Bare life is the human being stripped of his or her social existence and denied membership of a political community which guarantees their rights and civic status. In the state of bare life, the rule of law ceases and people can be killed and tortured with impunity. This work deals with these issues.

Elsewhere in the issue, Robin Wilson discusses inter-ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland; Richard Minns looks at the crucial role of pensions in the development of the Israeli state; Pat Devine revisits the political history of the 1970s, arguing that we are still living with the consequences of the events of that decade; and Janet Newman reflects on competing ideas about the nature of the public, and the different terrains across which battles about public life are currently being fought.

Editorial: Bare Life
Sally Davison
Editorial Commentary: The World Without Light
Jonathan Rutherford
Al-Qaeda, Spectre of Globalisation
Faisal Devji
Rehabilitating Pacification: Then and now, Iraq and Vietnam
Kurt Jacobsen
The Roots of Terrorism
Sayeed Hasan Khan
Learning from Robert McNamara
Michael Rustin
London Inside-Out
Doreen Massey
'Man's The Talk on Road': A Dialogue with Young Black People on their Experiences of Gun Crime
Ejos Ubiribo
A New Politics of Respect
Ruth Lister
Northern Ireland: The problems of Identity Politics
Robin Wilson
Pensions and the Growth of Israel
Richard Minns
Poems
Carole Satyamurti, C. K. Williams, Suresh Dalal, Joolz Denby
Reviews
Tony Bennett, Jon Baldwin
The 1970s and After: The Crisis of Social Democracy
Pat Devine
A Politics of 'the Public'
Janet Newman