From historiography to historiographical theory, or looking for politics where there can be none

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Not long ago, at an international law conference, in my panel was a scholar whom I admire a lot (still do). After presenting their paper, said scholar was asked a methodological question to which they briskly retorted—I quote—that they don’t give a shit about methodology. And that we would be much better off if we did away with it, is the kernel of what immediately followed. It would not be fair to name the author of those remarks. In any case, their identity is beside the point. What matters is that, at first, I more or less consciously dismissed the episode as an assertion of professional authority. (Having always entertained an uneasy relationship with authority, I tend to see its…

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Toward a New Universal Declaration of Human Rights (I)

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Baruch de Spinoza, the great 17th century philosopher, wrote that the two basic human emotions (or “affections”, as he called them) are fear and hope, and he suggested that a balance needs to be struck between the two, because fear unmingled with hope leads to despair and hope unmingled with fear can lead to destructive self-confidence. This very idea can be applied to contemporary societies, especially at a time when, what with cyberspace, instant interpersonal digital communications, the massification of industrial entertainment and mass customization of commercial and political microtargeting, collective sentiment is becoming more and more “like” individual sentiments, even if it is still made up of selective aggregates. That is why identification with what you hear or read…

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Digging for Failure

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Dig Station is an idle tapping game, with grinder overtones, produced by C6H6 and available on the Amazon app store. The premise is that you are in control of a station that is digging into the earth’s crust in order to mine resources. You begin simply with a drill: your ‘core drill’, which slowly and inexorably extracts resources that amass at the top of the screen—indicated by an ever-increasing yellow number. As this number increases, you are able to use the resources you have mined to upgrade your drill. The effect of this is to enable the drill to extract resources at a greater rate, with this rate increasing as you increase the drill’s level. Eventually you can upgrade the…

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Hong Kong, or How Social Struggles Can Reinforce the Cartography of Capitalist Enclosure

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If the debates incited by the 2019 Hong Kong Protest Movement, known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (or Anti-ELAB) Movement, have revolved around conflicting interpretations that favor differently weighted readings of geopolitics and more fundamental questions about the extent to which geopolitics can serve as a reliable index for understanding local insurrection, the bulk of commentary, which we have attempted to follow as closely as possible in Chinese, English, and French, seems to us almost unified, despite the important differences, in its inability to help us situate not just the Movement, but the entirety of our global conjuncture in terms of a particularly problematic relation to bordering. For those “outside” of Hong Kong – a qualification whose problematic nature…

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Dangerous Spaces

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In radical or alternative left movements, the idea of safety is paramount. It is rare to go to a meeting about feminist, anti racist, queer, or otherwise progressive politics without a safe (or safer) spaces policy being presented. This document, whether read aloud or pinned to a wall, is implicitly a contract between participants regarding suitable conduct. The idea of ‘safe spaces’ has been mocked, derided, and obsessed over by the right wing, viewed as idealistic, authoritarian, or both, though these policies are also subject to significant internal debate in alternative left spaces, whether at the level of specifics or as a mode of organising more generally. Sometimes there is furious and exciting debate on the limitations of safe spaces,…

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Marxist Legal Theory: Dictatorship of the Proletariat

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1917 Petrograd Soviet

This is one of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Form for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking. The Marxist concept of dictatorship has a different meaning from one-man rule or state of siege. It is a central concept of the political theory of Marxism, referring not just to the form of government but to the question of which class is politically dominant. This is why its analysis cannot be carried out in the abstract, but always in concrete relation to the rule of a specific class. When we speak of the…

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Marginalisation of Expertise & Media Bias

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We write as members of the UK academic community. We are deeply concerned by the marginalisation of expertise in the media coverage of the general election. In particular we would like to highlight the lack of attention paid to recent analyses by economists and employment lawyers in relation to the possibilities that the Labour Manifesto presents for revitalising and positively transforming the UK economy.  Together with these 163 economists and 54 employment lawyers, we would like to emphasise the Labour Manifesto’s proposals for more equitable global economic relations and its commitment to a more ecologically sustainable and socially just international economy.  We therefore endorse these letters by our colleagues and call upon the media to refocus the debate on the policies…

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Dear White, It’s OK to be white

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In October 2018, the motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ was introduced in the Australian Parliament by White Supremacist Senator Pauline Hanson. The motion called for the ok-ness of Whiteness while denouncing ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘attacks on Western civilization.’ Astonishingly, it was only narrowly defeated 31-28, with many members of the ruling conservative Liberal-National Party coalition supporting it. This short text was written in response to this vote. In the text, I use white to mean a white-skinned person (which as many academic works have shown is a far less straight-forward description than it might first appear). On the other hand, I use White with a capital W to indicate a White who has a conscious or unconscious investment in…

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Refugee Struggles: From Helsinki to Paris

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Even if refugees have lost their political community, their “society of equals” comprising “reciprocity and commonness” and “mutual agreements and promises,” as Hannah Arendt says, they are able to become and act as political subjects. Refugees create new kinds of political communities through their collective actions. These events generate the “we” of political subjects between refugees and citizens that binds them “together in a relationship of political reciprocity.” I will present two cases of refugee struggle both of which, first, make universal claims, second, turn urban spaces and symbolic places into stages of struggle, and third, create non-hierarchical political movements. Right to Life – A Protest Camp The Helsinki Right to Life demonstration started in front of the Museum of…

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Liverpool Law Externals Resign over Management Threats

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External examiners for Liverpool Law School today resigned en masse over Liverpool University management’s threats to students. With the authors’ permission we reproduce the letter below. Solidarity with everyone striking this week!   We, the undersigned, have tendered our collective resignation from the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool in protest at the University’s advice to students in respect of the UCU industrial action which begins today (Monday, 25 November) and expected to last until Wednesday, 4 December. We have taken this decision out of concern at the University of Liverpool’s misrepresentation of the law regarding support for official pickets and its weaponising of the UK immigration system against visa-holding students. The University of Liverpool,…

