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IMAGINE a family sitting around the kitchen table on a Saturday morning in midwinter somewhere in Melbourne. The paper is open at the sports pages, the radio is tuned in [...]

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has made significant progress towards a postcolonising transformation of its political culture and its major political and social institutions, as it has shifted away from violence and the dominance of political ideologies structured by the friend–enemy distinction. These ideological formations and the practices of social and political antagonism that they prescribed have been challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations that construct identities and relations through more inclusive norms of recognition and that support a more complex emotional constellation. However, as this cultural transformation has been neither thoroughgoing nor universal, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented, including one by Giorgio Shani on the post-secular understanding of human security, another by Emil Edenborg on the role of creativity in challenging and destabilising dominant narratives of ontological security, and one by Alexandria Innes on postcolonial identities in Cyprus.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by A. Dirk Moses on the politics of indigeneity, one by Robert Spencer on ecocriticism, and one by John O'Leary on politics of sympathy.

This article presents an analysis of the dynamics and dilemmas of the political project of reconciliation with reference to Australia. Reconciliation has come to figure as a central motive and motif of a postcolonial moment that is engaged in an attempt at re-organising social relations in "settler" societies such as Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Australia. Reconciliation is understood as a psychological process of personal transformation. It involves a battle within institutions, both civil and state, over which particular social imaginaries will come to organise the history of the present.

This article focuses on the conference on "'The Cultural Unconscious and the Postcolonising Process," jointly sponsored by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine and the Ashworth Program in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. Literary uses of language in poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction constitute an imaginative intervention aimed at changing the cultural unconscious. Perhaps the most powerful cultural work poetic language performs is to merge the linguistic, the psychological and the political.

Focuses on the closeness and affinity of concerns on the politics of territoriality in the work of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Persistent critical concern and engagement with psychoanalysis and Marxism; Forms of corporeality as gesturality, rhythm dance and rite; Politics of the concept and its implied ethics.

Introduces a series of articles regarding philosophy.

Introduces a series of articles on nature, modernities and civilization. Description of the origins of the Christian era; Images of nature mediated by the ideational, symbolic or linguistic frames of reference; Description of the counter-paradigm provided by landscape to modernity's objectivism of nature.

Editorial. Discusses issues which conceptualize the other from various positions which draw on continental philosophy, critical and postcolonial theories. Strangeness emitted by the term others; Discussion on the versions of the other; Relation between self and other.

Presents a series of articles on social and critical theory.