Civilians, Combatants, and Histories of International Law

by Christiane Wilke • 28 July 2014

If the only deaths worth mourning are those of children, we have become complicit with the oppression that dehumanizes their communities. Image by Israeli artist Amir Schiby in tribute to four boys killed on a beach In Gaza

In the media coverage of war, whether reports on individual incidents or the numbing tallies of casualties, the distinction between civilians and combatants is central and frequently contested. The killing of the four boys who had been playing soccer on a Gaza beach has become emblematic for Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians because the boys were clearly recognizable as children and therefore civilians. When news outlets report the death toll of the uneven conflict, they give details that bolster and yet complicate the distinction between civilians and combatants. For example, the Washington Post reports that as of July 26^th, 41 Israeli soldiers and 3 Israeli civilians were killed in the recent war, whereas 129 armed Palestinian militants, 119 Palestinians with unknown roles,…

Repetition and Death in the Colony: On the Israeli Attacks on Gaza

by Nimer Sultany • 11 July 2014

At the moment of writing these lines, the BBC reports 100 deaths thus far in Gaza in the recent Israeli onslaught. As we have seen these scenes before, the invocation of repetition comes naturally. “Once again” is a commonly used word when it comes to death and suffering under occupation in Palestine and specifically Gaza.1 It can be a rhetorically deployed knee-jerk reaction (as in: once again Israel is killing Palestinians; or: once again Israel has to defend itself against Palestinian attacks). It can also be deployed by a well-meaning third party who perceives the rhetorical deployment of “once again” as a propaganda war between two parties involved in a tragic conflict. Repetition is equated with futile death. Repetition outside context But “once again” is…

Should we value academic fashions?

by Davina Cooper • 23 June 2014

Davina_Cooper_Academic_Fashions-Manet

Fashions come and go, but what about academic or intellectual fashions? Are they like any other, with the same pleasures and limitations? Or should ideas be protected from the vagaries and currencies of what is current? Googling the phrase “academic fashion” produces a lot of hits — almost all address the question of what to wear. Very few tackle the problem of which academics are well aware — that ideas go in and out of popularity. “Academic fads” as a phrase gets closer to this truth, but fads are derided — their lack of staying power evidence the idea was not a committed one, not a good one. But are fashions in ideas all bad? Can anything good be said about them? The academic world I inhabit, that corner where social and…

The Infinity of the Silent Strike

by Illan rua Wall • 18 June 2014

image_5_hole-800x847-283x300

We know from Burke that it is the noise of the crowd or throng which leads to the experience of the sublime. The cacophony of the many, gathered in their discharged state, draws us like a magnet. But the crowd in strike has a number of very different dynamics to our open, closed and occupation crowds. Let us begin with this question of the crowd’s noise. The brief spell of revolutionary Syndicalism in France between 1886 and 1914 provides a useful starting point for thinking about the function of noise and silence.1Canetti begins this: Within the actual strike it is essential that everyone should abide by the undertaking not to work. Spontaneously from within the crowd itself there springs up an organization with…

Civilisation & the Savage Crowd

by Illan rua Wall • 17 June 2014

Anyone familiar with ‘crowd theory’ will have been told repeatedly that Gustave Le Bon is an origin. This assertion is quickly masked by obfuscation. He is not a first, of course, preceded by the historian Taine and the early criminologists Lombroso and Sighele. But Le Bon is the one who draws these dispersed though influential works together into a tradition or a theory. He constitutes an identity of crowd psychology, crowd theory or even social psychology. Le Bon was a popularizer and a synthesizer, rejected by the academic and scientific establishment, he writes for popular audiences. And with The Crowd he certainly finds one. In a sense, Le Bon perfectly instantiates the paradox of origins. They do not begin anything but are still the beginning. Le Bon is not the start of…

The Open Crowd & The Kettle

by Illan rua Wall • 16 June 2014

6a00d83451e1dc69e2017ee99f3ec0970d

Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power provides a useful starting point for this project. In it, he identifies a wide number of different crowds. They are determined by the temporality of their aims, the space in which they manifest themselves, the orientation of their activity, the manner in which their togetherness is conceived. In fact, the axes of differentiation multiply to such an extent that what initially began as a simple taxonomy, fractures and multiplies to reveal crowds as always too complex and contradictory to explain or understand in their totality. As a beginning, then, Canetti underlines precisely the multiplicity of the crowd. Despite this multiplicity, let me focus on two types of crowds, in Canetti’s eyes. The open crowd is ‘open’ in the sense that it is…

