Compared to the number of films devoted to nuclear war, the catastrophic nuclear accident never acquired its own cinematic genre. Disaster films about civilian nuclear accidents would seem perfectly poised to serve that function to nuclear power as a technology emblematic of recent neoliberal politics. This chapter examines three films in order to explore this hypothesis about the confluence of gothic representations and neoliberal politics within the realm of nuclear power. The films discussed include Gregor Schnitzler's Die Wolke, Andreas Prochaska's Der erste Tag, and Volker Sattel's Unter Kontrolle that that deal with nuclear power in the European context and from a uniquely German perspective. Die Wolke and Der erste Tag project the abolition of nuclear power into an imaginary future, either as the democratically desired result of the lesson learned from history or as the inevitable outcome of economic and political strictures.

In a novel departure in Irish public health promotion, 250,000 free measuring tapes were distributed via pharmacies throughout Ireland to encourage people to measure their waists in 2011. This was part of the Stop the Spread (STS) campaign which sought to change people's perception of a healthy and normal waist size. Its central message was that a waist circumference above 32 and 37 inches for women and men, respectively is overweight and an indicator of particular health risks. This chapter suggests that STS campaign illustrates a change in biopedagogical instructions and techniques in health promotion. It focuses on some recent Foucauldian scholarship in order to extend the relevance of such concepts to twenty-first-century movements in biopolitics and neoliberalism, and in order to set out an analytical framework by which STS can be analysed.

This chapter analyses the installation and development of Egypt CARE mission. It examines the attempts of all three parties: the private non governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as both governments to use this cooperation as a means to reach particular individual goals. From CARE's perspective, the Egyptian program offered the chance to expand its outreach, expertise, and geographical focus as well as an opportunity to serve a maximum number of hungry people with a minimum amount of private investment. In order to formalize the newly established relations, President Nasser decreed the setting up of an Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) which was to deal with and coordinate American voluntary agency activities in Egypt. The food commodities entering the country under the CARE contract, by contrast, were almost free of charge and replaced a good part of those food imports which would otherwise have been necessary.

Liberal scholars have historically stressed the role of NGOs, including churches, in world politics. Recently, scholars have also stressed the normative influence of religious actors as agents in international relations. The seventh chapter examines the role of the Catholic Church in the Northern Ireland peace process by analysing the theological basis of Catholic attitudes and beliefs regarding peace and the manifestations of these teachings as applied by bishops in Northern Ireland. The chapter demonstrates that faith creates action and explains how an important religious tradition in Northern Ireland promoted peace by recognizing and responding to the new kind of wars and political conflicts that have emerged in recent decades. As the nature of conflict changed from a state-centred model into one which saw civil wars and ethnic-conflict becoming the norm, so too did Catholic responses; national Churches began to realise that protest and non-violent action was no longer enough to create a more peaceful world. Consequently, the Catholic hierarchy in Northern Ireland sought to achieve peace by working for justice, especially for political prisoners and those who suffered discrimination.

This chapter discusses how the contradictory field of forces set in motion by the unfolding economic crisis are articulated in the 2013 televised version of Dracula. Dracula provides a new outlet for the commodification of the vampire and the corporatisation of the gothic. The chapter argues that Dracula highlights not only the increasing humanisation of the vampire, but also a specifically post-recession, capitalism-weary environment caught between the need for simultaneous restoration of growth and austerity. The raunchy and explicit sex scenes in the Dracula bolster audiences' voyeuristic viewing pleasures. The scenes also reassert the vampire as an exceedingly erotic, insatiable creature whose bite will transform the victims into predatory but alluring vampires themselves. Adopting neoliberalism's entrepreneurial ethos of self-responsibility, self-care and determination, Dracula resolves to become the master of his own fate and engage in what Anthony Giddens calls the reflexive 'project of the self '.

Pierre Subleyras's painting of Charon Ferrying Souls serves to introduce this chapter's observations on the image of pain. The chapter considers whether Subleyras's particular take on the body afflicted contains clues of a contesting and appropriation of familiar iconographies of hell. It draws on more specific responses to images, ranging from a print of Pausanias's descriptions of the classical underworld, to the themes of pestilent calamity in Gabriel François Doyen's painting of The Miracle of St Anthony's Fire. The chapter focuses on the Parisian reception of Epicurean thought, the fuller context of an Epicurean oppositional stance to religion and its theory of the image. It closes by Diderot's commentary on the Coresus and Cal-lirhoe, Jean-Honore Fragonard's portrayal of a pastoral scene that revolved around a sacrifice and a suicide, to reassemble an account of images and their effects on those viewing them in terms of an Epicurean criticism of religion.

This chapter explores the role of social media in the creation of myths and public beliefs about justice and law. Using the case study of the YouTube clip Kony 2012 the author identifies a number of myths and public beliefs this video creates and sustains, looking at three principal myths, namely the myths regarding the background and facts of the armed conflict and the current situation in Uganda, the myths regarding possible military and legal solutions and last but not least the myth surrounding the effectiveness of online activism itself. Rauxloh argues that the portrayal of a very long and complex conflict as simply a war of good versus evil and the presented solution of the “mighty West” helping the “helpless Africa” perpetuates dangerous stereotypes which are in direct contradiction to the aims of international criminal justice in general and the International Criminal Court in particular. It is also argued that one of the most damaging myths is the notion of the internet as the freely accessible democratic forum which opens up the power of voice to everybody. Rauxloh warns that social media have an unprecedented potential for creating, spreading and perpetuating myths and public beliefs.

Law in Europe developed firmly within a religious framework. The law's dependence on that framework, which can still be traced, has permeated European culture in all its visible and invisible aspects. The itinerary of the convict, from the moment of his arrest to his execution, illustrates the inextricable link between punishment and redemption. Class played an important role in the mode of execution, decapitation or hanging, and the crime for which one was being put to death determined the treatment that the body would undergo before and after execution. This chapter reviews historical source materials to illustrate the role of judicial torture in the handling of offenders. In the model of suspicion/denunciation/persecution, under judicial torture the convict was pushed to denounce innocent friends or foes in order to be relieved from pain, and the judges accepted this testimony as fact.