States are the only contemporary political organizations that enjoy a unique legal status under international law—sovereignty—and are deemed to possess an exclusive monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their borders. A central feature of the state is to provide for the delivery of public goods (such as security) to its citizenry, and states fail to function as states when they can no longer do this. While the concept of “state failure” or “failing states” is much debated, the consequences of such failure are all too real, especially in Africa. Endemic violence, ethnic and religious tensions, rampant human rights abuses, rising terrorism and crime, along with a lack of legitimacy and political inclusion, as well as an inability to exercise effective control over territory are hallmarks of failing states.

This chapter underscores the sexually charged nature of Agostino Brunias's West Indian paintings, probing in particular, the pronounced confluence of colonialism and the fetishisation of the mixed-race female body evident in these works. Like the Caribbean fruits and flowers with which the paintings identify them, they are simply rewards of the colonial enterprise. The chapter analyses two prominent eighteenth-century constructions of mixed-race female sexuality evident in Brunias's West Indian pictures: the Venus and the Vixen. In addition to the obvious references to Venus imagery, Brunias also employs the Roman myth of Actaeon and Diana as an iconographic and ideological model for the painting. Like the figures in William Blake's unquestionably imperialist and unequivocally erotic continental allegory, Brunias's brown Venuses posit an implicit analogy between female flesh and physical geography, reinforcing British power over both.

This chapter provides the reader with background material and a basic understanding of Africa’s uniqueness. It looks at the highly diverse and unique set of security challenges--from traditional to non-traditional—facing the continent and provides an overview of the nature of the threat to the continent and its people. It also sets the stage for an in-depth examination of the key threats to African security (and by extension to the global community) and identifies some emerging trends that present both opportunities and challenges for improving security in the decades ahead.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

Premier Raymond Poincare first officially confirmed French ambitions in Syria in 1912. Vichy administration and Free French administration shared much in common in that each sought to evade France's implicit obligation to quit the Middle East. Both the Free French and the British claimed that Vichy complicity in Axis support of Rashid Ali al-Ghailani's Iraqi revolt justified the Anglo-Gaullist attack on Syria on 8 June. The British empire and Free French columns that invaded the French Levant from Palestine and Transjordan on 8 June fell under the overall command of General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson. As the Levant was occupied by British land forces, the War Office bore primary responsibility for the cost of the occupation administration. By 14 July a Occupied Territories Committee had agreed that the best solution for Syria was a Free French administration with full executive powers.

The epilogue discusses the depiction of the church as a sacred space in the Middle English carol By a chapel as I came. The chapel has a multisensory, dynamic sanctity, and is presented as the house of God and all his saints. The epilogue concludes by showing how this mode of sanctity can still be experienced in the modern world by describing a visit to the church of St Botolph’s, Slapton, to examine the wall paintings and by discussing modern material replicas of church architecture, including the Lego Durham cathedral and the ‘Woolly Spires’ knitted churches project.

Africa is a security environment fraught with many dangers, but one too that presents great opportunities for addressing the most pressing global—and not just African—challenges. With more than its share of fragile, unstable states, impoverished societies, and endemic conflict, the continent was once seen almost exclusively as an incubator of instability and insecurity; a venue for addressing rising challenges and an exporter of global security threats. But this is no longer the case. Africa, like everywhere else in the world, is becoming increasingly integrated into a globalized security system, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa—and what happens there—matters more than ever. Simply ignoring it and hoping for the best through a policy of containment and isolation is not a viable option in today’s globalized and interdependent world.

Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), a Prussian general who served against Napoleon, and the other is Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who came of a numerous family at the centre of the high-Victorian 'intellectual aristocracy' of liberal Britain. Clausewitz's book On War, first published in 1832, was immensely influential, probably because its message was shocking and at the same time welcome to those in nineteenth-century Europe who had an interest in making war respectable. Clausewitz makes it clear that he regards war as a normal part of the mechanics of politics. G. A. Henty, still well known today and still in print as a boys' writer, in his own time was very active as a war correspondent. Henty was well qualified to provide a military or naval setting for the boys' adventure stories which he started to write in 1868.

Beginning with Vitoria and that ambivalence, this chapter offers a brief history of imperial law, focusing ultimately on its terminal failure in colonialism. This failure reveals the necessity of the responsive quality in law, a quality denied in standard and stultifying affirmations of the distinct determinative force of modern legality. There could hardly be two more divergent views of the primal text of international law than those which have come to accompany Francisco de Vitoria's De Indis. In Antony Anghie's elegant analysis, Vitoria's lauded origin of international law is not so much to do with its conventional concern, the relation between sovereign states, as with the colonial domination of people burdened with radical difference. Perhaps it could now also be said that Vitoria's scheme massively implies that it is the colonial domination which effects the relation between sovereign states.

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Ginsberg’s arrival and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. Although it is often thought otherwise, Ginsberg did in fact have long-formed plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and his expulsion from Cuba only expedited, rather than facilitated, his arrival to Europe. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Ginsberg had the opportunity to look behind the façade of the Communist Party and observed firsthand that Czechoslovaks lived in an oppressive regime they increasingly tried to challenge through various means, one of them being the publication and performance of Beat poetry. However, he underestimated the surveillance practices of the regime, which only intensified after Ginsberg was elected the King of May in front of a 100,000-strong crowd during May Day celebrations. Ultimately, his often frank discussion of his views and experiences not only placed several of his associates in danger, but also led to his deportation from the country.