Critical Legal Thinking

Looking in the mirror: reflections on the DUP and ‘the Irish problem’

by Paddy McDaid • 16 June 2017

The chatter, comments, and headlines are clear: the perennial ‘Irish problem’ has returned to haunt the British stage. But what is there to hear in the silence that frames the chatter? To the surprise and unease of many in Britain the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has been thrust front-and-centre onto the political stage of their liberal democracy. While this appearance has elicited much comment and chatter amongst the good people of that liberal democracy, the real question perhaps should be, beyond this comment and chatter which will undoubtedly die down when the ‘coalition of chaos’ comes to its inevitable end, what does this appearance tell us about British society and politics at a more general level? In Britain, since the first mention…

by Bernard Keenan • 15 June 2017

As the Conservative Party’s majority evaporated in the early hours of 9th June 2017, the new parliamentary power of the DUP quickly came into focus. With Sinn Fein resolutely abstaining from taking their seats, the Democratic Unionist Party find themselves in a position to enter a formal coalition or, more likely, a confidence and supply agreement with the Tories. On the straightforward arithmetic, there is no reason that such an arrangement cannot last a full five-year fixed term. Politically, however, it seems impossible. For the immediate future, however, it suits both Labour and the Conservatives to let the dust settle, make necessary internal changes within their parties, and allow new political distinctions to emerge in particular with regards to Brexit…

by Jacob Bard-Rosenberg • 14 June 2017

(or some quickly gathered thoughts) Thesis 1. Contemporary capitalism rarely appears simple. Back in 1848 Marx wrote in the opening of The Communist Manifesto about how “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” But already things were more complicated. Marx’s analysis hinged on showing how the opposition of these two classes was founded in the relation of domination of capital and wage labour. Suddenly, unable to leap into pure identification with a class, people become split and split up. For Marx, only in…

by Sarah-Jane Koulen • 13 June 2017

Sacrificing nuance, sensitivity and specificity for the sake of a ‘catchy’ title is not a neutral choice, but reiterates dominant narratives and is violently short sighted. Scrolling through my social media feed one evening last week, I came across an announcement advertising an event at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut in The Hague titled “Can Africa prosecute international crimes? – The DRC Example”. Sponsored by the Asser Instituut, the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University, in cooperation with Open Society Foundations, the event was part of a popular series of Supranational Criminal Law (SCL) lectures organized by the Asser Instituut. The series has run for years, is generally well…

by Admin • 8 June 2017

Whatever happens in today’s election in the UK, Corbyn’s campaign has been a success. Not in generations has there been an insurgent electoral campaign from the Labour party. By this we mean a campaign that faced down almost universal media antipathy (even hatred) but sought to turn Labor’s unpopularity with the establishment against the establishment itself. Because that is what Corbyn and Milne and the whole team have done. They have insisted that the establishment rejection of the Labour party under Corbyn is nothing more than an elite protecting its own interests. In this Labour have performatively revealed the political reality of even the most (apparently) liberal of media sources. At the outset one of the BBC commentators asked whether we…

by Tatiana Hansbury • 6 June 2017

Last month saw some of the most populous and socially significant protests in Moscow. A series of rallies was held against the plans by the Moscow authorities to demolish old ex-public housing stock and resettle over a million residents. What was supposed to be an uncontroversial policy and in the run-up to the municipal and federal elections may have been seen as a vote-winner, led to an unprecedented mobilisation of residents. The protesters see the plans as an unconstitutional attempt of a grand-scale expropriation in favour of city authorities and developers, and believe that they risk social cleansing and the change of the city in the interests of those who do not live there. Local activism, lawsuits, engagement with parliamentary…

by Tanzil Chowdhury • 30 May 2017

In the travel documentary, In America, Stephen Fry visits a tea party in Massachusetts to speak with Harvard Professor Peter Gomes. The conversation discusses the re-imagined history of the United States, describing how American political solutions are sought for global and local problems. Gomes goes on to suggest ‘the many things one can say about this country is that we dislike complexity- so we’ll make simple solutions to everything we can.‘ In one sense, this also speaks to the British people. Explanations of complex problems are frequently reduced to a simple calculus, often at the expense of nuance and sometimes with compromises of difficult truths. As a response to the tragedy in Manchester, Jeremy Corbyn has criticised the wholesale shortcomings…

