Abbas Kiarostami (born 1940) is the most influential and controversial post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker and one of the most highly celebrated directors in the international film community of the last decade. During the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, at a time when Iranians had such a negative image in the West, his cinema introduced the humane and artistic face of his people. Kiarostami has been involved in the making of over 40 films since 1970, including shorts and documentaries; he first attained global critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend's House? [1987], Life and Nothing More… [1991], and Through the Olive Trees [1994]), A Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).

Kiarostami belongs to a generation of filmmakers who created the so called “New Wave,” a movement in Iranian cinema that started in the 1960s, before the revolution of 1979. Directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Dariush Mehrjui, Sohrab Shaheed Saless, Amir Naderi, Bahram Beizai and Parviz Kimiavi were the pioneers of this movement. These filmmakers had a number of techniques in common, including the use of poetic dialogue and of allegorical narrative as a way of dealing with complex political and philosophical issues. They were followed not only by Kiarostami, but also by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahman Ghobadi, Jafar Panahi and Hassan Yektapanah.

As I write this, the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD), jointly implemented by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) in New Delhi and The Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) in The Hague, comes to an end after 25 years of successful research collaboration between researchers in India and The Netherlands. The findings reported in this book come from a large project titled, ‘Care of the Aged: gender, institutional provisions and social security in India, The Netherlands and Sri Lanka’ carried out with the financial support of the IDPAD.

Since 1981, IDPAD had five phases of research competition to which both Indian and Dutch scholars were invited to submit proposals on different themes of development issues and selected the best 20 to 25 proposals at each phase for funding. In the first phase (1981–4), IDPAD funded 17 proposals on the five research themes: Small-scale industrialization, Export-oriented industrialization, Multinational Corporations, Dairy Development and Women's Studies. The Centre for Development Studies (CDS) and IDPAD have worked together since its inception, however, from the second phase to the fifth phase, CDS faculty members always held research projects with IDPAD.

In its second phase (1985–9), IDPAD funded 19 proposals on research themes such as New International Economic Order, Comparative Perspectives of Asian Rural Transformation and Recent Trends in European Society.

The toughest interview for me ever to get was with Clint Eastwood (born 1930). My meetings with John Wayne and Sam Peckinpah were tough, but Clint was the toughest.

I had taught a course on Eastwood's films at a university where I spent my teaching career, and I took shots from some alumni who thought he wasn't a fit subject. Of course, he was. And, as time has passed, he has proven to be even more so.

I had tried for 30 years to get an interview. One time I called one of his people and played my trump card. I mentioned how well my interview with Wayne had gone. But my trump card was blown away.

“Mr. Eastwood hates John Wayne,” the man on the phone said curtly. Oops. I felt like collateral damage between two icons at high noon.

Intermittently I made further overtures–I sent Clint a book of poetry signed by Robinson Jeffers, the poet of Big Sur, Monterey, Carmel, and environs. But I imagine it never got to him; it probably wound up on eBay.

Finally, fate smiled. Rob Burke, one of my former students, had become vice president for marketing and creative services for Lakeshore International. Warner Bros. turned down Eastwood's project Million Dollar Baby, but when Lakeshore agreed to do it, Warner Bros. changed their mind and hastily signed on.

In January 2003, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada stated in his report for 2001–2, to the Parliament that:

These are extremely harsh words, when expressed by an officer of Parliament with a majority government in the House. The Commissioner was referring to various acts or draft legislations of the government, all prepared in the aftermath of 11 September:

• Canada Customs and Revenue Agency's new passenger database;

• The unrestricted access by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to all information that airline companies collect on their passengers and its transfer to foreign authorities under the Aeronautics Act;

• Dramatically enhanced state powers to monitor our communications, especially international ones;

• A possible national ID card with biometric identifiers, as advanced by the Citizenship and Immigration Minister, on the model of that which has already been adopted for permanent residents; and

• The government's support of precedent-setting video surveillance of public streets by the RCMP.

Melvin Van Peebles (born 1932), the godfather of ghetto-punk cinema, has assumed many personas in his decades-long career as an artist and self-reinventing iconoclast. But he long ago earned cine-immortality as the writer-director and revolutionary spirit behind Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the independently financed, anti-establishment 1971 film that broke box office records and established, for better and worse, the lucrative template for blaxploitation film. Made for $500,000 (including a $50,000 contribution from Bill Cosby), the film depicted a mustachioed sex-show hustler who goes on the run–and keeps running–after assaulting a pair of racist cops. Even with its fragmented, Nouvelle Vague-style aesthetics and a daunting MPAA rating (“Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury” was the movie's tagline), Sweetback's made morethan $10 million upon its release, mostly from African-American audiences who had never before seen such a vivid, angry expression of black-rebel consciousness on the big screen.

