bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Azd and the Early Islamic State
Authors: Ulrich Brian
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that the degree of centralization within the Islamic conquests differed between east and west, with the western conquests being more of an independent tribal movement which the early caliphs gradually came to co-opt. Similarly, early Islamic Basra was most likely an existing Arab settlement before it became a garrison town (misr). The chapter then discusses the al-Azd in Rashidun and Umayyad Syria, Basra, and Kufa, as well as garrison towns’ (amsar) division into tribal administrative units. The role of al-Azd in key events such as the Battle of the Camel and Second Fitna is discussed, as is the role of tribal leadership in Basra and Kufa. This chapter also contains a significant discussion of the events surrounding the death of Masud b. Amr in Basra.
Eastern Conquests and Factionalism
Authors: Ulrich Brian
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins by studying the role of al-Azd and the Muhallabids in the Islamic conquests along the eastern frontier of the Islamic world, in Khurasan and Sind. It critiques the idea that the Azd were a driving force behind the conquest of Sind, noting their prior presence in that region. Examining Yazid b. al-Muhallab’s campaigns in Jurjan and Tabaristan south of the Caspian Sea, it argues that both the Caspian and Sind campaigns were the result of governors linked to the Umayyad caliphs conquering territories to which their factional rivals had ties. Finally, there is a study of the role of al-Azd identity in Khurasan on the eve of the Abbasid Revolution.
The Azd of Mosul
Authors: Ulrich Brian
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins with a survey of the geography of Mosul and the surrounding al-Jazira region, as well as al-Azd settlement in the region during the Abbasid period. It then examines the region’s tribal politics under the Abbasids, and particularly the rivalry between al-Azd and Hamdan. Emphasis is placed on the way urban leaders maintained ties with Bedouin in the countryside, as well as the role of landed estates as a major form of wealth and powers. The chapter also examines the way tribal ties appear in connections between Mosul notables and figures outside the caliphate’s control, as well as the use of accounts of pre-Islamic Arabia’s history to support those notables’ status claims.
Conclusion
Authors: Ulrich Brian
Published: January 2020

During the middle of the ninth century, a son of the poet Diʿbil b. ʿAli al-Khuzaʿi produced a book called Wasaya al-Muluk wa Anbaʾ al-Muluk min Walad Qahtan b. Hud which became attributed to his father.1 The book consists of anecdotes about supposed ancient South Arabian rulers who also pass down in the form of poetry political advice to their offspring. It includes material closely related to the ‘Scattering of al-Azd’ traditions discussed in ...
‘“She has a lovely face”’:1 Tennyson and ‘The Lady of Shalott’
Authors: Thomas Jayne
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, a poem that met with intense criticism from its reviewers when it was first published in 1832, arguing that the poem prefigures the movement Tennyson is to make in the English ‘Idyls’ of 1842 toward a simplicity of diction and gaining the sympathies of a wide audience. The poem absorbs a Wordsworthian language and poetics from which Arthur Henry Hallam somewhat artificially separates it in his 1831 review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, And on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’. Wordsworth’s presence is clearly felt in the 1832 version of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, feeding Tennyson’s discussion of some of the poem’s major themes, although the level of borrowing from Wordsworth increases in the 1842 version of the poem, suggesting that Tennyson draws even more deeply from Wordsworth in 1842, both to assuage the critics and to search for a new poetic. The second part of the chapter briefly explores the linguistic and thematic connections between ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and Tennyson’s English ‘Idyls’, specifically ‘Dora’ and ‘The Gardener’s Daughter, Or, The Pictures’.
Painting about Painting
Authors: Balafrej Lamia
Published: January 2020

This book constitutes the first exploration of artistic self-reflection in Islamic art. In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter’s delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist’s likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist’s imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist’s signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed. In addition, each chapter explores a different theme: how painters challenged the conventions of royal representation (chapter 1); the role of writing in painting, its relation to ekphrasis and the context of the majlis (chapter 2); image, mimesis and potential world (chapter 3); the line and its calligraphic quality (chapter 4); signature (chapter 5); the mobility of manuscripts (epilogue).
Chapter One
Authors: Balafrej Lamia
Published: January 2020

