economic structures and social norms. Every Israeli and Palestinian cartoon pertaining to the conflict was coded either as expressing a positive or negative mood. The issues over which conflicts are waged are essential for understanding the nature of resolution. Acceptable borders for a future Palestinian state largely depend on the prominence of religious, security or demographic fears. Demographic fears mean that land with large population centres is least desirable.

The chapter asks whether Bourdieu prolonged the dilemma of the activist intellectual which Merleau-Ponty had articulated and which derived from the Western tradition indicatively absorbed and reproduced by Schutz and Gurwitsch. It suggests three possible responses to Bourdieu’s work. It prefers a particular response but concludes that the merit of the book is that it provides information to enable readers themselves to assess the value of the Bourdieu paradigm in their socio-cultural contexts.

West Cork was an outstanding and clear-cut version of the wider Irish experience, before and after the Famine. North Tipperary was not the most famine-ravaged part of Ireland, but it became the most turbulent. By the 1830s, Ireland was already becoming a primary supplier of emigrants to the great and insatiable needs of the United States. Emigration from south-west Ireland in the decades between 1770 and 1830 followed a clear sequence in the rural transformation. First came the amassment of population without any appreciable relief by migration. Much more significant was the emigration of Richard Talbot in 1818 from Tipperary to Upper Canada. T.J Elliott discovers the pathways and passages to America of the Protestant emigrants: using methods of family reconstruction and historical biography, he connects both ends of the 'migration corridors'.

Chapter 2 presents the key theories and concepts addressed in the book. At the centre of the theoretical framework is implementation theory. The chapter synthesises theories of implementation which have sought to conceptualise the way in which law and policy are put into action. There are two main approaches – the ‘top–down’ school and the ‘bottom–up’ school of policy implementation. The second theoretical dimension is Europeanisation which is also illustrative of ‘top–down’ and ‘bottom–up’ approaches. Interpretations of Europeanisation, as predominantly about governance and conceptualisations of Europeanisation as institutionalism inform the scholarship on the implementation of EU legislation and its impact on the polity, policies and politics of the member states. The third discussion addresses the concept of multi-level governance which influences EU policy implementation. Multi-level governance serves as a framework to link our understanding of implementation theory and Europeanisation, which encompass the various levels of governance – European, national, regional and local. A model of analysis apprised by the theoretical discussion is presented in the penultimate section of this chapter. This model will inform the case studies discussed in the second part of the book.

In Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–Petushki the character Venichka, a version of the author, takes an increasingly surreal train ride towards Petushki, a town at the end of a Moscow line which he believes to be like paradise. Unlike other drinker novels, where the committed central drinker’s behaviour is regarded as outside social norms, Venichka is surrounded by like-minded Russian souls who also drink continuously. One of the central conceits of the novel explored in this chapter is thus the role of Venichka as a Russian Everyman who is simultaneously alienated from the state, and paradoxically also from the people – drinking is his chosen vocation rather than a form of dulling self-medication. Venichka’s alienation is manifest in his ongoing argument with God, Russia, and fate. The chapter assesses how the novel refuses to privilege rationality, philosophy, or empiricism in its determination to fully exist in a country/world which lacks any kind of coherence, and offers a comparison between this novel and Exley’s A Fan’s Notes in their treatment of the individual, drink, and the nation state.

This chapter proposes a new grouping of Exeter Book riddles which share a semantic and metaphorical interest in ‘craft’ and ‘sound’: the acoustic craft riddles. In these riddles, worked objects speak, ring, and resound, while the practices which transform raw materials into artefacts are often euphonious and resonant in their own right. The soundscape of the craftsman’s workshop – its musical and melodious contexts – and the gifting of sounding voice to worked objects opens up the riddles to a celebration of the most meaningful of all audible human gifts: language, both spoken and written. This chapter explores how the acoustic craft riddles offer us a new critical picture of riddlic textuality which puts the material into a playful and rich relationship with the aural: sound and language can be crafted, like raw materials, in the production of aural artefacts. The riddles do not only rely on the voices of their poets; their linguistic mechanisms presuppose the social and communal value of the text within the word exchange: they leave space for the reader’s own voice to resonate in response and to re-craft solutions and propositions through the shaping power of their own voices.

Tensions between Australia and the United States over administration of the Fulbright Program soon became apparent in contests over which researchers should be given awards. The United States retained control over the decisions within the Board of Foreign Scholarships in Washington and on occasion exerted pressure about the kind of scholars that were wanted. Australian selection committees tended to favour scientists, the United States wanted to send humanities and social science scholars as more appropriate interpreters of culture. From these discussions we can see what US cultural diplomacy looked like and what influences were brought to bear.

Verbal dexterity was particularly useful within a legal system where the cross-examination was a key mechanism for accessing truth. This chapter explores the cross-examination as a vehicle for truth and a technique for negotiating legal and social power relationships. This chapter begins with an exploration of how Irish-language speakers and Irish-English speakers with a ‘strong brogue’ were represented in the press, highlighting the tensions that multilingual Ireland caused for a truth formed through wordplay. It then explores banter and joke-telling as a key strategy during cross-examination, before looking at the limits of the possibilities of humour, particularly for elite men who conformed to codes of honourable manliness. Through providing an opportunity for men from different ranks to challenge lawyerly manliness, the cross-examination became a space to assert Irishness as an identity, one that was legitimate, manly and rooted in the way of life of the lower orders.

Chapter 2 introduces one of the group’s key concepts – what Oldham called the ‘frontier’ between faith and social life – and examines how the group defined a socially relevant religious worldview despite there being dramatically divergent viewpoints among Christians about the relationship between faith and society. The group saw an emerging ‘convergence’ in Christian demands for a radical reshaping of dominant ideas, cultural norms and social practice in accordance with Christian understandings of human nature and the purposes of social life. They sought ‘middle axioms’ to express how eternal, universal Christian principles applied to modern, complex societies. Five theological influences on the group stand out: (1) a self-critical theological ‘liberalism’, (2) the ‘Christian realism’ of Reinhold Niebuhr, (3) the neo-Thomist philosophy of Jacques Maritain, (4) ‘continental’ Protestant theology (which was largely rejected) and (5) varieties of ‘personalism’

Meet Martin Feinberg, the sole American basketball player on the storied Paris Université Club (PUC) roster in 1956. That December, Feinberg organised a team tour through the American Midwest, the first such journey undertaken by a French basketball club. PUC’s travels (including a 1962 visit) were not subsidised by the US government and were thus not ‘official’ exchanges. The trips were nevertheless strong examples of sport’s ability to carry social and political messages with deep consequences. Basketball was first played in Europe in 1893 in a small sports hall located at 14, rue de Trévise, in Paris, France. Basketball, however, remained a niche endeavour in a country that favoured British sports, notably football and rugby. The young PUC players who travelled to the United States were thus not the ‘typical’ representatives of their generation. Yet many of them, even the more anti-American socialists, came away with favourable impressions of France’s sister republic in most matters, save that of race relations. ‘Barnstorming Frenchmen’ examines how the earliest French-American basketball exchanges created lasting impressions on young players in ways traditional diplomacy and diplomats rarely could. Set against the larger context of post-war French anxieties and reconstruction, French–American Cold War diplomacy and race relations in both countries, these trips are noteworthy.