In May 2004, I sat down to chat with Van Peebles and his actordirector son, Mario (born 1957), whose own projects (New Jack City [1991], Posse [1993], Panther [1995]) reflect a conscientious attention to racial disparity, civil rights history and the persistence of hoary old African-American stereotypes in mainstream Hollywood film. The pair were in New York promoting Baadasssss! (aka How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass!) (2003), Mario's Oedipal docu-fiction homage to his father's personal struggles in making Sweetback's, in which he cast himself as Melvin and his own son as a 13-year-old version of himself.

It is estimated that around 27 million people today are living in conditions similar to that of slavery and human trafficking has become a global industry worth $ 12 billion a year. It is even more baffling to note that twice as many people are enslaved today than during the days of the African slave trade. How can that be and what exactly is human trafficking? Human trafficking can be described as the forced movement of people for purposes of labour, such as prostitution and other kinds of work, including domestic work. If one looks at the history of the term ‘trafficking’ it can be traced back to ‘white slave trade’. Before the great wars it meant the coercion or transportation of Caucasian women to the colonies to service white male officers. From 1904 there were efforts to stop ‘white slave trade’ leading to the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Person and the Exploitation of Others in 1949. It is the Palermo Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime that made trafficking in persons an international criminal offence in the year 2000. The Protocol was drafted to meet all aspects of trafficking, whether for sexual or labour exploitation. The Protocol's objectives are to prevent trafficking, punish traffickers and protect victims. The Protocol urges states to criminalize trafficking. It also specifies the activities, means and purposes that constitute the offence. The important features of the Protocol are:

Many people in Britain face the task of speaking something other than English with a great deal of trepidation. Unlike the majority of the world's population, which speaks more than one language as a matter of course, we find the experience bewildering. And that bewilderment is part of the helplessness that characterises a position all too familiar to all of us; as we stumble over unfamiliar words and phrases we are once again infantilised, put in the position of the infans, one ‘without speech’. Stereotypical accounts of Japanese children in the English imagination, that they are silent in class and only speak when they have fully mastered a new language, function as a further reminder that regression to the level of the child who cannot help but display its inability will be the fate meted out to us as we learn another language, here and now.

Psychoanalysis might be useful to make sense of this, and varieties of psychoanalysis that have emphasised the role of language in the development of the unconscious should have something worthwhile to say.

There are five ways it does:

First, another language is another symbolic system. To be in another language is to be in a symbolic space, but space that feels buoyant enough to hold us as we float through it. When we are flattered enough by native speakers that our accent is perfect and that we are perfectly comprehensible to them, there can be moments of ecstatic, omnipotent illusory freedom.

Why should we believe that our future is already written in our past? Psychoanalysis tells us that patterns and shocks picked up early on in our lives are repeated and woven into what will be. But psychoanalysis is not powerful because it has discovered this relationship between past and future, but because it weaves itself into experiences of the relationship that are structured into Western culture. We are encouraged to discover how important the past is to who we are and where we are going, then, not simply because psychoanalysis tells us so, but because we learn this many times over when we try to imagine the future. Or, rather, when our futures are imagined for us. Then more parts of a psychoanalytic narrative start to make sense.

Each particular future is tied to a particular present. As representations of the future have accumulated in science and science fiction over the last century, we have been able to see all the more clearly how each attempt to stretch our imagination forward is glued to present times. Remember those models of molecules at school constructed out of red and yellow spheres on black wire, and the way they now look like 1950s prints, and how like the patterns on the linoleum they were. Remember the rockets to the moon, where the pilots sat in tubular frame chairs clicking switches like real pilots of the time.

“I wish you a disturbing evening!” This is how Michael Haneke (born 1942), who won Best Director award at Cannes in 2005 for Caché (Hidden), introduced his films one evening at a festival in London. Audiences–and their complacency towards the political conflicts “hidden” in the screen–are a prime target for this Austrian intellectual. Caché is a case in point. The story of a TV producer haunted by creepy cassettes, videos of his own house, sent him by an angry Algerian from his past, it boldly addresses the issue of firstworld seclusion from the third-world–and the collaboration of the media, and its audiences, to keep this issue hidden. As Haneke said at our interview in Cannes: “Each of us pulls the blanket over our heads and hopes that the nightmares won't be too bad.” Notably, the TV producer (played with tortured intensity by Daniel Auteuil) watches his own nightmares as if with a wide-angle lens.

