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.

The starting point for this book is 1872, where, in the middle of the first of four Liberal administrations under Prime Minister William Gladstone, Victorian poetry can be said to enter its ‘late’ phase. It is a peculiar time, because it is in these final decades of the age, partly mediated through the loss of Dickens in 1870, John Stuart Mill in 1873, and, subsequently, the deaths of Browning in 1889, Tennyson in 1892, and Ruskin, Wilde, and Nietzsche in 1900 that the idea of what it is to be ‘Victorian’ begins to take shape. Interpretations of the period are complicated further by the ‘apocalyptic paradigm’ of the fin-de-siècle: suggesting patterns of disclosure, of revelation. Yet as the century turned, many of these patterns remain, in the Kermodian sense, ‘disconfirmed’. In 1900 alone Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks, Henry James abandoned the novel he would never finish in order to start work on The Ambassadors, and Conrad's Lord Jim appeared. Husserl published his Logic, and Russell, Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. The same year, the decadent poet Richard Le Gallienne repudiated Catholicism in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Beautiful Life of Rome’—a gesture less radical than ritualistic, as many late-Victorian moments are—symbolising decades of nineteenth-century religious crisis still unresolved. 1900 may be the terminus for this anthology, but it figures an ending less finished than burnished.

ILA BANDYOPADHYAY

An 86-year-old who came to Brindaban straight from Brandipara in Jessore district in 1947. ‘I came to live in Brandipara after my marriage. My in-laws were well placed and influential. My husband was an MBBS doctor. I had three sons – the oldest was in Class X, the next in Class V and the youngest in Class IV. They went to the market and did not return, not one. No trace of them could be found. After that our house was attacked and our dispensary was burnt down at that point my husband decided, “We are going to leave today.” ’

In the dead of the night we left and entered Bongaon. There he said, ‘We have had enough of samsar, let us go to Brindaban straight. We shall die there. Since then we have been living in Brindaban. My husband who died ten years ago used to pray at Paglababa's ashram and I used to chant Hari's name in a dharmasala.

This chapter examines the politics of categorization that defines people who move, as well as the migration containment policies that set and maintain the boundaries of these categories. The paper explains why ‘the problem’ is not migration per se, but rather the way the powerful seek to control and contain the movement of people. […] Indeed, it is one of the most pressing justice issues of our time, and requires the consolidated and coordinated attention of all of us concerned with issues of human rights and social justice. It cannot be ignored.

THE POLITICS OF INDIFFERENCE

In July 2001, a photograph by Javier Bauluz caused controversy in Spain, and around the world. It was even published in the New York Times. The photograph, entitled The Indifference of the West, was of two beachgoers in Tarifa, Spain, sitting under an umbrella, while to their right there lay a dead body. The photograph generated much debate about camera angles, and whether the beachgoers actually were indifferent. […] Who was this dead person? The answers to these questions lie in geography, in economy, in sociology, in the politics of movement and the boundaries of belonging, in migration and citizenship policies. And the answers, as well as the questions themselves, implicate us all.

The term ‘psychopolitics’ has a sinister edge to it now, but it was not always so. The term has undergone significant shifts of meaning. In studies of fascism in the 1930s to the New Left rebellions of the 1960s, it referred to the attempt to connect subjectivity – our personal experience of who we are in the world – with political change. Progressive use of the term ranged from psychoanalytic accounts of the way relations to authority become embedded in individuals – ‘internalised’ – such that people feel isolated and unable to change, to feminist insistence that politics is to be found inside our intimate relationships as well as in the struggle against economic exploitation.

With the fading of revolt in the 1970s and the later apparent victory of capitalism in the 1990s, more was learnt about the involvement of the security forces in psychological propaganda during the Cold War and against the Left. Now psychopolitics came to refer to the fear of brainwashing and the destruction of individual autonomy, but the horrible twist to these revelations was that psychological theories as to why the world was a miserable and destructive place became even more powerful. The increasing influence of psychological discourse – stories about what the mind is like and how it is possible to master it – has meant that psychopolitics is something that people are in awe of, even afraid of.

Internal displacement in north-east India is a relatively new phenomenon. Until the 1970s, the north-east received huge inflows of refugees and economic migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan) and Nepal, and to a lesser extent from Burma. As a result, the demographic character of some states in the region underwent a sea change. Tripura became a Bengali majority state, leaving its indigenous tribes feeling marginalized. In Assam, Bengali Hindus and Muslims probably outnumber the ethnic Assamese now, though some doubt has been expressed about that contention. The first wave of the refugee influx, following the partition, displaced the indigenous populations from their ancestral lands. And when the indigenous groups – and militias raised by their younger people began vent their resentment through armed action against the settlers, the north-east began to wake up to large-scale internal displacement.

But the local media and administration continued to describe even the internally displaced as ‘refugees’, in spite of the fact that they did not cross over to another country. The states in India's federal polity may not enjoy as much power as the states in the US – but because Indian states or regions are so rooted in tradition and enjoy such a distinct sense of identity that they often behave like nations would, with each other. […] The internalization of the displacement, in the sense that it happened within the boundaries of the Indian nation state, has, therefore, not always resulted in an easy solution to the problems of displacement.

Introduction and Context

In 1974, starting with the arrival of democracy in Portugal, more than 60 countries in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa have made transitions from authoritarianism to some form of democracy. Democracy has now become the dominant form of government in the world. Its appeal and popularity is more widespread than ever before. Many political struggles are increasingly being fought in different parts of the world in the name of democracy. The democratic development in many of these newly democratic countries has often been sluggish, turbulent and marked by regular reversals. Though performance of many of these democracies continues to be disappointing, the cases of complete reversal from democracy to authoritarian rule are very few. In the last century, the per cent of global population living in democratic countries has increased from 12 per cent in 1900 to 63 per cent in 2000. A near consensus has now been achieved among decision-makers and academics alike on the virtues of democracy. Besides freedom and prosperity, successful democratization is argued to bring peace and security to unstable regions of the world.

This global trend relates mainly to developments within individual countries or within a number of countries, i.e., the internal or domestic developments. If ‘democracy’ is interpreted as a particular system of governance, this approach may be adequate.