This chapter focuses on some of the ways in which states and their citizens have sought to describe and identify terrorists and terrorism, and why they have adopted certain historical tropes and language in the process. Modern states have utilised a number of long-standing historical tropes as lenses through which to view the nature and threat of modern sub-state terrorism, in turn adopting corresponding historical narratives to condemn and counter terrorism. ‘History’ has therefore proved a useful tool in helping states legitimate counterterrorism policies. ‘History’ has also played a role in the scholarship of Terrorism Studies, with commentators looking to the past in order to differentiate between ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorism. The historical evidence for the old/new terrorism thesis may be fragile, but the presentation of ‘new terrorism’ – characterised by religious fanaticism (notably Islamic extremism), irrationality and unlimited violence – has drawn heavily upon the historical trope of civilisation struggling against barbarism. Terrorists have become the paradigmatic new barbarians of our current political era. The wider cultural resonances of this linguistic association between barbarism and terrorism is important because, as Crenshaw rightly argues, language is not neutral. By using the language of barbarism in reference to terrorism, states are able to situate terrorists immediately within a deep cultural understanding of threat and the Other.

What happens when we insert refugees into a history of twentieth-century Britain? As we might expect, exploring the entry, reception and resettlement of refugees reveals a good deal about British attitudes towards vulnerable strangers, belonging and identity. Yet the book argues for the value of using the arrival of refugees to consider a far wider set of historical problems. Focussing on refugees’ relationship with British society and institutions allows us to historicise, not only the changing experiences of refugees themselves but how Britain also changed over time. Assumptions that refugees fleeing Nazism were solely the responsibility of voluntary organisations, as much as the expectation that 20,000 Hungarians within a few short weeks in the winter of 1956-1957 would be found employment, or that Ugandan Asian arrivals in 1972 might need protection from the National Front, all speak volumes about profound shifts in British society across the twentieth century. Unpicking the historical processes underpinning these assumptions leads us, for example, to think about the changing nature of the welfare state, the relationship between voluntary organisations and government, the role of pressure group politics and the relationship between national employment levels and the reception of foreigners.

This chapter focusses on two refugee movements caused by the Nazi regime: Jews and dissidents from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia seeking refuge before the outbreak of war in September 1939; and Dutch and Belgium refugees who arrived in May 1940 as they fled the German advance. The Britain they were attempting to enter was still fearful of mass unemployment and was a country of endemic antisemitism and everyday xenophobia. Still self-confident on the world stage and driven by its imperial interests, Britain was nevertheless obliged to engage with the emerging internationalist and humanitarian structures of the League of Nations. The tensions caused by these competing forces saw Britain retaining its anti-alien immigration legislation while also becoming a signatory of the League’s 1933 and 1937 Refugee Conventions and dominating many of its refugee initiatives. As the refugee crisis deepened, voluntary organisations stepped into the humanitarian vacuum, with their activity demonstrating the diversity, energy and resourcefulness of British civil society. As well as paying particular attention to the role of refugee organisations, this chapter demonstrates how the balance between state and voluntary initiatives changed over the duration of the war as government became ever-more drawn into supporting refugees who had reached Britain’s shore.

Measuring behaviour means assigning numbers to observations of behaviour according to specified rules. Converting a stream of behaviour into behavioural metrics involves choosing and defining specific categories of behaviour that can be measured. Behavioural categories can be described in terms of their physical structure or their consequences. An ethogram is a catalogue of the species-typical behavioural categories displayed by a species in a specified environment. Descriptions of behavioural categories should be unambiguous and written down before data collection starts. Behavioural categories can be designated as either events (short duration) or states (longer duration). Behavioural categories are used to generate metrics such as latencies, frequencies, durations and intensities. Two or more metrics can be combined to form a composite metric. Metrics can be at different levels of measurement, ranging from nominal (weakest) to ratio (strongest).

In his 1914 monograph, The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual, accepted as an Habilitation in law in the field of state theory in 1916, Carl Schmitt proceeds from a discussion of his view of the relation between law (Recht) and power (Macht), through a discussion of the role of the state in the realization of law, to a discussion of his view of the significance of the individual within the state. Schmitt argues that the value of the state consists in the realization of law in the world, while the significance of the individual is that of fulfilling the roles that the state assigns and ascribes to them for the completion of the state’s task of realizing law and right. Schmitt thus claims a great value for his view of the state and a correspondingly diminutive significance for his view of the individual.

