Critical Legal Theory

Anger and Indignation in Ireland, Greece & Tunisia

By
1
28 June 2011
Grim ECB IMF

Polit­ics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are strik­ing back. Por­tugal, Ire­land Greece and Spain. Except that’s not quite right. I will address the fail­ure of Irish rad­ic­al­ism and con­trast that with Greece and Tunisia, in order to begin to pull out a num­ber of import­ant les­sons of the cur­rent wave of indig­na­tion and fury. I will sug­gest that when the media focus on anger and indig­na­tion they miss some of the most sig­ni­fic­ant factors involved. I want to sug­gest that anger is only the beginning. For the last twenty years, in Ire­land, there has been a con­cer­ted effort to render polit­ics as that which hap­pens after and in the wake of the eco­nomy. Ire­land fit­ted itself ...
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Our Society is Bigger than Yours: Squatting and the Wider Political Rumblings

By
2
27 June 2011
Our Society is Bigger than Yours

Des­pite the attempts of Tory back­bench­ers to del­e­git­im­ize squat­ting, and divide it from the issue of home­less­ness, the two remain inex­tric­ably linked: un-​met hous­ing needs, a sup­ply of empty prop­erty, and squat­ting, go hand in hand in hand. But that’s about as far as the gen­er­al­iz­a­tions go; squat­ting is both a means and an end, and the ways that dif­fer­ent indi­vidu­als and groups put squat­ting into prac­tice var­ies enormously. The goofy arrival of Cameron’s Big Soci­ety, which provides us with a nice neigh­bourly back pat to see us through the cuts, and which gives us a sense of ‘involve­ment’, might lead one to think squat­ting could have even been embraced by the Con-​Dem dogma. Would it not have fit­ted snugly in with “the ...
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Home & Apart: Spatial Justice in ‘Women of Cyprus’

By
2
22 June 2011
Abandoned airport – stark symbol of Cyprus division

On the 16th of June 2011, the West­min­ster Inter­na­tional Law & The­ory Centre hos­ted the Lon­don première of Women of Cyprus, a doc­u­ment­ary dir­ec­ted by Vassi­liki Kat­rivanou and Bushra Azzouz, fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion with the first dir­ector. The film tries to cap­ture the voices and feel­ings of women both sides of the 1974 Cyp­riot par­ti­tion, namely the North (Turk­ish) side and the South (Greek) side. The main focus of this mov­ing film turned out to be the home and its con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions both as a nation­al­ist strategy and a per­sonal feel­ing, namely as a geo­pol­it­ical line and a cor­por­eal affect. The film and the ensu­ing dis­cus­sion amply show that the two con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions of home can­not eas­ily be told apart. We wit­ness for example how, in ...
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Libyan War and Revolution — Unity & Multiplicity

By
2
8 June 2011
Tblisi Protest

The war that has been escal­ated in Libya over the last week is not the same as the revolt that gripped the coun­try months ago. Even today in Benghazi there are two orders – war and revolt – at work, but the logic of war is des­troy­ing the mul­ti­pli­city of a revolu­tion. In this sense, there is much that we can learn about Libya from the Tunisian and Egyp­tian exper­i­ence. From the very first days of suc­cess in the Arab Spring, it was clear that long-​standing North African and Middle East­ern lead­ers would be ejec­ted by a massive and sus­tained pop­u­lar refusal of con­sent and rep­res­ent­a­tion. In Tunisia, Ben Ali and his RCD party were the ini­tial objects of anger. How­ever, again and again – even after ...
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To Dis or not to Dis? Disobedience and the Case of the Naughty in Relation to Law

By
2
7 June 2011
William_Burroughs_oil_on_canvas_7ft_x_5ft

This piece was ori­gin­ally writ­ten for and presen­ted at the Dis­obedi­ence Work­shop (20 – 21 May 2011) at the School of Law, Birk­beck College. Since put­ting together my abstract a few months ago, there have been some alter­a­tions and addi­tions and ana­lo­gies that have influ­enced the writ­ing of this piece. I have been read­ing, and I have to say, not his entire opus, but some of the early writ­ings of the Amer­ican Beat nov­el­ist and poet, Wil­liam Bur­roughs. Whether I have liked it or not, he has mis­chiev­ously and some­what mys­ter­i­ously found his way into this paper, and whether he is applic­able or not we shall soon find out too. So the writ­ing has been kid­napped some­what, by Bur­roughs, lead­ing to a more sin­is­ter appre­ci­ation of ...
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Reanimating Human Rights