We, as spectators, are also kept out. We watch the film through a distant camera, a reflection of our own alienated relation to the world around us. The closing shot of Caché is that of two boys, Michael Haneke (2004). Credit: Photofest Algerian and French, conversing on the steps of a school, a mute “dialogue” that we can only glimpse through a wide-angle shot of a grate.

Similarly, Haneke's best-known film, The Piano Teacher (2001), begins (as it ends) with a closed door.

At the Star Trek exhibition in the Science Museum in London, I stood in front of Jean-Luc Picard's desk, the desk from his ready room next to the bridge. I was seized by an uncanny double feeling that I can only call ‘elated loss’; an excitement at being so close to something that I had never touched but knew so well, and a sick despair at having something taken away that I had never really had. And, barely a week later, with the final episode ‘All Good Things’, Picard's 178 episode-run of The Next Generation (ST:TNG) came to an end.

Psychoanalysis knows about excitement and loss, of course, but it tends to look for those things first inside the individual and what had happened to them in childhood, and it only then describes those feelings played out through the medium of culture. But we might understand something more about these kinds of feelings, as well as what part psychoanalytic processes play, if we look at the way popular culture structures how we think about relationships and the narratives we follow when we participate in it.

You have to know how to participate in order to follow the narrative. When you watch Star Trek, for example, you know you are not really experiencing an inexplicable and unpredictable chain of events, and there is a paradoxical rule governing it so that we know that although this is about the future, by the time we watch, it is about things that have already happened.

When it comes to the internally displaced in Jammu and Kashmir, the state's response in the face of a lack of policy to deal with the problems of the displaced community is much like a leaf from George Orwell's Animal Farm. All are equal but some are more equal than others. The differential treatment that the different kinds of displaced get in terms of relief and attention eventually prevents them from finding a common cause with each other or talking about a common ground. There are hierarchies and hierarchies within hierarchies among different groups of people displaced at different times, ever since the Kashmir dispute began in 1947. In the absence of any state policy or international law on the internally displaced, there are different ways of treating the displaced, as per the whims or the political needs, or often the greed, of those in power. While this has benefited some politicians, it has kept the internally displaced in Jammu and Kashmir, roughly numbering 7 to 8 lakhs, divided. […]

There are several kinds of people displaced due to the conflict – those uprooted by the partition of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947–8, and thereafter by some territorial alterations in subsequent wars in 1965 and 1971, those who have been forced to flee, in the last couple of decades, from the Indian side of Kashmir to the Pakistani side, those displaced due to recent India–Pakistan border confrontation after the Kargil War and subsequently Operation Parakaram, those displaced due to violence in militancy hit areas and those displaced from one militancy infested area to a slightly lesser one.

This interview was conducted both in English and French (translated by me) in late May of 1984 in François Truffaut's (1932–1984) private office at Les Films du Carrosse, the production company in Paris he founded and ran. His last public appearance had been in a television interview on 13 April 1984, for the Apostrophes series hosted by Bernard Pivot. When Truffaut generously agreed to meet with me for what was intended to be a print interview (which did not materialize at the time), he was clearly weak, but unquestionably lucid. He died from brain cancer on 21 October 1984.

Interview

Yes, of course. During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema. I'd skip school regularly to see movies–even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early. At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that. I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist. Next I decided I'd be a film critic.

This chapter deals with Palestinian efforts towards democratization, with a special focus on one of the dominant actors: the Islamic Resistance Movement, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya (Hamas). Palestinian society in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is in the midst of a state- and nationbuilding process, in conflict with Israel, and is also engaged in a difficult nonlinear democratization process. However, since the elections, and despite attempts to maintain the short-lived coalition government, competition between Hamas and Fateh has erupted into violence, propelling Palestinian society to the brink of open internal war. The election victory of Hamas in January 2006 could be seen as a first step away from the one-party rule of the Palestinian Authority that, until 2006, was dominated by Fateh.

This chapter is not concerned with the question of ‘how a democracy, assumed to be already in existence, can best preserve or enhance its health and stability’– it is clear that authoritarian structures are in existence in the Palestinian politicalelite structure. The chapter looks to identify factors that can either promote or inhibit Palestinian democratization. It does not necessarily imply a deterministic process in which democracy will follow. Rather, democratization is an open palette, in which research is needed to identify the democratic frontiers in societies that are experimenting with, or searching for ways to follow, democratic principles. The concept of democratic frontiers relates to societal spheres, with structures, institutions and agencies that have a strong democratic culture, and whose centre may disperse into other parts of (authoritarian) society.