CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Analysing the Iranian Uprising: Costas Douzinas interviews Leila Faghfouri Azar
This interview, conducted by Professor Costas Douzains for the Greek weekly newspaper Epohi, features Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar and was originally published in Epohi’s special supplement on the Iranian uprising (24–25 January 2026). In the conversation, Faghfouri Azar discusses the dynamics of protest in Iran, patterns of social stratification, the state’s response, and the prospects of U.S. military intervention. Costas Douzinas (CD): Can inflation and repression create an opposition alliance beyond the dominant forces of Iranian society? Leila Faghfouri Azar (LFA): The recent protests, which began in late December 2025 in response to rising inflation and the unprecedented collapse of the national currency, have been both geographically widespread and socially diverse. Within days, they brought together groups with different grievances into a more unified oppositional voice, even as participants faced extreme and deadly repression. In this way, the protests reveal what might be...
ARTICLES
Eye in the Sky: drones, the (human) ticking-time bomb scenario and law’s inhumanity
"The law is here to protect YOU" — Legal adviser of the UK military, Eye in the Sky Eye in the Sky is (unintentionally) a film about law’s profound inhumanity. (*Moderate spoilers to follow, proceed with caution.) Colonel Katherine Powell (Hellen Mirren) commands from...
The Left in Power? Notes on Syriza’s Rise, Fall, and (Possible) Second Rise
The left in power? Four enticing words. The most important thing here, however, is the question mark at the end. For what does the left mean today as ideology and vision, as organization and party, as movement and government? No single or simple answer exists. We have...
Taxing Citizens: Hegel On Having the Right Attitude
We hear a lot about tax, and about how people dislike paying it. But while there’s general agreement that there is a big difference between tax evasion (illegal: breaching the law to escape paying tax) and tax avoidance (minimising one’s tax liabilities in a legal...
Impolite Conversations around the ‘War on Waste’
I have few food-related memories of my childhood in Italy. One of these is certainly represented by my parents nudging me to eat all the food that was in my plate: no questions asked. It was the end of the 80s, and households in the Global North were for the first...
What is DiEM25, really? A Reply to the Open Letter
Note from the LeftEast editors: this is the reply of Yanis Varoufakis to the Open Letter by George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini about the Democracy in Europe Movement 2015 DiEM25, which appeared earlier this week on LeftEast. Varoufakis’s reply first appeared on...
An Open Letter to Yanis Varoufakis
In the following open letter (republished on AnalyzeGreece), George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini respond to the recent DiEM25 launch in Rome. Dear Yanis,We decided to write you this letter after following closely the launch of DiEM 25 in Rome on 23 March. The missive...
Open Letter: Calling all Students and Staff to Resist ‘Prevent Duty’ at their University
Today, 1 April 2016 (this is no April fools) marks a key date in terms of institutionalising toxic policies regarding the Prevent duty at universities around the UK. The 1 April 2016 marks an important date for the future of the university and the wellbeing of its...
Brexit: Whose Europe, Theirs or Ours?
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. — Antonio Machado I. Introduction The referendum on whether or not Britain should remain within the European Union (EU) is now fully underway. This debate...
Brazil: Democracy on the Edge of Chaos and the Dangers of Legal Disorder
With legal order turned into legal disorder and democracy being highjacked by the non-elected sovereign body, political and social life has become a potential field of spoils at the mercy of political adventurers and vultures. When I began studying the judicial system...
Terrorism, Brussels, etc … Think Before you Hunt
Look at the swamps created by the differential of exterminability and mournability between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is in those and similar dips in the affective tectonic plates in which we are all embedded where some of the emotional propellors of Islamic...
Markets are the Measure of All Things: George Osborne’s Devolution Agenda and All-Academies Policy
An analysis of George Osborne's devolution agenda and all-academies school policy in the budget he presented last week as a form of "market-fostering subsidiarity." Four legs good, two legs bad! — was the catchy maxim which first summarised the principles of the...
Doreen Massey has died
Doreen Massey died four days ago at her home in Kilburn. Even before her close friends and family could decide on how to announce her death, the social media were bursting with wishes for her peaceful rest: hundreds of mini memorials of 140 characters dedicated to a...
Hillary Clinton, Riot Grrrl and Subversive Property
I came late to riot grrrl. It was 2004 and there was a rush on tickets in Brisbane to see a band called Le Tigre. It seemed like every lesbian in the city was going. “What kind of music is it?” I asked my then girlfriend. “They’re girls”, she answered, “they shout a...
A philosophical dialogue on financial risk: the (dis)illusion of a singular meaning
Financial risk is a common term nowadays. It affects our life. It is the main reason of our existence since the start of the contagion risk. It was in 2008 that one of the biggest financial institutions collapsed in America: Lehman Brothers. Since that moment...
Wanted: Sovereignty — Dead or Alive
In the first flurry of publicity around the present referendum on the UK’s EU membership, the expected statement regarding the securing of UK sovereignty has not, perhaps surprisingly, been forthcoming. Instead we have been treated to rebuttals of Gove on the role of...
Podemos, 15M and Radical Change: A multiple process of the self-determination of life
‘There has never been so much talk about politics as there is now! ‘And so little about life…’ (A conversation with friends, in the ‘year of change’) How might we understand the fundamental nature of the political management of this economic crisis? I think we can...
Walter Benjamin in Palestine
"The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice. The gate to justice is study." — Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka.”[1. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death”, trans. Harry Zohn in Howard Eiland and Michael W....
Legality and the Production of Difference
Legal theoretical approaches oriented around discerning a constitutive difference between law and morality are misguided in that they misrepresent epistemological claims for ontological certainty. While some, such as Kelsen, have been admirably straightforward about...
Nowhere Left to Dance: ScumTek, the Electronic Underground and Neoliberal Mainstreamism
As I sat down to write this piece on some of the less credited and understood sonorous movements in the UK and their affecting encounters with law, snippets of David Cameron’s pronouncements on ‘blitzing poverty’ and ‘bulldozing the UK’s worst sink estates’ transmute...
On parents going to school in pyjamas
Sometimes, working late at the university, when it’s dark or raining I call my partner (who works there also) to drive and pick me up. She jumps in the car, in her “loungewear”, and is at the university within five minutes. I was reflecting on our own comfort levels,...
Pirates in our public library: Why Indian scholars are closely watching a court case in Quebec
The online library aaaaarg.fail, which is being sued for copyright violation, gives researchers access to a wealth of vital texts that are inaccessible in the subcontinent. Originally published on Scroll.in and republished here with permission. In 2005, Sean Dockray...
KEY CONCEPTS
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