By
1
29 May 2011
humanitarian war

It seems that the dis­cus­sion over inter­ven­tion in Libya and revolu­tions in Arab coun­tries is over. In the midst of dis­cus­sion over leg­al­ity or right­eous­ness of the inter­ven­tion in Libya, the prob­lem of the vic­tims of the situ­ation that lead to the inter­ven­tion (and earlier to the upris­ing) seems to dis­ap­pear. Argu­ments are con­cen­trated around ques­tions of inter­na­tional law but refugees, – those flee­ing from North Africa, are some­how absent. As if their rights were not import­ant, or – maybe worse – as if we uncon­sciously stopped believ­ing that they had any. Unfor­tu­nately, neither the inter­ven­tion nor struggle of Arab peoples them­selves are over, so there still remains time to dis­cuss the issue. Before I elab­or­ate on what I have in mind, how­ever, I want make a con­fes­sion: see­ing ...
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Class and Gender in Super-​Injunctions

By
0
23 May 2011
Tweet

For the past three weeks, the media has been swamped with tales of super­in­junc­tions. The press claim super­in­junc­tions cur­tail free­dom of speech, while celebrit­ies and their law­yers argue that they are neces­sary to pro­tect indi­vidual pri­vacy. In my view, the claim to pri­vacy is incon­sist­ent. If it applied to all indi­vidu­als equally, there might be an argu­ment; how­ever, in its cur­rent form the super­in­juc­tion has been used almost exclus­ively by rich men. And it is for that reason, that we are now see­ing a fight­back against it. Two weeks ago, it was revealed that the BBC’s senior polit­ical journ­al­ist, Andrew Marr, had an affair and took out a super­in­junc­tion to cover it up or pre­vent journ­al­ists from men­tion­ing the story at ...
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The Arab Minotaur: A People Deferred

By
0
17 May 2011
Bull Fight

A deluge of art­icles, state­ments and com­ments on the peoples’ protests across a region defined in imper­ial geo­pol­it­ical and cul­tural dis­courses as the Middle-​East or the Arab World have so far been driven by two main ques­tions: ‘how it happened?’ and ‘what will hap­pen next?’ The ‘how’ and ‘what next’ are impossible ques­tions at times like these, because they make impossible demands on what happened and mis­recog­nize the fact that it is still hap­pen­ing. The event—regard­less of how it is cur­rently referred to: upris­ing, unrest, crisis, revolt, or protest — will not reveal itself as an object of thought and study pre­cisely because it is mind­less and aceph­alic. Both the domino-​effect thesis and the snow­ball thesis are nar­rat­ives and spec­u­la­tions after the ...
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Bin Laden, Targeted Killing & The Elimination of Danger

By
0
11 May 2011
Targeted Killing

As the euphoria sur­round­ing the announce­ment of Osama bin Laden’s death wears off, and the ini­tial stor­ies of ‘gun­fights’ and ‘human shields’ are rad­ic­ally revised, ser­i­ous doubts are emer­ging as to the leg­al­ity of the entire oper­a­tion. Legal experts have cri­ti­cised the US for fail­ing to take bin Laden into cus­tody, accord­ing him due pro­cess rights and try­ing him before a court for the crimes he has com­mit­ted. Lib­eral press out­lets have opined: “the line between sum­mary justice and illegal killing is a fine one, but it is one that must be scru­pu­lously observed by any coun­try with a claim to be civ­il­ised and gov­erned by the law”. Even the Arch­bishop of Can­ter­bury has voiced his con­cerns, declar­ing that killing this way ...
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Capitalism & Legal Subjectivity in the Age of Globalisation

By
0
9 May 2011
You are not what you own

A Pre­lude: Terra’s Predicament Once upon a time there was a planet – per­fect green and egg-​shell blue. It hung, fra­gile and ancient, in the yawn­ing firm­a­ment of space-​time. On the planet-​surface – a thin crust rid­ing a mol­ten sea –one spe­cies out­reached all oth­ers, reach­ing for the vaul­ted heav­ens with an invent­ive­ness that far out­stripped its own moral insight. It took a river of time and thought – but after a slow start the invent­ive­ness of the Ter­rans built to an accel­er­at­ing howl driven by a com­plex cur­rent of exchanges and inter­plays too vast to trace. Now, the seeth­ing world of Terra has reached a crisis point threat­en­ing the very mater­i­al­ity of life itself. The planet teeters at the tip­ping point. The rest­less Terra-​North need for expan­sion has emp­tied out civil­isa­tions, con­struct­ing ...
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Some Indonesian Recollections on Critical Legal Pluralism

