CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Iran and the ‘state of exception’
It seems that we have entered a period of endless war. The undeclared American war "Epic Fury" (the name of the attack on Iran) and Israel's new murderous campaign has replaced the "cosmopolitan order of rules" heralded by those who saw the "end of history" after the fall of communism. The "perpetual peace" of Kant and Habermas has been replaced by "perpetual war and its threat." We live in a "global state of exception." A situation where governance, military strategies, and armaments are closely linked to the needs of capitalism. At the beginning of the century, the "rogue state" and the "failing state" were the ideological terms that justified attacks and invasions by the major powers and the neo-colonial occupation of regions and states. Today, references to these distinctions have been limited. Trump attacks Venezuela and Iran, gives every possible assistance to Israel without any specific explanation or credible justification. He simply boasts like a spoiled child in the...
ARTICLES
Black Skin, White Masks? Training African Leaders in the Art of Universality
I was intrigued to see the recent advertisement for the Academy Africa Fellowship at Chatham House, a prestigious, London-based think tank on international affairs, with a Royal Charter granted in 1926, and originator of the famous ‘Chatham House Rule’. In its...
The Empire Strikes Back: On the recent general strike in Brazil
In a recent review of Alex Cuadros’ 2016 Brazzillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country (astonishingly, yet unsurprisingly, still unpublished in Portuguese and in Brazil) Patrick Iber, writing for the New Republic, declared that ‘if...
Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biopower
Key Concept Despite their prominence in subsequent academic writing, the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics” are perhaps the most elusive, and arguably the most compelling (given the attention...
How Long Will Critical Human Rights Theory Continue to Ignore Race and Gender?
Human rights need to be released from the confinements of whiteness and sexism. In a debate that took place in 1993 about the “reinvention of the left”, Tariq Modood highlighted that ethnic diversity and racial equality were new challenges for the left and thus, also,...
Doing the Russian Revolution Justice
The centenary of the 1917 revolution can be seen as a diversion from the trauma still fresh and experienced by every living Russian except the youngest. The Russian revolution of 1917 indelibly marked the course of the 20th century. Its centenary comes into a world...
Moving towards Meta-Politics: Notes on Alain Badiou’s Political Criticism
Since the publication of Being and Event[1. See Alain Badiou. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. (London, UK. Continuum, 2005)] in 1988, Alain Badiou has established himself as inarguably the most ambitious philosopher in the Continental tradition in quite some...
Trump’s Law: Toward a Necropolitical Humanitarianism
On 5 April 2017, one day before authorizing missile strikes against Syrian targets, Donald Trump remarked during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, ‘I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact.’ He elaborated:...
A World of “Sound” and “Clash”: An Interview with Taru Dalmia (Part III of III)
We want to know more about the roots of your music. As we understand it, your music brings together a particular new take on reggae, ska, and techno sounds with powerful lyrics. How does this mixture relate to your aim to engage with social struggles? We are thinking here too about ‘tradition’ – an idea that for legal scholars simultaneously denotes social power, respect, order, patterns of thought, and, of course, obedience: inheritance, and mixing? T: In music as opposed to prose it is not just lyrics but sound that becomes a carrier of meaning. Bass music, dub music, deeply impacts upon people and can be powerful expressions of emotion, of political sentiment, even of metaphor. In the case of reggae in particular we feel that it lends itself very well to expressing the fractured militarised reality that we are engaging with…
A World of “Sound” and “Clash”: An Interview with Taru Dalmia (Part II of III)
Taru, as legal scholars the idea of soundclashing is extremely interesting. We know that speech and rhetoric have been always part of law, and yet it is hard to grasp the actual mechanics of using sound in our projects. How do you process, or how do you render into a material form, this idea of ‘soundclashing’? Specifically, how are technique and technology mixed at this point with politics, histories of violence and entrenched power asymmetries in order to produce something new, or at least something different? Taru [T]: There are different processes at play, depending first on whether we are talking about a recording or performance oriented endeavour and then also, the various musical outlets…
A World of “Sound” and “Clash”: An Interview with Taru Dalmia (Part I of III)
Introduction Taru Dalmia is a New Delhi-based Indian reggae/dancehall artist, poet, academic historian and social activist. Taru, also known as Delhi Sultanate, is the lead singer of The Ska Vengers, the mastermind behind Bass Foundations Roots - BFR Sound System...
Brexit is upon us: what is to be done?
To know where we are going we must know how we got here. A long-established online politics forum currently has a thread under the title ‘Creating Lexit: What is to be done?’ A reasonable enough question, and the ‘creating’ admits we are a long way from a left Brexit...
On Racial Injury: Fighting the Dilution of Anti-Racist Legislation Is More Important Than Anti-Racist Legislation
Last year, following the terrorist attack in Nice, I met a European friend and colleague at a conference in Milan. I asked him how his Palestinian boyfriend was, a lovely man I have grown to care about. My colleague visibly upset informed me that his boyfriend has had...
Governmentality and the Management of the Circulation of ‘Extreme’ Ideas
In October 2016, the University of Sussex published its Freedom of Speech Code of PracticeUniversity of Sussex - Office of Planning, Governance and Compliance, ‘Freedom of Speech - Code of Practice’...
Al Khan al Ahmar, international law and the paradox of hope
Imagine living day after day unsure of when your home will be demolished. That will most likely mean having to quickly move elsewhere out of necessity, not out of choice. Will you be able to salvage some of your belongings, comfort your traumatised children as a...
‘We did this’: Collective Guilt & the Tuam Mass Grave
“We all partied”: Fianna Fáil Finance Minister Brian Lenihan’s infamous phrase, in the early years of the financial crisis, encapsulated the drive, on the part of Ireland’s political and media establishment, to broaden collective responsibility for social and economic...
Europe must go back to the school of the world. As a student
In order to learn, Europe must be willing to un-learn many of its self-conceptions and many of its conceptions about the non-European world that brought it to its present place. Europe and the Global North as a whole are being assailed by a feeling of historical and...
Zombie Capitalism and the Grinning Void
Please would you tell me,’ said Alice … ‘why your cat grins like that?’ ‘It’s a Cheshire-Cat,’ said the Duchess, and that’s why. Pig!’ She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped… ‘I didn’t know that Cheshire-Cats always grinned; in fact,...
#Strike4Repeal: Ireland’s Women’s Strike
This International Women’s Day sees women worldwide engaged in strike action. Irish women strike for repeal of the 8th Amendment: the constitutional provision which prohibits abortion except where the pregnant woman’s life is at risk, and the only means of avoiding...
Swedens of the Mind
This article was first published by Wildcat Dispatches: Speaking in Florida on Saturday 18 February, Donald Trump pledged to keep the United States safe from refugees, and pointed to catastrophes unfolding elsewhere as the reason: We’ve got to keep out country safe....
Police and Protest in the Banlieue
On February 2, 2017, in the banlieue municipality of Aulnay-sous-Bois (North-East), 22-year-old Black man Théo L. was raped by a police officer, while three others were holding him. As of today, Théo is still at the hospital suffering of a 3.5-inch-long tear of his...
The problem with the past is that it doesn’t pass: On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution (RR)By Russian Revolution I mean exclusively the October Revolution because that was the revolution that shook the world and impacted on the lives of about one third of the world’s population in the...
KEY CONCEPTS
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