In Paul Gilroy’s After Empire (2004), multiculturalism drifts, exists, resists and persists through boisterous and ongoing convivial cultures. This one-day conference will investigate the opportunities and limits of convivial spaces of the metropolis: places in the city where solidarities, kindness and intimacy have developed and been sustained between London’s plural constituents, but also where the edges of conviviality have been strained, policed or contested.

The conference hopes to consider how conviviality might offer ‘a more radical ideal of urban interaction’, that is ground level and extra-governmental, but can also be forced or imposed from above.

- How and where were such spaces constituted and by whom?

The rise of the nation state and of national identity in the nineteenth century has long been associated with the development of the national press. Since the 1970s and 1980s, historians have also mapped this rise onto the growing interest in organised sport, particularly towards the end of that century.

Over the last decades, the study of governance in Asia has increasingly expanded to include a focus upon non-state entities. Historians have realized that engagement with local intermediaries, civil society organizations, power brokers, and interest groups has been crucial to the day-to-day administration of European colonies and postcolonial states alike.

Since the dawn of the nuclear era, nuclear deterrence has been contested and criticized, both as a legitimate policy on the basis of its immorality, and as a practical policy on the basis of its inefficiency and dangerosity.

These questionings opened the path to a great diversity of movements that have been involved in nuclear disarmament, either directly – peace and antinuclear movements, national and international peace organisations, including professional (notably scientific and religious) organisations – or indirectly – direct action groups (more common in anti-nuclear energy groups), environmental, feminist, anticolonial or human/civil rights groups, and political parties.

Despite their differences, these entities have all contributed to the edification and circulation of a broad corpus of criticism against nuclear weapons.

Recent studies and movements have re-energized the pro-nuclear disarmament agenda in the West and the strong criticism against nuclear deterrence, especially on ethical, moral and philosophical grounds (see, for example, changes in religious thoughts, notably the Catholic Church in Rome).