The introduction presents the book’s main arguments, its methodological principles, its objects of study and the social and artistic context of the late Timurid period. While most scholarship on Persian painting has emphasised either painting’s illustrative function or its relation to the patron, this introduction announces that Persian painting could also serve as a self-reflective device, designed to embody and mediate ideas about artistic authorship, medium, and representation. The introduction also provides information on the historical background of late Timurid Herat, on the scholarship of Persian painting as well as a description of late Timurid painting’s visual characteristics, before presenting the Cairo Bustan, a late Timurid manuscript and the study’s centrepiece.
Potential World
Authors: Balafrej Lamia
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 examines the representation of epigraphic inscriptions in Persian painting, inscriptions that appeared in pictures as ornaments adorning buildings. It argues for a shift in these inscriptions’ content and function in the late Timurid period. Until the mid-fifteenth century, inscriptions were mainly used to link painting to patron. But in the Cairo Bustan, the poetic verses were chosen so as to convey a celebration of the painter. As such they constitute an example of wasf (ekphrasis), a description of the visual that was also a discourse of praise. Moreover, the verses were picked from the poetry of ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami, a late fifteenth-century poet. The inscriptions thus staged a model for the pictures’ reception, a model in which the painting would circulate among famous poets such as Jami, prompting responses about the medium and its makers. A possible institutional setting for such a scenario was the majlis, a form of social gathering that fuelled the art of jawab (response).
Introduction: Turkish Muslim “Theology” and Religion in Turkey
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh R.
Published: January 2020

This chapter gives a broad overview of broader trends within Islam in Turkey as well as a brief history of Turkish theology faculties. In addition, it explains and problematizes the term “theology” as a translation for the Turkish “ilahiyat.” It further provides a summary of the book’s main argument that Turkish Muslim theology involves dialectical mediation of multiple authoritative traditions and concludes with subsequent chapter descriptions.
Roots and Authorities: Resituating Revisionist and Ankara Paradigms in Light of Other Authorities
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh R.
Published: January 2020

This chapter explains how an understanding of Turkish theology as Muslim theology in dialectical tension with multiple traditions can develop and challenge previous literature on Turkish theology, addressing the work of two scholars of Turkish theology faculties: Felix Körner and Philip Dorroll.
Körner’s writings on Turkish revisionist Qur’an hermeneutics depicted Turkish theology in a unique position to undertake a truly modern Muslim approach to the Qur’an. This chapter raises the concern that when the standard that constitutes a truly “modern” approach is brought in from outside Turkish discussions, it is liable to reinforce a questionable Islam vs. modernity binary. Dorroll comes much closer to breaking out of binaries in his treatment of Turkish theology in his work on the Ankara Paradigm. He argues for a seminal vein in Turkish theology that considers itself modern by tradition, even if his discussions are still largely framed within a religious vs. secular binary.
By elaborating the decision to treat Turkish theology as both subject and source of conceptual frameworks, this chapter emphasizes the dialectical aspect of Turkish theology in its interactions with Turkish identity, the classical Arabic tradition, and Western intellectual tradition, highlighting theological moments of engagement that resist reduction to binary frameworks.
Inclusions and the Role of the Individual
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh R.
Published: January 2020

This chapter continues the discussion of the work of Recep Alpyağıl. While the previous chapter discussed the question of what constitutes and authentically Turkish Muslim canon of philosophical theology and why it is integral to the Turkish context, this chapter investigates Alpyağıl’s views as to what this canon might look like in practice, how it relates to religious hermeneutics, and the role of the individual Muslim in navigating and drawing meaning from such a canon. For Alpyağıl, the individual stands in “hypoleptic” continuity with her past, best represented as a spiral that reaches back to the past but also moves forward into the future. This chapter portrays Alpyağıl’s vision of the believing individual in continuity with past and with future as a prime example of how Turkish theology can dialectically make use of multiple intellectual traditions to resist being reduced to simplified binaries.
Düzgün’s Case for a Religion of Freedom
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh R.
Published: January 2020

This chapter takes up the work of Ankara theologian and kalam scholar Şaban Ali Düzgün, treating his Muslim understanding of fitra, or primal human nature and how he uses this Islamic concept to redefine what it means to be primitive. From his understanding of primal human nature, the chapterreconstructs his theological anthropology—one defined by both Enlightenment values and classical Islamic understandings of the God-world relation. Through a holistic reconstruction of Düzgün’s theological anthropology, the analysis shows that his dialectical use of both Islamic and “Western” concepts not only allows him to cast authentic Islam as compatible with Western values of individual freedom. Further, Düzgün’s theological anthropology also allows him to actively defend individual agency and worth in the face of double-standards, be they religious or secular, or in the face of Western individualism gone to the extreme.
From Dialectics to Direct Address: Turkish Theologians on Atheism and Other Religions
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh R.
Published: January 2020

