This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book examines the meanings of 'law' and 'imperialism'. It explores the effects of the presence of indigenous peoples on the modification, interpretation and inheritance of British laws and the legal ideology by white law-makers. The book discusses the production of the serious and contested concept of 'sovereignty' and the modifications to legal practices made necessary by a reconsideration of both common law and customary law. It looks at specific instances of judicial decision-making, and more abstractly, at the relevance and appropriateness of issues of 'custom' and 'culture' in the courtroom. The book deals more directly with land and property at and around the actual and imagined frontiers of settler societies. It comments on the legacies of colonialism for both legal praxis and academic studies.

This chapter focuses on the multi-dimensional uses of walls both within and between interface areas. It explores how the physical divisions are perceived and experienced by young people who live in interface areas and how they view the architecture of division. The chapter discusses of young people's conflicting perceptions of the peace walls. The young people's attitudes to the use of flags as expressions of national identity are then examined and this is followed by a discussion of their attitudes to a wall portraying racist graffiti. The chapter presents the triple notions of teenagers as victims, perpetuators and transformers of political conflict. It considers the murals which adorn many walls within and at the margins of interface communities. Murals in Loyalist areas often represent tensions, rivalries and allegiances to different local paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Loyalist Volunteer Force.

This chapter explores how the work of first-generation critical theory can offer some interesting and timely insights into the current political economy of emotion that binds happiness and wellbeing to positivity, productivity, and measurable output. It begins by charting the major historical conceptualizations of melancholia, both in its medical and cultural iterations, since these have played such a significant role in shaping our understanding of (un)happiness. The chapter focuses on Walter Benjamin's varied and complex engagements with melancholia, many of which contrast with the traditional readings of melancholia as inherently passive, inward-looking, static, and so forth. It closes with an analysis of Theodor Adorno's form of social critique and 'conscious unhappiness', that is, a wilful rejection of any privatized or individualized notion of happiness in favour of a militant and political discontent.

Chapter 7 studies the role played by the party in public office in the formulation of European policies and the selection of EU specialists. It first analyses the House of Commons, the National Assembly and the Bundestag’s EU scrutiny powers and the internal organisation of EU affairs. Second, it investigates the parliamentary parties’ dealings with the EU. The chapter finds that MPs have delegated a large amount of policy-making power to their respective government and to MEPs, often without exerting much formal control. Especially when in power, MPs tended to leave EU policies to their government. Thus, whilst the party in public office has some advantages over the party in central office and the party on the ground (above all, policy expertise and resources) it is not the clear ‘winner’. Still, this chapter also identifies a number of differences, which can be explained by comparing the institutional structures; the ways in which the parties prioritised their EU expertise in parliament; and the parties’ general attitude towards the EU. Overall, centre-left MPs have not pulled their weight in the formulation of European policies, or the scrutiny of government and the Members of the European Parliament. This is a story of missed opportunities.

This chapter seeks to draw up an outline of how 'globalisation' and 'migration' have been articulated in Western discussions of contemporary art since the 1990s, and how the two discourses intersect: 'art and globalisation' and 'art and migration'. Since the 1990s, terms such as 'global art', 'the global contemporary' and 'the global art world' have become a staple of mainstream art discourses. Thus, Jonathan Harris begins his introduction to the anthology Globalization and Contemporary Art by comparing 'globalisation' to the well-established terms 'modernism' and 'renaissance'. As opposed to the emphasis on globalisation-from-above in the discourse on contemporary art and globalisation, globalisation-from-below takes centre stage in the discourse on contemporary art and migration. Here, nodal points such as migration, diaspora, exile, refugeedom, displacement, precarity, subalternity, cosmopolitanism, cultural translation, creolisation and migratory aesthetics push globalisation into the background.