by Sundhya Pahuja • 19 May 2017

I was intrigued to see the recent advertisement for the Academy Africa Fellowship at Chatham House, a prestigious, London-based think tank on international affairs, with a Royal Charter granted in 1926, and originator of the famous ‘Chatham House Rule’. In its advertisement, Chatham House seeks fellows who will, as part of their Leadership training, undertake a research project of their ‘own design’. The project must be conducted under one of four Chatham House programmes, including the International Law Programme. It is here that my interest was piqued. The named research topic is ‘African Perspectives on international law’. You can see the full advertisement here: https://www.chathamhouse.org/academy/fellowships/africa ‘African governments may differ from those in the West and elsewhere in their perceptions…

by Florian Hoffmann • 18 May 2017

In a recent review of Alex Cuadros’ 2016 Brazzillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country (astonishingly, yet unsurprisingly, still unpublished in Portuguese and in Brazil) Patrick Iber, writing for the New Republic, declared that ‘if Brazil’s inequality shocks the conscience, we must recognize that, as a global community, we are all Brazil.’ Indeed, the fascination of Brazil, not least in the current ‘close to boiling point’ climate that has come to dominate the political weather across the globe, consists not in its being an exotic outlier but rather, as Iber concludes in his perceptive piece, a magnifying mirror that shows in sharp detail the ruptured macrocosm of neoliberal techno-capitalism, its violence and cruelty, but also the beauty…

by Rachel Adams • 10 May 2017

Key Concept Despite their prominence in subsequent academic writing,1 the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics” are perhaps the most elusive, and arguably the most compelling (given the attention they have subsequently received), concepts of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre. Within his published work, these concepts featured only in the last chapter of the slim first volume of History of Sexuality (The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality Volume I 1976).2 And, while biopolitics and biopower can be seen to figure within broader conceptualisations and genealogies of power and governmentality3 of his lecture series at the Collège de France (largely, 1975-76 ‘Society Must be Defended’4; 1977-78 Security, Territory Population5; and 1978-79 The Birth of Biopolitics6) these references remain ‘speculative’7 and incomplete, in part…

by César Augusto Baldi • 8 May 2017

Human rights need to be released from the confinements of whiteness and sexism. In a debate that took place in 1993 about the “reinvention of the left”, Tariq Modood highlighted that ethnic diversity and racial equality were new challenges for the left and thus, also, for critical theory in general. Being Pakistani and Muslim, he sought to prove that without the full participation of individuals in all social areas, without the need for anti discrimination procedures, without recognising that racism is ‘broader than colourism” and without allowing communities to use their own customs and values to address their problems and obstacles, it is impossible to conceive of an effective multiculturalism that would have as its foundation “remodeling concepts of equality”.1…

by Tatiana Hansbury • 12 April 2017

The centenary of the 1917 revolution can be seen as a diversion from the trauma still fresh and experienced by every living Russian except the youngest. The Russian revolution of 1917 indelibly marked the course of the 20th century. Its centenary comes into a world once again seized with turmoil, and its import is far from settled, most importantly, in Russia itself. The stakes for Russian society are high: successful appropriation of mutually incompatible narratives about the past will allow Russia a viable future, indeed without it we may struggle to talk meaningfully about ‘Russian society’ at all. The Western coverage of the centenary of the February revolution has been, with few exceptions, faintly disapproving and dismissed the government’s approach as…