About ‘Crowded Sovereignty’

by Illan rua Wall • 16 June 2014

The crowd is not a technology or a subject of sovereignty. It is neither the ‘agent’ who could take, create or destroy sovereignty; nor a ‘means’ for others to become sovereign. The crowd is remarkable because of its prevalence and excision. It is often there in those paradigmatic moments of sovereignty, but generally maligned and denigrated. This site is designed to investigate the intuition that today the crowd presents a distinct way of thinking. Unlike the nation, people or proletariat, the crowd has remained something to be reviled, and as such it remains unburdened by the weight of idealisation. The crowd is crucial, but not in its rationality, its wisdom or its possibilities to provide capital efficiently. As Freud or Canetti saw clearly,…

The Prospect of Harmony and the Decolonial View of the World: Weihua He Interviews Walter Mignolo

by Weihua He • 12 June 2014

Knowledge is always situated. As a young scholar from China working on western theories, I always felt frustrated with the eurocentrism embedded within them. The frustration comes first because they are not addressing the problems lingering in my mind; and second at the moment I realized that I had the wrong expectations: why should theories developed to deal with European issues and problems address issues and problems in China? During my yearlong stay at Duke University as a visiting graduate student from 2008 to 2009, I attended Professor Walter Mignolo’s seminar. Participating in class discussion, talking with Professor Mignolo, reading the materials assigned, and delivering class presentations with other students, I was ushered into the exciting world of decolonial thinking. It offered to me a totally new perspective…

Politics in Times of Anxiety

by Emmy Eklundh and Andreja Zevnik • 8 June 2014

politics-in-times-of-anxiety

Politics in Times of Anxiety springs from the 9/11 attacks, when public safety and security turned into a central concern across the globe. The subsequent economic crisis that broke out in 2008 in the USA and its gradual spread across Europe initiated a protracted period of global slump and distressed views of political representation to be found in the Occupy movement, for example, the Indignados, or, more recently, uprisings in Greece, Turkey, and Brazil, to name but a few. In these instances, fear about environmental sustainability, economic stability, or social exclusion has permeated the public discourses, creating a strong narrative of an immanent threat or uncertainty about the future. These expressions of uncertainty and dissatisfaction are more than mere signs of insecurity. They are also attempts…

The Past and Future of the Legal Left: Celebrating Duncan Kennedy’s Scholarship

by Nimer Sultany • 6 June 2014

Below you can watch the conference on ‘The Past and Future of the Legal Left: Celebrating Duncan Kennedy’s Scholarship’ which was held at SOAS, University of London on 22 May 2014. This conference honoured Professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the most influential legal theorists and left critics of our time. After teaching for more than four decades at Harvard Law School, Professor Kennedy announced his intention to retire. Kennedy’s brilliant contributions have challenged our thinking on law and its role in society. He never shied away from controversy and engaged in a variety of academic and political debates. Admirably, he was able to commit simultaneously to both an intellectual critique and left-wing politics, without the political stifling critique or the latter undermining…

Language: Notes on the Thought of Luce Irigaray

by Yvette Russell • 5 June 2014

I is marked sexually

Luce Irigaray’s critique of masculine language systems follows logically from her broader critique of history and culture first elaborated 40 years ago in Speculum.1 Irigaray’s thinking on language is so complex and informed by so many difficult methodological frameworks, when approaching it for the first time I think it helps to look at her corpus chronologically. In her vast critique of language systems, Irigaray argues that systems of parole, discourse and logic rather than being universal and neutral are set up and maintained to serve male interests. Irigaray’s psychoanalytic reading of language is informed primarily by her insight that through a process of specularisation man projects his own ego on to the world which is then reflected back to him with his own image. Woman, as…

Gezi: One Year On

by Ipek Demirsu • 2 June 2014

It has been a year since the most outstanding and extensive uprising in modern Turkish history took place. On the night of 31^st of May 2013, no one thought such a groundbreaking civil revolt would occur across the whole country, gathering millions of individuals from various backgrounds and ideological dispositions. Founded upon a language of solidarity and freedom, the Gezi movement gave way to myriad forms of highly creative and non-violent forms of protest that drew their power from symbolic politics, premised, inter alia, on humor, art and performance. There is still an ongoing discussion about what compelled these people, most of whom were participating in a protest for the first time of their lives, to take their claims out on to the streets. Despite growing out of such diversity, one…

Putin’s Dissertation and the Revenge of RuNet

by Bill Bowring • 29 May 2014

The spectre of academic plagiarism by high-ranking officials is affecting much of Europe. Germany especially has been in the news: on 9 February 2013, the German Education Minister, Annette Schavan, resigned her position after the Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf voted the previous week to remove her doctorate following a review. The University decided to look into Ms Schavan’s 1980 doctoral thesis, after an anonymous blogger raised questions about it. The faculty committee found she had ‘systematically and intentionally’ copied parts of her thesis, ‘Person and Conscience.’ In a statement declaring the doctorate invalid and withdrawing it from Ms Schavan, the faculty head Bruno Bleckmann said they had ‘decided by secret ballot, by 12 votes to 2, with one abstention.’ Germany’s biggest selling…