While this chapter still features discussions drawn from the work of Recep Alpyağıl and Şaban Ali Düzgün, overall it takes a broader scope to offer a survey of Turkish theologians’ general responses to Christianity, skepticism, atheism, and religious pluralism. This chapter argues that in the Turkish theological context, these three issues mutually implicate one another, with only some exception. Among various works of Turkish theologians, this chapter engages the figures of Adnan Aslan, Mehmet Bayrakdar, Mahmut Aydın and the late Yaşar Nuri Öztürk.
Introduction
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

If finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which that process crystallises: interpretation, commentary, critique. These are not merely brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves with them, but are the scene [...
Servants
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

Servants in early modern drama have increasingly been investigated less as objects of domination than as subjects capable of affective and ethical relations with their masters. Both sorts of interpretation depend upon the assumption that actual early modern servants are straightforwardly represented in drama of the time. Observing that common players were themselves patronised and liveried servants, and that the theatre itself appeared as a form of mercenary service, this chapter shows how procedures of dramatic figuration implicate identification of the servant in a complex dialectic of discernment. With roots in various sorts of contemporary social anxiety, such difficulties are at their most intense in revenge tragedy. In many places reading revenge plays involves confronting their ability to undo the social concepts used to grasp their historical content.
Figures
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

How do we see the figures of baroque drama? This chapter challenges common moral and historical interpretations of the revenge play by showing how judgement itself is forestalled by prior difficulties of discernment and recognition. Such difficulties are produced by these plays because early modern playwrights had begun for the first time to link tragic form to problems of figure and figuration, person and personation. From this interest arose serious artistic investigations of dramatic materials, achieved via extended manipulation of revenge tragedy’s corpses, ghosts, and uncertain substances. Exploring these from a variety of angles, this chapter concludes that both moralist and historicist accounts of early modern tragedy have conspired in the neglect of its most inventive claims upon our attention.
Bare Facts, Endless Tragedies
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

Turning first to the classic revenge play sansrevenger, Arden of Faversham, this concluding chapter considers how this book’s findings bear on strongly held assumptions concerning the way concepts and categories relate to tragic works and their literary or theatrical afterlives.It is uncertain whether or not such works attain to ‘tragedy’ itself, or whether they prove incapable of it – but ‘metatheatre’ is a troublesome substitute. ‘Metatheatre’ is one of the most ubiquitous and influential concepts in contemporary study of (early modern) drama, yet the term’s origins and implications are very poorly understood. It conceals a host of naïve assumptions about the history and purpose of theatre, but survives precisely because its inadequacy reflects the confusion provoked by the figurative experiments identified for the first time by this book.
Introduction
Authors: Baron Kevin M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter presents the theoretical and analytical framework to understand the politics of issue evolution in policymaking by creating a Continuing Legislative Development Cycle (CLDC) model. Nested within the CLDC, a social learning lens provides the ability to understand a Cold War Paradigm shift in thinking that influenced the actions taken by the White House in response to the rise of the communist threat. These presidential actions led to direct learned responses from Congress establishing an action-reaction model, demonstrating power struggles between the legislative and executive branches. An Interconnected Doubled Feedback Loop framework provides an understanding that new information is utilized to seek influence between political elites and society in a continuous manner across time. The multidimensional model developed in this chapter provides an analytical framework to understand how and why issues evolve through the legislative process when steeped in the politics of the moment between Congress and the president.
Truman and the shift to a Cold War Paradigm mindset
Authors: Baron Kevin M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter details how the Cold War Paradigm mindset became institutionalized within the executive branch following the end of World War II. The threat from communism, both external and internal, provided the foundation from which Truman would alter American foreign policy through the Truman Doctrine, but also would focus internally in seeking to stop communist and subversive activities domestically. Once institutionalized, the Cold War Paradigm demonstrates how Truman's actions became a learned response to threats, which altered information policies within the executive branch. Congress heavily supported Truman's actions during this period, as members of Congress also learned and responded to threats. However, the Internal Security Act of 1950 created a rift between the president and Congress over control of government information, setting up an ongoing power struggle that would lead to Eisenhower's creation of executive privilege and Congress's response with the creation of the Moss Subcommittee on government information.
LBJ and the politics of passing FOIA
Authors: Baron Kevin M.
Published: January 2020