Self-determination operated as an organizing principle for national liberation movements around the world in the twentieth century. This was no different for Kurdish political movements assuming the principle that a nation is entitled to a state which exercises exclusive territorial control. National self-determination became the grounding of the right they claimed to establish the independent state of Kurdistan. Since the constitutive power of the state relied for its justification on the existence of a self-determining nation, Kurdish political parties emerging after the Second World War framed their struggle in terms of state formation. However, in the course of the twenty-first century, the emphasis on the Kurds as a people without a state became one of the Kurds as a people beyond the state. In this chapter, these contemporary political developments are discussed within a historical context. The chapter looks at the relation of Kurds and Kurdish politics with the state as an object and objective of political struggle. In so doing, it distinguishes between two strong currents in Kurdish politics over the last decades.

The Kurdish question, four decades after the Iranian Revolution, continues to be considered one of the most serious threats to Iran’s territorial integrity by the clerical regime. In turn, Iranian Kurds often feel marginalized, discriminated and dissatisfied with the treatment they receive from Shiite Persians who dominate the multinational country of Iran. In a quest to better understand the conflictive relationship between Kurds and the Iranian regime, this chapter intends to examine the social and political dynamics of Iranian Kurdistan by analysing the interaction between social forces, Kurdish organizations and the central state. For this purpose, it aims to examine three major aspects that have shaped Kurdish society since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The first section presents an overview of the demography, social and class structure of the Kurdish people. By focusing on state-minority interaction, the second section analyses the Kurdish question in Iranian discourse and various state policies vis-â-vis the Kurds. The third section addresses the Kurdish movement’s responses to state policies. It distinguishes between organizations present in Kurdistan and the Kurdish movement which incorporates a wide array of aims, interests and actors. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of new spaces and prospects for action.

After setting out the centrality of governance to understanding and engaging with energy transitions, I show how ideologies and strategies of governance have been shaped by broader shifts in capitalism around neo-liberalism regarding the role of the state and the re-scaling of the global economy through processes of globalisation. I show how at every level from local, city, national, to regional and global governance, political systems reflect and are imbued with the structural and material power of incumbent energy providers and interests, reinforced by institutional power through high levels of access and representation in the key discussion and decision-making centres to frame their needs as congruent with those of the state and their energy pathways as the most viable for tackling the energy trilemma of energy poverty, security and sustainability. I describe an energy governance complex: a web of distributed (but unevenly concentrated) power and agency over different parts of the energy system and its multi-functionality. Ecologising governance draws attention not only to its interconnections and interdependencies but also to its ecological blindness.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s overall contribution – its examination of white workers’ experience and negotiation of the dismantling of the racial state and the transition to majority rule, thereby inserting white workers into the historiography on late and post-apartheid South Africa; its demonstration of the analytical value of class in gaining new interpretative and chronological insights into South Africa’s long transition and current politics; and its demonstration of how this contributes a white working-class perspective from the Global South to current debates on the insecurities, subjectivities and politics produced by longer processes in the changing relationship between the state, capital, and labour, as they emerge at the current historical juncture.

This chapter lays down the theoretical foundations of the book. It reviews broader literatures on energy in general across the social sciences, before focusing in on debates about sociotechnical transitions. It draws out key insights from that body of work and provides a critique of some of its limitations. It then lays out the basis of a global political economy account that emphasises the global politics of transition, its historical dimensions and key political economy dimensions around shifting power relations and is attentive to the ecologies of transition.

This chapter sets out the idea of the moral economy of elections in more theoretical detail, locating it in the context of a particular theoretical approach to the state that draws inspiration from the work of Timothy Mitchell and others, as well as elaborating the description of the patrimonial and civic registers. The chapter also sets out the relationship of this moral economy approach to analytical models that foregound the idea of the norm, arguing that the affective power of the behaviours and language on political subjectivity is better captured by the language of virtue and morality. The chapter concludes with a brief description of three moments that help reveal the tensions between registers of virtue that shape the moral economy of elections.

Chapter 1 considers theatre as a form of industry that confronts a central problem: how to produce a performance – in the general sense of manufacturing a product rather than in the specialist sense of financing a show – and then reproduce it over time and space. This chapter explores the centrality of blocking in addressing this problem, through an analysis of the practice’s historical and contemporary significance, and of two productions by London’s National Theatre: Noises Off (2000) and Frankenstein (2011). On the one hand, blocking demonstrates the extent to which virtues commonly attributed to the theatre – its artistry, its ephemerality, its uniqueness, and so on – are inextricable from the routines, systems, and technologies upon which any production process depends. At the same time, it abstracts the work from the worker, with all the potential for both ingenuity and exploitation that can entail, and is a precondition for forms of theatrical production – from touring shows to “McTheatre” – that have taken theatrical production firmly into the realm of the (sometimes global) market for centuries.