In this chapter, the author examines clinical psychological, traumatic developmental, and sociocultural perspectives of a serial murder. This includes media dynamics and feminist perspectives. The author discusses malingering, or the faking of mental illness. The case of female serial killer (FSK) Aileen Wuornos is revisited to illustrate clinical psychological issues. The cases of male serial killers (MSKs) Ronald Dominique and Dennis Rader (BTK Strangler) highlight phenomena from the chapter.

This short epilogue seeks to summarize the major claims of the book and to provide examples of events and changes close in time to the publication of the book of how the Islamic esoteric sciences continue to be tied closely to political and religious authority in postcolonial twenty-first century Mauritania.

In the early years of the 2010s, new television and radio stations in a postcolonial Islamic Republic of Mauritania struggled to fill airtime with something other than the nightly news, recorded music performances, and images of Mauritania’s countryside set to traditional music. Talk shows, commercials, and sketch comedies were some of the new productions broadcast on private television and radio programs. Short situational or sketch comedy television programs sometimes used l’ḥjāb as a narrative hook for an episode relying on specific gendered tropes and stereotypes about its experts to elicit laughs from viewers. This chapter examines such television programs as well as the ways Islamist preachers also began using social media to their advantage to reflect on contemporary social issues in this period to examine how a larger Mauritanian public understands, criticizes, makes use of, and ignores l’ḥjāb, its experts, and its detractors. While the representations of l’ḥjāb in the media in the late 2010s show Mauritanians challenging the legitimacy of its bases, its experts and its efficacy, these images nonetheless provide evidence of its persistent relevance to the challenges of daily life and its capacity to adapt and respond to questions of modernity.

This chapter investigates the political effects and means of royal heirs in constitutional systems. It asks how they contributed politically to the process of monarchical persistence in the Long Nineteenth Century and concentrates in particular on instances where they were opposed to the course championed by their predecessors and on the process of generating ‘soft power’ for their dynasties by committing themselves to visibility, mobility and ‘civic publicness’.

Chapter 11 considers the spread of mass delusion and misinformation among humanity and its dangers.

Over the last decades both 'war' and 'media' have been unleashed – both conceptually and in practice – in ways that defy conventional understanding of the terms. One obvious reason is digitization, the explosive, closely entangled growth of cyberwar and cyberspace. This make it all the more important to scrutinize the peculiar mutual attraction the study of war and the study of media tend to exert upon each other. For media studies, the study of war, and the progress of weapons technology in particular, allows for the creation of evolutionary models that privilege internal dynamics of technological supersession at the expense of external factors. The focus on new, increasingly autonomous media technologies, in turn, privileges variants of technological solutionism on the side of military experts and historians. In both cases, however, conceptual difficulties arise not only from the unprecedented growth of new infrastructures, but also from the realization that both 'war' and 'media' were never – or only in a fairly limited post-1648 European context – what the terms commanded them to be.

Introduces the volume, identifying themes, methodology and goals; positions it in relation to other works; and outlines the chapters and their running order as well as those features that unite chapters or lead from one to the next.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

The relation between Buddhism and constitutional law is not just a story of Buddhist influences on public law; it is also a story of how concepts and ideas that are prominent in constitutional design and interpretation also come to influence Buddhism. The chapter investigates this possibility by looking closely at a new transnational movement of televangelist Buddhist monks who form part of the “Mahamevnāwa Monastery.” Mahamevnāwa monks have taken the linguistic ideology of Sinhala nationalism which was central to constitutional practice in Sri Lanka and made it a central tenet of Buddhist practice (i.e. making the national language the language of Buddhism). They have also taken an idea that the law of the land should be accessible and representative of the “nation” which is core to the very concept of constitutional law itself and turned it into a soteriological principle of accessing nirvana. I argue that what links both these things is that both the constitution and the Mahamevnāwa reforms embody similar forms of linguistic ideology in which the ideal state can be realised by creating “public” texts for the uplift of the “nation.”

Several recent elections – including the Brexit referendum – suggest a looming disconnection between political representatives and citizens. This perceived gap in representation gives fuel to populist parties, who claim to speak on behalf of the people suffering under the rule of disregarding elites (see Chapters 9 and 13). While representation used to be the solution to large-scale democracy, today it would seem, it is precisely what is causing problems to democratic societies all over the world (see Chapters 2 and 15). There is therefore an urgent need to acquire more knowledge about the dynamics of the relationship between the elected representatives and the people they represent.

This chapter examines careers in, and the structure of, public and community archaeology. It includes discussion of archaeological outreach organizations (especially charity sector and non-governmental organizations), of professional archaeological organizations and museums, and of the place of archaeology in the media.

In recent years, nations around the world have faced a veritable crisis of ineffective government. Basic governmental functions – preventing private violence, resolving disputes through lawful means, providing an infrastructure to enable people to meet their most elementary needs for shelter, nutrition, transportation, communication, education – go unmet. In some countries, these basic functions are met but longer-term governance issues languish, and government is perceived to be unresponsive in ways that some believe contribute to political backlashes, including those against minority groups. These failures in governance are also perceived to have contributed to a global upsurge in authoritarianism and a concomitant decline in democracy.1

Moreover, the basic freedoms protected in many democratic constitutions – freedom from state-sanctioned torture and from punishment or coercion without fair process; freedom of expression, of religion, of movement; freedom from invidious discrimination; enjoyment of property without arbitrary government interference; free exercise of the suffrage – cannot exist, in an organized society, without government effective enough to control itself and its agents and otherwise to secure the protection of those rights.