Lyndon Johnson's ascension to the presidency following Kennedy's death created the political space for one of the most productive policymaking periods in US history. The politics of this moment provided an astute politician like Moss the opportunity to press forward on getting FOIA passed out of Congress. Years of coalition building on the issue, including support from key congressional Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, along with Bill Moyers eventual support from within the White House, provided Moss with the opportunity for policy change. LBJ would follow Kennedy's example by signing a letter to Moss reaffirming Kennedy's position on executive privilege, but Johnson was far from supportive of the efforts to get FOIA passed. A tumultuous period marked by massive policy change, FOIA was a small piece of the Great Society, but one that Congress - and Moss - would not back away from. This chapter delves deep into the politics and skills of the individuals in Congress that were able to get FOIA passed and get Johnson's signature on the bill, marking the end of the legislative development period within the CLDC and moving to the next phase of implementation, oversight, and amendment.
Nixon and the resurgence of executive privilege
Authors: Baron Kevin M.
Published: January 2020

With the passage and implementation of FOIA under Johnson, the CLDC moves into the next iteration by examining the implementation, oversight, and amendment phase. This was driven in large part by Nixon's actions after coming into office. While Nixon talked about transparency, he took steps to expand White House control over information, not just following the precedent of Eisenhower, but in expanding the scope of executive privilege. Nixon asserted that executive privilege covered all White House conversations with any staff, appointees, and employees, expanding beyond the national security concerns in the public interest of his predecessors. Nixon's actions to expand executive power left Congress in the position of again grappling with ways to respond, including eventually amending FOIA to strengthen the law as an oversight measure. The first FOIA amendments began under Nixon but would not be finalized until President Ford was in office.
The Classic-Juridical Model
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter introduces the problematic governing the book, outlines a brief history of the concept of sovereignty from the Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century to develop the basic co-ordinates of the classic-juridical conception that forms the basis from which the three models engaged within in the book are developed against, and provides an overview of the argument and structure of the book.
Violence and Power: Arendt on the Logic of Totalitarianism
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on Hannah Arendt’s claim that sovereignty is not based, as Carl Schmitt maintains, on a collective decision but on collective agreement. The chapter outlines her critique of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s theory of sovereignty to show how she departs from the classic-juridical model, before setting out to reconstruct her own revised version of sovereignty based on an analysis of violence. Noting an ambiguity in the relationship between her earlier writings—notably a number published during the Second World War that hold violence to be an inherently political action and the Human Condition that sees violence, in the form of fabrication, as being constitutive of human action—and her later On Violence in which violence is understood to be instrumental to rather than constitutive of politics, the chapter explains the apparent contradiction through her claim that contemporary society has increasingly fetishized the means of fabrication over the end, a logic that sees all things (including humans) as pure means. To prevent this, Arendt advocates that power and violence be radically opposed. In so doing, however, she insists on an undifferentiated opposition between violence and power that was undermined by her own examples and much later thought.
From Law to Life: Foucault, Sovereignty, and Biopolitical Racism
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

The chapter argues that Michel Foucault introduces a fundamental rupture from the classical and radical-juridical conceptions of sovereign violence by claiming that it is no longer orientated towards the establishment, preservation, or maintenance of juridical order, but is, first and foremost, orientated towards the regulation of life. In turn, this regulation depends upon the introduction of a division, which, in the 1976 lecture course Society must be Defended, Foucault identifies as a racist one that divides those deemed to be biologically acceptable from those deemed to be unacceptable. Violence is needed to save the former from the alter, with the consequence that Foucault points to a hygiene function for sovereign violence that is fundamentally different to the purpose afforded violence in juridical models.
Life and Law: Derrida on the Bio-Juridicalism of Sovereign Violence
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter moves from the second to third part of the book and from the biopolitical model to the bio-juridical one. The fundamental problem with the two paradigms outlined up to this point is that they set up a binary opposition between those thinkers that affirm the relationship between sovereign violence and the juridical order and those that affirm its relationship to life. The chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the sovereign violence inherent in the death penalty to show that he claims that sovereign violence is not simply orientated to juridical legal order or the regulation of life through the creation of social norms, but simultaneously expresses itself through two faces—the juridical and biopolitical, or law and life—wherein the one demands and expresses the other: the juridical expression of sovereignty regulates life, whereas the sovereign’s regulation of life (and death) always takes a juridical form.
Introduction
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

