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This book seeks to review the state of political issues early in the twenty-first century, when New Labour is in its second term of office. As part of the updating process it became necessary to choose which political issues are important. The book includes the main issues which appear in current Advanced Level Politics syllabuses. In the case of Edexcel, which offers a specific political issues option in its A2 specification, all the specified issues have been included. The book deals with the process of constitutional and political change which are issues in themselves. It also includes material on constitutional reform (incorporating the recent development of human rights in Britain), and devolution. The book includes the global recession and other recent political developments and looks at the important issues in British politics since 1945. It examines the key issues of British politics today: economic policy, the Welfare State, law and order, environment policy, Northern Ireland, issues concerning women, European integration and the European Union, and the impact of the European Union on Britain. The book also deals with the European Union and Britain's relationship to it. Finally, it must be emphasised that Britain's relationship to the European Union is in itself a political issue which has fundamentally changed the party system.
This article discusses how we might formulate an account of William Blake’s avant-garde reception. Having dealt with Peter Bürger’s theorisation of the notion of ‘avant-garde’, it concentrates on a series of portraits, made from Blake’s life mask, by Francis Bacon in 1955. This ‘high art’ response to the Romantic poet is then contrasted with a series of ‘subcultural’ responses made from within the British counterculture of the 1960s. Case studies are presented from the alternative magazine production of the period (notably an illustration from Oz magazine in which Blake’s imagery is conflated with that of Max Ernst). An article by David Widgery in Oz on Adrian Mitchell’s play Tyger (1971) is also discussed to show how the scholarly literature on Blake of the period (mainly David Erdman) was called on by the counterculture to comment on political issues (e.g. Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech). The final section of the article shows how the ‘avant-gardism’ of Oz’s utilisation of Blake might be counterposed to the more activist left-wing approach to the poet in small magazines such as King Mob with their links to French situationism. In terms of the classic avant-garde call for a reintegration of art and life-praxis, such gestures testify to a moment in the 1960s when Blake may be considered fully ‘avant-garde’.
to turn it into a political issue, which runs the risk of raising the stakes. On the other hand, by endowing the hostages with greater commercial and political value, mobilisation campaigns may serve to protect their lives and pressure those with the power to facilitate their release. British journalists have noted that the lack of information and public advocacy on behalf of aid workers David Haines and Allan Henning, who were abducted in Syria by
-established normative framework – the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was theorised by Enlightenment philosophers and legal experts (Grotius, Rousseau and Vatel, most notably). The safeguards granted to prisoners of war by the 1929 Convention were already a part of the 1785 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Prussia and the United States, and long before the humanitarian conventions were formalised as such, the treatment of POWs had become a key political issue with the
.), Engaging Men in the Fight against Gender Violence: Case Studies from Africa ( New York : Palgrave Macmillan ), pp. 69 – 100 . Tickner , J. A. ( 2001 ), Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era ( New York : Columbia University Press ). Tobin
but also to ‘human rights’ and ‘atrocities’ above. This is the first theme I take up: books like these are contributing to the history of what – of humanitarianism? Of human rights? Of something broader than both, like the visual culture of distant suffering? After addressing these conceptual challenges, I turn to some of the substantive contributions the books make to analysing images of suffering before concluding by reflecting on some of the perennial ethical and political issues raised by
The changes in warfare during the twentieth century could be addressed from a variety of perspectives, political, cultural, and national. This book addresses the issue of how gender is constructed by exploring a range of historical events. It also asserts that a focus on gender, rather than producing a depoliticised reading of our culture, offers an informed debate on a range of political issues. The book explores the impact of warfare on women whose civilian or quasi-military roles resulted in their exile or self-exile to the role of 'other'. The book first draws upon a number of genres to use Richard Aldington and H. D. (the poet Hilda Doolittle), to understand the social and cultural implications of warfare for both parties in a relationship. Then, it examines the intricate gender assumptions that surround the condition of 'shell shock' through a detailed exploration of the life and work of Ver a Brittain. Continuing this theme, considering the nature of warfare, the gendered experience of warfare, through the lens of the home front, the book discusses the gendered attitudes to the First World War located within Aldous Huxley's novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow'. Wars represented in Western cinema are almost universally gendered as male, which corresponds to the battlefield history of twentieth-century warfare. As this situation changes, and more women join the armed services, especially in the United States, a more inclusive cinematic coding evolves through struggle. The book considers three decades of film, from the Vietnam War to the present.
This book provides a combination of critical argument about those central debates within African literary studies, alongside a focus on individual texts and writers that are central to the study of African literatures. It investigates how certain versions of the past get to be remembered, which memories are privileged and what the loci are for memory within the context of African literatures. The book establishes the main debates about African writing in relation to modernism and traditionalism, history and the present, trauma and the ethics of historical representation, and theories of memory as a challenge to the discourses of historiography and ethnography. In these respects, the book first focuses upon memory as a discourse in African writing, emerging as a product of discourse in the ways it operates in private and public life. It then explores how memory is socially and historically constituted within differing African contexts. The book also interrogates the invocation of memory within a number of other discourses (political, historical, ethical, autobiographical, gender, ethnic), enquiring how memory is called upon to legitimate identity, construct or reconstruct it. It further explores how memory is narratively organized, and the ways in which narrative is related to other cultural forms of remembering.
This book is an in-depth examination of the relations between Ireland and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It explores political, diplomatic, economic, media and cultural issues. Before embarking upon the journey in the archives of the Stasi, it is necessary to give a picture on the relations between Ireland and the GDR to set the scene. The first part of the book is an analysis of the political, economic and cultural links between the two countries, and also perceptions and portrayals by the media. The second part is devoted to the long and extraordinary process of establishing diplomatic relations between Ireland and the GDR. It focuses on intelligence activities. The activities include: reading and listening about Ireland and Northern Ireland; spying on Ireland; and recording information on Northern Ireland in the central databank for persons. They also include: watching the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Irish National Liberation Army and British Army of the Rhine. Thus, documents and findings are presented in a rather thematic way, except the history of Irish terrorist activities in West Germany. This approach has the advantage of showing how an intelligence service actually operates.
Issues concerning women The environment 120 9 ➤ The background and origins of the environment as a political issue ➤ A review of the ways in which the environment became a more prominent issue ➤ Description and assessment of New Labour environmental policies after 1997 DEFINING THE TERM ‘ENVIRONMENT’ The term ‘environment’ is a broad one and we need first to establish which aspects are covered here. For the purposes of this chapter, we will recognise the following meanings. ● Matters concerning the physical environment, including air and water quality