The conventional story runs like this: violence is what happens where law ends. Law is the alternative to the feud, the pacifier of the state of nature, and the substitution of process for force. On this account, violence and law occupy opposite ends of a single...
The concept of “securitization” was developed by the Copenhagen School to analyze the process whereby powerful actors such as governments identify a particular phenomenon as an existential threat and legitimize the use of extraordinary measures to combat it. The...
If there are a number of terms in the lexicon of contemporary critical social, political, and legal thought that one cannot go about without invoking the name of Michel Foucault, “power” is definitely one of them—despite Foucault’s later protestations that the...
Since October, the world has watched in real time the transformation of Gaza from a concentration camp into a killing field. Besieged by land, air, and sea, Palestinian men, women, and children are now subject to a historically unprecedented program of mass...
The Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant called for a “right to opacity” throughout his work. Speaking about small countries in the Caribbean in his 1981 Caribbean Discourse, he said, “We demand the right to opacity.” He would reiterate this claim in his...
Rei Terada’s concept metaracial emerges from her 2023 book, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity, the result of a sustained engagement with Hegel’s enduring influence on how we think about race — or rather, how race structures our thinking. In this...