While Western moral, philosophical, and theological thought has historically privileged the good,1 this privileging has been accompanied by profound, if subterranean, interest in evil. In what follows, I set out to chart a history of evil as it has been thought within this tradition. A number of studies have recently traced different conceptions of evil from the eighteenth century onwards....
The Rise of the Problem of Evil
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter outlines the genesis of the problem of evil by highlighting that it came to the fore as a conceptual problem with the rise of monotheism where the aim was to reconcile the monotheistic principles with the existence of evil. Whereas Judaism maintains a strict monotheism with the consequence that God is considered to be both the source of good and evil, Christianity developed a ‘soft’ monotheism wherein the ‘evil’ aspect was cast out of the kingdom of Heaven. Exploring this difference through the Judaic figure of the satan and the Christian notion of Satan shows how the problem of evil came to the fore due to socio-historical-conceptual alterations taking place during the inter-Testament period. Contrary to the commonly held assumption that ‘evil’ is an atemporal category, this chapter shows that it is a thoroughly historical one dependent upon a particular metaphysical schema.
Schelling and the Metaphysics of Evil
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines Schelling’s 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom to argue that it contains one of the most sophisticated challenges to Kant’s theory. Schelling criticises Augustine’s insistence that evil entails a privation of being by developing an original account of metaphysics and, by extension, evil that maintains that being entails an autopoietic process whereby a dark, chaotic, differentiating abyss expresses itself in actual, empirical being. By associating evil with this dark abyss, Schelling holds that ‘evil’ not only has actual being, but forms the differentiating foundation of actual existence. This brings Schelling to engage with the question of why some individuals choose to actualise this dark abyss while others do not. In contrast to Kant’s appeal to an unknowable noumenal decision orientated to the good that can be subsequently overcome, Schelling suggests that the choice of evil is an unconscious one that cannot subsequently be altered. The chapter concludes by raising two critical questions regarding Schelling’s analysis.
Arendt on Evil: From the Radical to the Banal
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on Arendt’s claim that subterranean social processes and structures create the conditions that bring individuals to commit evil acts. This led her to develop a Kantian-inspired radical conception of evil before subsequently abandoning it for a banal one. This chapter argues that the reason for doing so arose from her rejection of the foundationalism explicit in the Latin etymology of radical: radix. Arendt’s inability to identify this fixed foundation and her experiences of the Holocaust led her to claim that evil was diffuse not radical, located in the everyday. As such, she abandoned her previous notion of radical evil for one that held evil to entail a fungus that was located on the surface of society. For Arendt, evil is not exceptional or located in another cosmic realm, but results from the everyday actions of individuals who act for banal social reasons. With this, she ties the question of evil to the social processes subtending individual existence.
Introduction: Unfurling Worlds
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

The Introduction situates the emergence of this recent wave of films about animals in relation to contexts such as ‘slow cinema’, the question of the animal in philosophy, the arts and humanities, and cultural anxieties around the accelerating biopolitical transformations of animal life addressed by Shukin, Derrida, Haraway, Wolfe and others. The Introduction foregrounds Shukin’s model of ‘animal capital’ as particularly useful for addressing filmic engagements with the (re)production of animal life within the shifting regimes of late capitalism. Yet the Introduction also moves beyond the closed loop of biopolitical rendering diagnosed by Shukin, turning to Deleuze’s accounts of the time-image, virtuality and lines of flight (and to his engagement with Foucault), through which the relation between cinema and animal life is imagined otherwise, beyond the biopolitical grid of ‘bare life’.
Still/Moving: Bestiaire’s Lives in Limbo
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the exhibition of animals both living and dead, still and moving, Côté’s film invokes two key metaphorical positionings (cinema as zoo/taxidermy), privileging a self-reflexive form of ontological investigation. This chapter traces these ontological investments by drawing on accounts such as Lippit on the ‘electric’ animal, Bellour on hypnotic animal images and Haraway on taxidermy. Folded into Bestiaire’s set of somewhat essentialising, ontologising reflections, however, is an implicit questioning of the politics of the zoo and its links to biopower, neocolonialism, captivity and suffering. Structured by these tensions between the ontological, the aesthetic and the political, Bestiaire reflects on the zoo both as a metaphor for cinematic ‘animality’ qua cinematic specificity and as a set of lived, material conditions. While Bestiaire’s distension of ‘dead time’ keeps the focus above all on questions of captivity – its durational aesthetic bearing witness to lives left in limbo – its Deleuzian time-images invite attentiveness to animal worlds of embodiment, perception and meaning-making that reach beyond the biopolitical grid of imprisoned life.
The Turin Horse: Animal Labour and Lines of Flight
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

