The broad aim of this book is to provide a general basis for comparatively analysing and understanding the French riots of October/November 2005 and the corresponding Bristish disorders which occurred in the spring/summer of 2001. The first of the French riots broke out on 27 October in the north Parisian banlieue (suburb) of Clichy-sous-Bois when two teenage youths of Muslim heritage were electrocuted in a substation while fleeing from the police. The two youths had apparently become unwittingly involved, together with their friends, in a police investigation of a break-in. It is not clear whether they had actually been chased by police officers. Nevertheless, a rumor to this effect quickly circulated the locality, provoking violent confrontation between youths and police. Three more weeks of rioting then ensued in neighbouring Parisian suburbs and other major French cities with similar concentrations of ethnic minorities. The riots invariably involved thousands of youths from poorer areas who confronted the police, set fire to local buildings and ignited hundreds of motor vehicles. Further rioting - though not on the same scale as in 2005 - occurred subsequently in 2006 and 2007. England and Wales have had their own counterparts to the French riots. In the early and mid 1980s, there were a number of clashes between police and African-Caribbean youths in inner-city areas. Further, in 2001 rioting broke out in the northern mill towns and cities of Bradford, Burnley, Leeds and Oldham. All of these later instances involved youths from Pakistani or Bangladeshi descent. In contrast to the riots that occurred in France though, a contributing factor to 2001 riots was the activities of white neo-Fascists. Many official reports and academic studies followed each wave of disorder, each questioning the effectiveness of Britain's 'multicultural' society, in addition to other possible factors such as the marginalisation and 'criminalisation' of minority ethnic youth, and their relations with the police. Such issues were again on the agenda after more rioting occurred in the Lozells area of Birmingham in 2005. Unlike the previous disorders, this entailed conflict between South Asian and African-Caribbean youths, following a rumor that a young African girl had been gang-raped by South Asians. British attempts to analyse and remedy the underlying causes of the riots constitute a potentially valuable resource to French academics, practitioners and policy makers. In turn, the French experience provides a fertile basis for re-applying, testing and enhancing existing British theory and policy. The book consists of a highly coherent, theoretically rich and thematically comprehensive collection of papers which provide an unparalleled description and comparative analysis of the French and British riots, along with social policy recommendations to help to address the underlying issues.

The Familiar Enemy re-examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two profoundly intertwined peoples developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. This special connection between the English and the French has endured into the modern period as a model for Western nationhood. Ardis Butterfield reassesses the concept of 'nation' in this period through a wide-ranging discussion of writing produced in war, truce, or exile from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, concluding with reflections on the retrospective views of this conflict created by the trials of Jeanne d'Arc and by Shakespeare's Henry V. She considers authors writing in French, 'Anglo-Norman', English, and the comic tradition of Anglo-French 'jargon', including Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, Charles d'Orléans, as well as many lesser-known or anonymous works. Traditionally Chaucer has been seen as a quintessentially English author. This book argues that he needs to be resituated within the deeply francophone context, not only of England but the wider multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe. It thus suggests that a modern understanding of what 'English' might have meant in the fourteenth century cannot be separated from 'French', and that this has far-reaching implications both for our understanding of English and the English, and of French and the French.

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

As the UK leaves the European Union and as the multilateral order is increasingly under stress, bilateral security links are more important than ever. Among such relationships, the UK-France partnership has become particularly critical in the past decades. Alice Pannier's Rivals in Arms reveals the history of the growing special partnership between Europe's two leading military powers in the twenty-first century. Using an innovative analytical framework rooted in theories of cooperation and negotiation, this book exposes the challenges the two countries have faced to develop, equip, and employ their military capabilities together. Through a decade-long study, Pannier highlights how France and the UK have endeavoured to make their partnership more effective and resistant to domestic and international shifts, including Brexit. Building on more than one hundred interviews with key stakeholders and unmatched access to primary sources, Rivals in Arms takes the reader behind the scenes, investigating the complicated but crucial defence relationship between France and the UK - a relationship that is critical to the future of Euro-Atlantic security.

This collection examines relations between France and Britain, in particular their conflicting memories of key episodes in their recent past.

Genuinely new story of the Second World War - the full account of England's last war against France in 1940-42. Most people think that England's last war with France involved point-blank broadsides from sailing ships and breastplated Napoleonic cavalry charging red-coated British infantry. But there was a much more recent conflict than this. Under the terms of its armistice with Nazi Germany, the unoccupied part of France and its substantial colonies were ruled from the spa town of Vichy by the government of Marshal Philip Petain. Between July 1940 and November 1942, while Britain was at war with Germany, Italy and ultimately Japan, it also fought land, sea and air battles with the considerable forces at the disposal of Petain's Vichy French. When the Royal Navy sank the French Fleet at Mers El-Kebir almost 1,300 French sailors died in what was the twentieth century's most one-sided sea battle. British casualties were nil. It is a wound that has still not healed, for undoubtedly these events are better remembered in France than in Britain. An embarrassment at the time, France's maritime massacre and the bitter, hard-fought campaigns that followed rarely make more than footnotes in accounts of Allied operations against Axis forces. Until now.

Though Britain and France have faced a similar threat from Islamist terrorism in the years following September 11 2001, they have often responded in different ways to the challenges it posed. This groundbreaking work offers the first in-depth comparative analysis of counterterrorist policies and operations in these two leading liberal democracies. Challenging the widely held view that the nature of a state's counterterrorist policies depends on the threat it is facing, Foley suggests that such an argument fails to explain why France has mounted more invasive police and intelligence operations against Islamist terrorism than Britain and created a more draconian anti-terrorist legal regime. Drawing on institutional and constructivist theories, he develops a novel theoretical framework that puts counterterrorism in its organisational, institutional and broader societal context. With particular appeal to students and specialists of International Relations and Security Studies, this book will engage readers in the central debates surrounding anti-terrorist policy.