CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
‘After’ the Rojava Revolution? Rethinking Political Hope in a Post-Autonomy Syria
Since early 2026, Rojava in North East Syria, has been under renewed assault by the new Syrian regime. A majority-Kurdish region, Rojava has, for more than 12 years been home to one of the world’s largest experiments in democratic autonomy and ecological living. The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), led by Kurdish activists and facilitated by the organisational work of Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk (TEV-DEM; ‘Movement for a Democratic Society’), has built a new model of political community and legality in the wake of the Syrian civil war. Since 2014, the DAANES has provided safety, political and legal rights, and the means to lead a meaningful and peaceful life for almost 5 million stateless peoples from more than 11 religious and ethnic backgrounds. The DAANES experiment in Rojava can also be credited, uncontroversially, with the defeat of Daesh, through the organisation of its population into self-defence units that have also empowered women to...
ARTICLES
Virus: All That Is Solid Melts into Air
There is a debate within the social sciences about whether it is easier to ascertain the truthfulness and quality of a society’s institutions under normal daily circumstances or in exceptional situations, during times of crisis. One can probably learn from both types...
Covid: The Ethical Disease
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNJwioSoyGA This morning, as I was cycling down a road I frequently take on my way to work, I came across a blockage, big orange plastic net boards cutting across the way, stopping all traffic from going through. Some road works,...
Decolonisation Is Not About Ticking a Box: It Must Disrupt
As academics in a post-truth world, I believe we have an urgent and important task. In a world where emotional appeals and emotive decision-making are seemingly the norm, academia should be in the business of truth. Rather than lament reality, we should be revealing...
From historiography to historiographical theory, or looking for politics where there can be none
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...
Toward a New Universal Declaration of Human Rights (I)
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...
Digging for Failure
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:...
Hong Kong, or How Social Struggles Can Reinforce the Cartography of Capitalist Enclosure
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...
Dangerous Spaces
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...
Marxist Legal Theory: Dictatorship of the Proletariat
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...
Marginalisation of Expertise & Media Bias
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...
Dear White, It’s OK to be white
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.’...
Refugee Struggles: From Helsinki to Paris
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.Hannah Arendt (2005), The...
Liverpool Law Externals Resign over Management Threats
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...
The End of the Transition to Democracy in Chile
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...
Gilles Deleuze: Jurisprudence
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...
New Police powers aimed at #ExtinctionRebellion?
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...
Why Context Matters in the Trans Prisoner Policy Debates
‘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...
The Case Against Agamben’s Impotence
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...
Recognising the right to food does not mean handouts but radical transformations
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...
A ‘Dred Scott Moment’ – but not only for the UK Supreme Court!
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...
Law & Critique: Technology elsewhere, (yet) phantasmically present
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...