Tarr and Hranitzky’s The Turin Horse opens with a voiceover recounting Nietzsche’s apocryphal encounter with animal suffering – a horse being beaten in the streets of Turin on 3 January 1889. The film approaches this history obliquely, through the fictional story of another horse – a horse kept by a man, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, in a desolate, inhospitable part of Hungary, in an unidentified time. As the horse increasingly resists eating or moving, the film traces human lives of routine pitted against a nonhuman life refusing to submit to routine any longer. While critical commentary on the film has tended to emphasise an existentialist, Beckettian focus on the inescapability of death and an apocalyptic ‘end time’, this chapter reads The Turin Horse as a film about labour, and about animal labour in particular. Alongside the work of Deleuze, it draws on Jacques Rancière’s discussions of duration in Tarr’s work, while engaging critically with Rancière’s apparent neglect of questions of animal labour. While bearing witness to modes of exhaustion and precarity that reach across human and animal worlds, The Turin Horse is a quietly revolutionary film that patiently documents an animal’s revolt through her withdrawal of labour – a deterritorialising line of flight.
Conclusion: Cinematic Worlds and Beyond
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

The question of animal suffering, and of forms of vulnerability through which animal and human lives are differentially exposed, runs through the films explored in this book, from the reflections on ‘enduring’ and death-in-life states in Bestiaire and The Turin Horse, to the scenes of slaughter in Leviathan and the powerlessness explored by Bovines. In all of the films in this study, there appear to be two different concepts of life at stake: the ‘bare life’ produced by biopolitical regimes and the worlds that unfurl, and make meaning, beyond this. This corresponds to the two different orders of power traced throughout this study, following Deleuze (particularly in his readings of Spinoza and Foucault) – power as domination (pouvoir) and power as potential (puissance), understood as being in a relation of continual exchange. Bestiaire, Bovines and The Turin Horse offer a subtle diagnosis of our biopolitical present and its seemingly relentless ‘subjection of the animal’ (Derrida). Yet these films also hold out the promise of something else, gesturing to possible lines of light and political futures, in which our relations with animal worlds – both onscreen and off – might be reconfigured otherwise.
Aron’s legacy
Authors: Adair-Toteff Christopher
Published: January 2020

When Raymond Aron died suddenly in October of 1983, there was an outpouring of grief and praise. Aron was highly regarded by philosophers, sociologists, political thinkers, and many others in a variety of disciplines. Newspapers and journals were filled with his obituaries and most of the authors lauded Aron for his work. Even allowing for some hyperbole, it was understood that the world had lost a great thinker. Since then, Aron’s reputation has suffered to some degree; however, there have been a number of scholars who have written about him and their estimation of Aron is understandably high. Finally, there have been a few additions to the literature on Aron, and those indicate a further resurgence of interest in his thinking. Aron was one of the leading sociologists and political philosophers of the twentieth century; his legacy deserves to live on and his writings deserve to be read.
Romantic Italy and Restoration Politics: Romantic Poetry, Lady Morgan’s Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga
Authors: Cove Patricia
Published: January 2020

Chapter 1 analyses Romantic-era responses to the Congress of Vienna and 1820-1 Italian uprisings, with attention to Lady Morgan’s travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley’s historical novel Valperga (1823). Although the tropes of decay and rebirth that pervade British Romantic poetry about Italy by William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron and P. B. Shelley tend to elide contemporary Italy in favour of a distant, idealised past and imminent but imagined future, Morgan and Shelley historicise Italy to demonstrate that outside influence and occupation shaped the peninsula, while Italy mediated the major European powers’ views of themselves and each other. Morgan and Shelley place Italy, a cluster of minor states, within a broad, European context of cultural appropriation, imperialist territorial expansion and failed diplomacy, to interrogate the discourse of Italian decay and offer, instead, Italy as a potential site of concrete resistance to the post-Napoleonic status quo.
Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio
Authors: Cove Patricia
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores the re-imagining of the Italian refugee during the early Risorgimento. Victorian works by Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Barrett Browning register a new discomfort with Italian place that corresponds to the displacement of thousands of Italians from their home countries as conflict intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses on two English-language novels by Italian refugee Giovanni Ruffini, a former Young Italy member who fictionalises his own involvement in the movement in 1830s Piedmont and flight into exile in Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and depicts a returned Sicilian exile’s participation in the 1848 revolutions in Doctor Antonio (1855), to argue that Ruffini makes exile a constitutive feature of Italian political identity and re-writes the Italian landscape by mapping out the tracks of the dispossessed patriots who were expelled from their homes and communities during this period.
Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy’s Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems Before Congress and Last Poems
Authors: Cove Patricia
Published: January 2020