By
0
6 May 2011

I recently returned from a three month fel­low­ship in the kal­eido­scopic nation that is Indone­sia. I under­took research with non-​governmental organ­isa­tion ICRAF (World Agro­forestry Centre), ana­lys­ing their ‘rewards’ (Pay­ments for Envir­on­mental Ser­vices or ‘PES’) schemes for the farm­ers for plant­ing trees in order to sequest car­bon, and my field work was based in Pan­ing­ga­han, West Sumatra with the ‘Min­angkabau’. The Min­angkabau have been the sub­ject of much research over the past years, pre­dom­in­antly due to their mat­ri­lin­eal sys­tem of prop­erty man­age­ment and inher­it­ance. Legal plur­al­ists and legal anthro­po­lo­gists Kebeet and Franz von Benda-​Beckmann, based in Hallé’s Max Planck Uni­ver­sity, have been the most pre­dom­in­ant author­it­ies on Min­ang cul­ture, and have given great influ­ence to the struc­ture of the research eman­at­ing and ...
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The Fallibility of the Immune: Metchnikoff’s lie

By
1
5 May 2011
Metchnikoff in his Laboratory

On May 1st 2011 news was broad­cast that the leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, had been killed fol­low­ing a ‘tar­geted oper­a­tion’ executed by United States forces, in a north­ern town of Pakistan. Shortly after­wards, it was con­firmed by US offi­cials that bin Laden’s body had been bur­ied at sea, accord­ing to Muslim cus­tom. The details of this occur­rence were delivered to the world by the US Pres­id­ent, Barack Obama, in a speech where he described that the ‘achieve­ment’ was to be seen as a ‘test­a­ment to the great­ness of our coun­try.’ He also stated that in Bin Laden’s death it could be said to ‘…those fam­il­ies who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s ter­ror: Justice had been ...
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Seeds of Justice

By
0
2 May 2011
Ai Wei Wei Sunflower Seeds

Today Al Weiwei’s install­a­tion at Tate Mod­ern comes to an end. Unfor­tu­nately, the Chinese artist is cur­rently in the lime­light due to more press­ing reas­ons, since his arrest earlier this month, fol­lowed by the usual array of ‘solid’ evid­ences provided by the Chinese Gov­ern­ment, as well as some awk­ward silence. It is to him that this post is ded­ic­ated, adding this insig­ni­fic­ant voice to many oth­ers call­ing for his prompt release (an online peti­tion can be signed here). *** After months of pro­cras­tin­a­tion, some weeks ago I finally man­aged to go to Tate Modern’s Turbin Hall to see Weiwei’s install­a­tion. Sun­flower Seeds con­sists of 100 mil­lions hand-​painted por­cel­ain ‘seeds’ brought from China to Tate Mod­ern, to form a soft car­pet for us ...
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The People Cometh: From Popular Existentialism to Anarchy

By
0
27 April 2011
cern

Abstract The under­tak­ing of this art­icle is to assemble an eth­ical and polit­ical mean­ing of the people as neces­sary to any legal order that reputes itself demo­cratic. The chal­lenge is then set to think dif­fer­ence and mul­ti­pli­city not from legal orders but from the demo­cratic abyss, ant­ag­on­ism not from con­sti­tu­tional law but from con­stitu­ent power. Assert­ing that the anni­hil­a­tion of con­flict is the back­bone of con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism which means the dir­ect elim­in­a­tion of polit­ics; the object­ive is there­fore to restore con­flict as the order of being of polit­ics. The place of con­stitu­ent power is then crisis, mani­fes­ted in the impossib­il­ity of syn­thesis between con­stitu­ent power and con­sti­tuted order, demon­strated through the inter­de­pend­ence of exter­i­or­ity and inter­i­or­ity as the con­tin­gent logic ...
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Who’s Breaching Whose Peace?

By
1
23 April 2011
Brank

On 14 April 2011, the High Court of Eng­land and Wales ruled, in R (on the applic­a­tion of Joshua Moos and Han­nah McClure) v The Com­mis­sioner of the Police of the Met­ro­polis, that the police had acted unlaw­fully in “con­tain­ing” (aka ket­tling) cer­tain G20 protest­ors on 1 April 2009. It made clear that the police must be in reas­on­able appre­hen­sion of an “immin­ent breach of the peace” before tak­ing “pre­vent­at­ive action”. Pre­vent­at­ive action includes ket­tling, but only “as a last resort cater­ing for situ­ations about to des­cend into viol­ence”. That the police can­not arbit­rar­ily kettle protest­ors can be seen as good news for polit­ical act­iv­ists. The bad news, for those who see ket­tling as an always unjus­ti­fi­ably bru­tal form of col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment, ...
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