Wealth inequality denial

by Ida Ince • 26 May 2014

Ceci n'est pas l'inegalité des fortunes http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42729

In the week a report established that 97.1% of scientists publishing on the subject have concluded that man-made climate change exists, it seems the right have re-opened an old front in their war on reality. In Saturday’s Financial Times the normally sober paper appears to have fancied a day masquerading as Fox News as it piled into Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21^st Century, arguing that its main thesis — broadly that wealth inequality is rising at Belle Époque rates — was undercut by flawed data.1 Picking apart the analysis is fair enough you might argue, and Piketty would agree; that’s why he put all his data on his website so it could be checked by third parties (compare the secrecy of right-wing think tanks, especially…

A Brief Reflection on the Hard Left

by Richard McAleavey • 26 May 2014

If the only deaths worth mourning are those of children, we have become complicit with the oppression that dehumanizes their communities. Image by Israeli artist Amir Schiby in tribute to four boys killed on a beach In Gaza

Why use the term ‘hard-left’ to describe candidates to the left of the Labour Party? What is ‘hard’ about these candidates, by contrast with political parties who oversee draconian cutbacks to expenditure in health and education and social services, or parties who set the police on social welfare claimants whilst releasing fraudulent figures on fraud, or parties who normalise forced and unpaid labour in order to keep unemployment high and wages low? Such parties do all of the above, then tell us it’s all for our own good and puff out their chests telling us how brave they are, and how they saved the State. How hard must the candidates to the left of Labour be, then, when the softest part…

Is there a Right to Resistance and Revolution? Lecture by Costas Douzinas

by Andreja Zevnik • 24 May 2014

Professor Costas Douzinas delivered this year’s annual talk of the Post-structural and Critical Thought Cluster at the University of Manchester. This event also officially launched a 2-year cluster run project entitled Politics in Times of Anxiety. The project sets its context in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when worries over public safety and security became a central issue across the world. The subsequent crisis that broke out in 2008 in the USA and gradually spread in Europe initiated a protracted period of global slump and distressed views on political representation, for example the Occupy movement, the Indignados, or, more recently, uprisings in Greece, Turkey, and Brazil, to name but a few. In these instances, fear about environmental sustainability, economic stability, or social exclusion…

The Slave Ship Embodies the Whole Story of Slavery

by Nirit Ben-Ari • 22 May 2014

The man refused to eat. He had been sick, reduced to a ‘mere skeleton.’ He had apparently made a decision to die. Captain Timothy Tucker was outraged, and probably fearful that his example might spread to the other 200-plus captives aboard his ship, the Loyal George, as it made its way across the Atlantic to Barbados in the year 1727. The captain turned to his black cabin boy, Robin, and commanded him to fetch his whip. This was no cat-o’-nine-tails but rather something much bigger, a horsewhip … All the while the man made no resistance and said nothing, which incensed the captain, who now threatened him in his own language: ‘He would tickeravoo him,’ that is, kill him, to which the…

A Walk in Yarl’s Wood

by Jacob Stringer • 20 May 2014

Yarls-Wood-from-the-air

On a fine winter’s day, the first fine day after weeks of storms and rain, I went for a walk in the country. I found myself in a typical English rural landscape, driving down hedge-lined lanes that grew progressively narrower. A couple of dead badgers lay whitening on the edges of the road. At the gate of a farm the road turned abruptly into mud track. Three men were digging a ditch at the entrance to the farm. I got out and asked them if I could get up the track. They spoke no English, their accents from some new-entrant country to the EU I couldn’t identify. I gestured up the track and one of them said, “No,” and shook his head. There was no way through. I decided to start my walk, not…

Bodies, Buses, and Permits: Palestinians Navigating Care

by Rana Sharif • 13 May 2014

Figure 1: Israeli Soldiers’ T-Shirts. SOurce

In May 2013, I traveled to Palestine for six months to collect data for a research project that examines the cultural and visual productions of natalist images, including pregnancy and birth. During the time I spent traveling throughout the West Bank and Israel, I took account of the various modes of (re)production of Palestinian women’s bodies. I am interested in asking first, what do cultural and visual artifacts of pregnancy and birth indicate about the materialities of occupation and second, how do Palestinian women negotiate, respond to and challenge such images? One particularly graphic example I examine in my work is a series of t-shirts produced by Israeli battalion members with images of pregnant Palestinian women carrying captions like “One Shot, Two Kills,” “Better Use Durex,” and…

Ukraine Crisis Timeline maintained by Anastasia Tataryn for CLT on http://knotpolitics.blogspot.ca/