CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Colombian Unrest – Tax Reform, Neoliberalism & Riot Cops
In recent weeks Colombia has seen massive unrest, with a general strike, huge crowds across the country and significant violence from ESMAD - the riot police. This short piece seeks to clarify the background and underline the significance of this revolt against neoliberal tax policies. In November and December 2019 there was a massive outpouring of popular dissatisfaction with the approach of the governing class towards social and economic policies, the peace process and a number of other issues. The state reacted in panic mode, and while the right wing media hysterically focused on vandalism, the riot police embarked on a relentless attack against protesters (irrespective of whether they were peaceful). I witnessed the dispersal of peaceful crowds with teargas and stun grenades a number of times. Each time I found myself wondering about the purpose of such interventions. As it was, the police-induced violence led to further confrontations, footage of police abuse significantly...
ARTICLES
The Colombian Unrest – Tax Reform, Neoliberalism & Riot Cops
In recent weeks Colombia has seen massive unrest, with a general strike, huge crowds across the country and significant violence from ESMAD - the riot police. This short piece seeks to clarify the background and underline the significance of this revolt against...
Karl Marx: Alienation
Key Concept The Marxian concept of alienation (Entäußerung) or estrangement (Entfremdung) is one of the most discussed notions in the history of modern social and political theory. There is a long history of the term before Marx, from the giusnaturalistic...
Syllabus: Decolonizing Political Science
We are republishing a slightly abridged version of Prof Robbie Shilliam's brilliant Decolonizing Political Science syllabus (full version with assessment available here). We also welcome other radical syllabi (both those practiced and ideal) and hope that the act of...
Law, Metrics and the Scholarly Economy
As markets began to usurp other forms of social regulation throughout the 20thcentury, metrics became increasingly central to the coordination of new spheres of market-mediated relations. More recently, digital metrics have been operationalized to facilitate the...
Relic or Portent: The View of Northern Ireland from Britain?
Time shows both the diagnosis and prognosis regarding Northern Ireland offered in the Break-Up of Britain to be well wide of the mark. That Nairn’s view from Britain is inaccurate is not that surprising to those used to hearing about Northern Ireland (and the wider...
States that Build Citizen Power and Joy
In her recent article for CLT, Davina Cooper calls for the urgent reimagination of the state. She calls upon critical theorists to move beyond critique of the current state form, and ask the deeper questions: what is the state for? What does it mean to be a state?...
On the Mark of Woman
It is true that men do not understand the refusal so well. It is true that women understand it all too well. Such that they make it their own. When the death of Eurydices Dixon in Melbourne re-evoked the chant “men fear women laughing at them, women fear men killing...
The An-Archic Nomos of the Nomads: Preliminary Thoughts on the Relationship Between Law and Anarchy
The relationship between law and anarchy tends to be characterised, to say the least, as an uncomfortable one. Taking, usually, a purely negative approach towards law, anarchist thought — in all its heterogenous tendencies — is, usually, characterised by a total...
The Urgent Task of Reimagining the State
Covid 19 has given new urgency to the radical task of rethinking the state. Illness, job losses, hospitalisation, and economic precarity demonstrate the need for scales and forms of governance that can organise and resource social welfare and public health...
Anti-racism, Materialism and the Sewell Report
One might be forgiven for thinking that the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ Report was released a day early. The Report’s insistence that Britain is not institutionally racist, and indeed that Britain could serve as a ‘beacon’ for other...
Brighton and Hove’s Homeless Bill of Rights
On 25 March 2021 the City of Brighton & Hove voted (by 31 votes to 11, with 7 abstentions) to adopt the Homeless Bill of Rights. (The text, and much other material related to the campaign, may be found at the website: The Homeless Bill of Rights.) What does this...
Towards an Orwellian Police-State Apparatus: Education Reform in Greece
On February 11th, 2021, the neoliberal government of New Democracy in Greece endorsed a reform bill for tertiary education, establishing a special police force for the surveillance of university campuses. The bill was adopted with 166 votes in favor (versus...
A Decolonial Feminist Critique of Penality
Andrea Zambrano Rojas & Iván Zambrano. 'Staroutkinsk (Russia) and Quito (Ecuador)' 2021 Contemporary penal expansion does not have an exclusively neoliberal heritage, so how are we to make sense of penality thriving through progressive political discourses?...
Sexual Violence at the University
TW: Sexual Violence Since 18th March 2021, students at the University of Warwick have occupied the Piazza, at the centre of the campus, demanding change in the way that the institution deals with sexual violence. At the time of writing, they have been in...
International Solidarity Call: Mediterranea Saving Humans
Mediterranea Saving Humans is under attack in Italy. Several members of Mediterranea are accused by the Office of Public Prosecutor of Ragusa of “facilitating illegal immigration.” It is definitely not the first time that such an accusation has been...
The Begum Judgment on the Couch
The Supreme Court’s judgment in the Begum case[i] has already attracted multiple readings and commentary. This comment will attempt a different kind of reading, and of listening, given the judgment was not only published but also broadcast live as delivered by...
The Turmoil of Studying Law: Falling Inside the Outside
“ …for the language I spoke was that of the world from which I came.”Khalil Gibran, The Madman.[1] I write this piece as my course on critical legal thinking comes to an end.[2] I am now a peculiar embodiment of imperfect juxtapositions – of hope and...
Law & Critique: On Arendt, Race and Lawbreaking
Hannah Arendt was conservative in more ways than one.[1] She valued the unprecedented, the unexpected, and the new,[2] yet in ‘Civil Disobedience’ and other essays crafted at the end of the rebellious 1960s, struggled to square this valuation with a palpable desire...
The Anti-System
The global rise of the far right has given new relevance to the concept of anti-system in the context of politics. In order to understand what is happening, we need to go back a few decades. This is not the place to dwell on how rich this period was, politically...
Beyond Criminalisation: Torture as a Political Category
It has been almost a year now that the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill has been discussed in the British Parliament. The Bill is currently at Committee stage before the House of Lords and, if proposed amendments do not succeed, it...
Ode to Reza Barati on the seventh anniversary of his death
Reza Barati was a Kurdish Iranian man who was killed on Manus Island - Australia's immigration prison in Papua New Guinea. Reza was killed on 17 February, 2014. He was 24 years old. The Kurdish Iranian writer Mardin Arvin was his friend. Imprisoned with him on Manus...