Chapter 4 traces the traumatic impact of the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’s Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Despite voicing enthusiastic support for unification, Barrett Browning’s poems also recognise the Risorgimento’s failures and costs. ‘Napoleon III. in Italy’, ‘Mother and Poet’, ‘Died . . .’, ‘The Forced Recruit’ and ‘A Tale of Villafranca Told in Tuscany’ explore the uses and limits of lyric utterance, using familial and intergenerational motifs to demonstrate how a performative poetic voice that ushers Italy into being conflicts with the historical trauma that precludes speech and severs the correspondence between words and deeds. EBB attempts a kind of wounded utterance, exploring a poetics of recognition that acknowledges the deep roots of political trauma embedded in the nation-making process while accepting and respecting the wartime suffering and grief that are beyond the powers of poetic convention and speech.
Conclusion
Authors: Cove Patricia
Published: January 2020

The Conclusion focuses on the delicate balance between investment in Italy and disenchantment with the Risorgimento’s outcome in the period following official Italian unification in 1861. Late nineteenth-century writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee step back from Risorgimento politics to depoliticise Italy, returning it to the aesthetic domain; yet, an unsettling quality of resurgence, or risorgimento, lingers in the skeletal Juliana Bordereau of James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and the revived corpse Medea da Carpi of Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1887/1890). George Meredith’s post-unification Vittoria (1866), in particular, points to the conflicts that the creation of an Italian nation-state failed to resolve; these contests, the Risorgimento’s cultural remains, reveal the centrality of loss, dissent and struggle to the Risorgimento’s legacy. However, Italian politics also played an invigorating, energising role for nineteenth-century British literature and culture, enlivening political discourse, cultural production and literary experimentation through its oppositionalist character.
The Growth of Intelligence Contracting in the Post-Cold War Era
Authors: Van Puyvelde Damien
Published: January 2020

This chapter charts and explains the rise of intelligence outsourcing in the post-Cold War era. In the 1990s, the private sector led the information technology revolution and became an indispensable asset for the intelligence community. Meanwhile government policies downsized the government intelligence workforce and a number of experienced officials moved to the private sector. Intelligence contracting boomed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks because the private sector offered a pool of knowledge and capabilities that managers deemed necessary at the time. The government hired thousands of contractors to intensify the national intelligence effort rapidly, and outsourcing diversified to an unprecedented level. In the atmosphere of emergency that characterized the early days of the global war on terrorism, this expansion was not planned, and a variety of contractors related to the intelligence community in ways that were not always harmonious and economically viable.
Improving Government Oversight of Intelligence Contractors
Authors: Van Puyvelde Damien
Published: January 2020

Chapter 5 examines how, from the mid-2000s onwards, the executive and legislative branches of government made substantial efforts to palliate gaps in the accountability regime for intelligence contractors. This chapter sheds a more positive light on the relationship between intelligence accountability and outsourcing, and emphasizes the progress government accountability holders made in four main areas: government access to information on contractors, acquisition management, the definition of core government functions, and balancing the public and private components of the intelligence workforce.
Conclusion
Authors: Van Puyvelde Damien
Published: January 2020

The US intelligence community’s reliance on contractors challenges accountability both in theory and in practice. When intelligence is outsourced, accountability cannot be approached through the sole prism of executive control, congressional oversight and judicial review, as is so often the case in the academic literature. To explore the evolving accountability regime for intelligence contractors, this book has proposed a new model of intelligence accountability as a process that brings together a variety of stakeholders across the three branches of government and broader society. In practice, these stakeholders’ willingness and ability to hold contractors to account differs and evolves....
Introduction: Between Movement and Party
Authors: Kirdiş Esen
Published: January 2020