by Matthew McManus and Christopher Satoor • 11 April 2017

Since the publication of Being and Event1 in 1988, Alain Badiou has established himself as inarguably the most ambitious philosopher in the Continental tradition in quite some time. His rapidly growing oeuvre has come to encompass metaphysics, ethics, politics, art, cinema and more. Badiou has truly taken it upon himself to build and defend a genuine philosophical system (once a faux pas par excellence) intended to stand next the great architectural edifices of Hegel, Kant, and of course Plato. The result has been something of a philosophical epiphany, with many scholars nostalgic for grand systematicty taking Badiou at his word that he is the real deal,2with other being more critical.3 All this makes thorough engagement with his work ever more…

by Sara Kendall and Stuart J. Murray • 10 April 2017

On 5 April 2017, one day before authorizing missile strikes against Syrian targets, Donald Trump remarked during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, ‘I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact.’ He elaborated: ‘When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal — people were shocked to hear what gas it was. That crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. Many, many lines.’ Described as a visceral and instinctual reaction to the deaths of innocent children, Trump’s account of this event plays upon tropes of a break or conversion, a ‘flexible’ turn from the ‘America First’ paradigm…

by Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja • 5 April 2017

We want to know more about the roots of your music. As we understand it, your music brings together a particular new take on reggae, ska, and techno sounds with powerful lyrics. How does this mixture relate to your aim to engage with social struggles? We are thinking here too about ‘tradition’ – an idea that for legal scholars simultaneously denotes social power, respect, order, patterns of thought, and, of course, obedience: inheritance, and mixing? T: In music as opposed to prose it is not just lyrics but sound that becomes a carrier of meaning. Bass music, dub music, deeply impacts upon people and can be powerful expressions of emotion, of political sentiment, even of metaphor. In the case of reggae in particular we feel that it lends itself very well to expressing the fractured militarised reality that we are engaging with…

by Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja • 4 April 2017

Taru, as legal scholars the idea of soundclashing is extremely interesting. We know that speech and rhetoric have been always part of law, and yet it is hard to grasp the actual mechanics of using sound in our projects. How do you process, or how do you render into a material form, this idea of ‘soundclashing’? Specifically, how are technique and technology mixed at this point with politics, histories of violence and entrenched power asymmetries in order to produce something new, or at least something different? Taru [T]: There are different processes at play, depending first on whether we are talking about a recording or performance oriented endeavour and then also, the various musical outlets…

by Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja • 3 April 2017

Introduction Taru Dalmia is a New Delhi-based Indian reggae/dancehall artist, poet, academic historian and social activist. Taru, also known as Delhi Sultanate, is the lead singer of The Ska Vengers, the mastermind behind Bass Foundations Roots – BFR Sound System along with his partner Samara Chopra, aka Begum X, one of the first Jamaican-style sound systems in India, and the co-founder of Word, Sound and Power with producer Chris McGuinness, a collective dedicated to producing documentary films and musical collaborations with grassroots movements. First attracted by the intensity, sophistication and rendition in a different medium of our own concerns with international law and the destructive motion of the global development project, World, Sound, Power was our entry point into Taru’s…

by Jake Stanning • 31 March 2017

To know where we are going we must know how we got here. A long-established online politics forum currently has a thread under the title ‘Creating Lexit: What is to be done?’ A reasonable enough question, and the ‘creating’ admits we are a long way from a left Brexit right now. What struck me strongly reading it however is that I am not sure whether the vexed question of what is to be done by the left has changed with Brexit. I have watched left thinkers struggle to create a positive way forward from Article 50, and little consensus emerges. That in itself helps answer the question: How did we get here? ‘Here’ is not a good place. Due to…

by Ghassan Hage • 22 March 2017

Last year, following the terrorist attack in Nice, I met a European friend and colleague at a conference in Milan. I asked him how his Palestinian boyfriend was, a lovely man I have grown to care about. My colleague visibly upset informed me that his boyfriend has had a series of mishaps: a few weeks ago he was racially attacked by skinheads and was hurt seriously enough to need hospitalization. While in hospital, he was watching the news on TV when he saw the Nice terrorist drive his truck through the crowd. He was so affected that he had a violent seizure. Still feeling fragile and not fully together because of his racial bashing, the Nice event, beside its immediate…