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The End of the Transition to Democracy in Chile

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After the historic march in Santiago that gathered more than a million people, and of multitudinous marches in other cities and regional capitals, the sense of the protests that began more than three weeks ago and led the country to the most acute crisis since the return to democracy, has been crystallizing. Above all, we must say that the crisis affecting Chile is not primarily the product of the subjectivity of a generation that transforms its perception of the world into objective truths and tries to impose them without deliberation on the rest, as the lawyer Carlos Peña, an influential Chilean columnist, said[1].  Rather, it is a constitutional crisis, in which the foundations of legitimacy that shaped and sustained the…

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Gilles Deleuze: Jurisprudence

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Key Concept The relationship between law and the thought of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, is an interesting one. Throughout his work, Deleuze, often, manifested his contempt for judgment and representation –  undeniably, two fundamental characteristics of law and legal thought more generally.[1] Despite that, in an interview with Claire Parnet, he states that “I have always been fascinated about jurisprudence, about law… If I hadn’t studied philosophy, I would have studied law[…].”[2] Yet, he was quite clear that this interest in law and jurisprudence is not one that aims towards ‘the discovery’ of fundamental truths or the Truth about law’s essence or nature – issues that he considered to be empty abstractions, that fail to engage with the particularities…

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New Police powers aimed at #ExtinctionRebellion?

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The Metropolitan Police force have requested greater powers to deal with the threat of #ExtinctionRebellion. The exact details of the request are unclear, but some of the proposals have begun to emerge. And they are couched in what may be politely be called ‘utter bullshit’. The police seem to be deliberately obscuring existing powers in order to gain new draconian ways of preventing people from expressing their views together. It is important to see the obfuscation, as well as the outline of these potential powers. This is the case, not least because the proposals have been apparently well received by the Home Secretary (Priti Patel), making it likely that they will form part of any future Tory party legislative agenda.…

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Why Context Matters in the Trans Prisoner Policy Debates

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‘Let women prisoners decide’ on trans policy sounds democratic but follows a concerning trend of anti-trans groups using women prisoners for their own political agendas In a recent blog post, the Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) argues that non-trans women prisoners should decide whether trans women should be able to ‘share space’ with them in prison. To suggest that prisoners should determine trans prison policy sounds, on the surface, like a reasonable and laudable position. Certainly prisoners get very little say on the policies that impact their daily lives and should have greater opportunities to feed into decisions that affect their wellbeing. However, what the CCJS Director is actually arguing is that some women (i.e.…

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The Case Against Agamben’s Impotence

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Another appraisal of Aristotle´s configuration of potentiality and actuality and the latter as a division between Entelecheia and Energeia may open up a new consideration of being and power. Through it, we may dispel Agamben´s interpretation of power that shrouds political action in impotence. When we read Energeia as power without transcendent finality, contingency, as the order of the political, is released and with it the possibility of becoming-other is open anew. Contingency means that only when beings exist, not as a necessity, is the meaning of being necessary. In between potentia and actuality hinges not only the definition of power but the utter possibility of existence, of what is possible and impossible, logical, contingent, necessary and time. We have…

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Recognising the right to food does not mean handouts but radical transformations

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Four years after the Lombardia regional council in Italy approved the first law on the ‘Recognition, Protection and Fulfilment of the Right to Food’ in the European context, time seems to be ripe to put food at the centre of analogous political and legislative processes across the European Union. After the establishment of a Right to Food Observatory in Spain, the Good Food Nation consultations in Scotland and the announcement by the Liberal Democrat party of a Fairer Share for All, the last act of support was that of the United Kingdom Shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Sue Hayman, who announced few days ago that the UK Labour party – if elected – will formally recognise everyone’s right…

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A ‘Dred Scott Moment’ – but not only for the UK Supreme Court!

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When Aidan O’Neill QC, counsel for SNP MP Joanna Cherry and the other parliamentarians, asked the UK Supreme Court to save the “Mother of all Parliaments from being shut down by the father of all lies” it was justifiably a sensation. Finally the crux of the case about prorogation of Parliament was distilled and expressed free of the legal jargon about the justiciability of the prerogative, and the nature and limits of judicial review in the face of executive power. O’Neill also drew attention to the dark side of liberal institutions when he asked the Supreme Court not to make this their “Dred Scott moment”. The reference was to Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) – widely regarded as the worst decision…

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Law & Critique: Technology elsewhere, (yet) phantasmically present

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While in some corners it has been argued that “post-modernism” (in these tellings, usually a metonymy for any theory that questions authority, the stability of meaning and the normalization of various forms of sovereignty and their violence) bears a certain level of responsibility for the supposed rise of “post-truth” politics, for us the situation is directly the inverse. The problems that are being discovered today under the various monikers of crises of truth, institutions, ruleof law, etc. are in fact the generalised perception of the long-term impossibility of securing and regulating text that well predates the contemporary technological milieu. “New” contemporary technologies are not all that new.[1] The computer page for example “remains a screen” belonging to a “digital history”…

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Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus

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Key Concept In Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework both for understanding the way that cultural settings (re)produce the means of their own production, and for analysing the effect of this (re)production on the particular subjects of a given ‘habitus‘. For Bourdieu, the term habitus refers to the collective entity by which and into which dominant social and cultural conditions are established and reproduced. In Bourdieu’s words, habitus refers to “a subjective but not individual system of internalised structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class” (p.86). These “internalised structures” and “schemes of perception” structure the subject’s (shared) world-view and their “apperception” of the world…

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