This chapter introduces the research question and definitions of the book. It also sets out a methodology to compare Islamic movements across countries and within the same country. Lastly, this chapter introduces the three central hypotheses of this study and sets out the book’s theoretical framework.
Form a Party or Stay a Movement? Structures and the Menu of Options
Authors: Kirdiş Esen
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyses the socio-political structures of Morocco, Turkey, and Jordan comparatively. It looks at the costs and benefits of party formation versus eschewing party politics. In doing so, it presents three strategic tradeoffs Islamic movements face while deciding to participate in party politics.
Islamic Movements Take Agency: The Decision over Participation
Authors: Kirdiş Esen
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the internal debates over party politics that took place within each of the six Islamic movements in question. It examines how ideological priorities and organizational needs influence Islamic movements and their decision-making.
Two Paths, Six Different Outcomes, Three New Political Centres
Authors: Kirdiş Esen
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at the effects of participation and non-participation both on Islamic movements and parties, and on the regime before and after the Arab Spring. By looking at how the same behaviour resulted in different outcomes, this chapter examines how Islamic movements reconstitute new political centres in their respective countries.
In Defence of Politics against Security?
Authors: Neal Andrew W.
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins with the history of security as a form of ‘anti-politics’, from Hobbes to 20th century struggles to tame the ‘rogue elephant’ of the US intelligence services. It discusses the growth of security practices since 9/11 and reviews a range of key literature in security studies that perpetuates the ‘anti-politics’ idea. The chapter then explores the key concepts of the book including the meaning of ‘politics’, the stakes involved in defining what is and is not ‘political’, and the normative and analytical significance of the concept of ‘normal politics’ in relation to the ‘exceptional politics’ of security. It also discusses the ‘political game’ and ‘professional politics’ as the empirical focus of the book, framing this through works of Machiavelli, Weber, Foucault, and Bourdieu. The chapter closes by describing the overarching historical narrative and extended UK case study of the book: a four-decade shift from institutionalised forms of ‘exceptional’ security politics in 1980s to the current situation in which security is a ‘whole of government’ project that increasingly occupies the ‘normal’ activities of politics.
Securitisation and Politicisation
Authors: Neal Andrew W.
Published: January 2020

This chapter sets out an original conceptual framework for analysing the shift of ‘security’ from discursive and institutional arenas of ‘exceptional politics’ to ‘normal politics’. It argues that this shift is a conceptual impossibility in securitisation theory, in which by definition an issue cannot be ‘security’ and part of ‘normal politics’ simultaneously. Introducing an alternative approach, the chapter engages the recent debate on politicisation and depoliticisation to unpick contradictions in security theory and develop a conceptual framework to distinguish forms of politicisation from securitisation. The argument is that these literatures conflate the political quality of issues with their institutional location, and that these should be disaggregated analytically. The chapter thus proposes a framework that reserves the terms securitisation, politicisation, and depoliticisation for qualitative changes in the intensity or salience of issues, and adopts the term ‘arena migration’ (rather than deliberate ‘arena shifting’) for the movement of issues, policies, or activities between different institutional locations. Migrations between arenas such as central government and legislatures matter politically because of the historical exclusions of security politics: it matters if ‘security’ is no longer confined to the ‘black box’ of sovereign decision and is increasingly present in the activities of ‘normal politics’.
Politicians, Security Politics and the Political Game
Authors: Neal Andrew W.
Published: January 2020

Drawing on research interviews with politicians, including three former cabinet ministers and a former member of the UK Intelligence and Security Committee, this chapter describes the historical ‘rules of the game’ of security politics and how they are being challenged. It explores two angles: the problematisations expressed by politicians themselves, and a broader analysis of the structured power relationships in which they are enmeshed. It examines what happens within the ‘arena’ of ‘normal politics’ as it relates to security and why: certain formal and informal ‘rules’, conventions, norms, and power structures have worked to reproduce the institutional and symbolic dominance of the state and marginalised most actors in the political arena. Using concepts from Pierre Bourdieu, it analyses how non-government politicians have helped to reproduce their own marginalisation through practices of deference and self-exclusion. The final part argues that the old ‘rules’ and conventions of security politics have not entirely disappeared but are changing. It discusses how parliamentary debates on Iraqi WMD in 2003 and military intervention in Syria in 2013 show that non-government politicians are increasingly questioning, resisting, and rejecting the old conventions of security, such as deference to the executive on intelligence assessments.
Changing Communities and Collieries
Authors: Phillips Jim
Published: January 2020

Economic security in the coalfields was intimately connected with underground safety. Hazards were mediated by the effectiveness of trade union representation. Where employers attacked workplace trade unionism, the risks to workers of death, serious injury and illness were increased. This was the pattern in the 1920s and 1930s, when private owners excluded forceful union advocates. The reverse was observable in the 1950s and 1960s, when nationalisation facilitated stronger union voice. The rate of fatality was cut by one half as a result. On this most fundamental of all questions, life and death, nationalisation was an unambiguous success. Major fatal disasters from the 1950s to the early 1970s showed that dangers were diminished but not eradicated. Changes in production, with the application of power-loading in the 1960s, also brought new hazards. Miners were nevertheless empowered by union voice and public ownership to act with greater vigilance in pursuit of safety and were compensated when missing shifts because of injury or illness. This was unmistakable progress towards greater security in the coalfields.