CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
A Preliminary Report on the Academic Office of Principal and Vice Chancellor
On 26 June 2025, Prof Iain Gillespie publicly accepted that he was ‘incompetent’ in his execution of the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Dundee.[1] The surprise revelation of a roughly £30 million deficit at the Scottish university in November 2024 had been widely reported, and indicated a lack of institutional awareness of the financial challenges the University of Dundee was facing. This, in turn, triggered the engagement of Scottish Government with Dundee’s financial governance and recovery (a process that remains on-going),[2] including the completion of an independent public investigation into the accounting and governance processes that led up to the deficit being discovered. This investigation resulted in the damning Gillies Report, a detailed work of forensic accountancy that documents the collapse of financial governance at the institution.[3] Given this report, and the live-streamed three-hour grilling of Prof Gillespie by the Scottish...
ARTICLES
Palestinian Feminist Critique and the Physics of Power: Feminists Between Thought and Practice
The Palestinian woman in the Jewish state is a woman who confronts and defies bio-political, geopolitical and necropolitical Zionist settler colonialism, as well as socio-patriarchal oppression. The various forms of oppression facing Palestinian women, and the...
Some Reflections on BDS and Feminist Political Solidarity
We are not asking you for heroic action or to form freedom brigades. We are simply asking you not to be complicit in perpetuating the crimes of the Israeli state.Ali Abunimah, “After witnessing Palestine’s apartheid, Indigenous and Women of Color feminists...
Dense Struggle (IV): The Ghostly Real
As I mentioned in the last post, one of the most perplexing circumstances that surrounded the appearance of the ghost in the refuge was that it occurred at the precise moment at which the group of IDPs formally entered into the realm of the official. It could have...
Dense Struggle (III): The Modern Uncanny
In the last two posts I have argued that the longue durée of capitalist modernity has implied an expansion of a material and social global ordering, and that this process is far from being free of emotional forces, even of an uncanny dimension. In my account, this...
Dense Struggle (II): Oh yes, that, our world
In the preamble of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels made the famous dictum: A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and...
Dense Struggle (I): Violence and the otherworldly
How can we make sense of popular struggles in this period of late capitalist modernity? What do the experiences, voices, and visions of groups involved in such struggles tell us about the actual functioning of our world — a world mined with growing inequalities, ever...
Notes for a Non-Statocentric Politics
The statocentric gaze proposes to think of social change as a conflict between the political class (“chancers, crooks, liars”) and a “we” that is essentially healthy (“the real people”, “decent folk”, “the multitudes”). It would be sufficient for “the good guys” to reach power (through their representatives) to change the state of things. But neoliberalism is in fact a co-production. With different levels, but we all produce it among ourselves (by entering into competition with our neighbour, by speculating, etc.). It is not enough to be against “the bad guys” as if there were about the place somewhere a “good us” that already existed. A new reality has to be created (and we have to change with it).
Six Theses on Anxiety & the Prevention of Militancy
Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination. One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. The NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the Job Centre, the privileges system in the prisons, the constant examination and classification of the youngest schoolchildren. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace. We need to think about the ways in which a neoliberal idea of success inculcates these surveillance mechanisms inside the subjectivities and life-stories of most of the population.
Improper attachments, or who do anti-abortion posters belong to?
The events discussed below took place at the University of California Santa Barbara, on 4th March 2014. I had planned to meet Mireille Miller-Young, a professor in Feminist Studies, who was chairing a talk I was giving. When I arrived, Mireille was in the seminar room...
“Peace! I Hate the Word!” A Few Thoughts in Favour of Conflict
The world is riven by conflict. The recent events in Ukraine are just the most recent example. The value and necessity of conflict should not be subsumed within the entirely understandable desire to prevent violence. I want to argue that peace, as a goal, is not...
To Demonstrate a Right: Police Power Jurisprudence and the Rule of Law in Zuccotti Plaza
Waller v City of New York, 2011 At approximately 1:00 am on the morning of November 15, 2011 the NYPD entered Zuccotti Plaza with armored vehicles, barricades and bullhorns and announced to ‘those occupying Zuccotti Park’ that they were to immediately remove all...
Five Theses on the Aftermath of the Ukrainian Revolution
1 The escalation of the Crimean crisis has all but obscured the events in the Ukraine during November 2013 – February 2014 that led to it and which alone make it intelligible. What took place during this period was a revolution in the full sense of the word, i.e....
The Market as the Unique Site of Truth: On Foucault & Milk
Whom would you ask in order to check if the milk you are drinking is fresh? This trivial question can be answered in multiple ways. For example, one could ask a farmer, a biologist, a chemist, or even a grandparent that lives in a rural area. One could even rest upon...
Five Theses on Financialisation
1 The dual nature of contemporary capitalism resides in the separation of ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ on one side, and ‘finance’ and ‘production’ on the other. However, in financialisation ‘politics’ and ‘finance’ are connected, specifically by an unspoken pact of...
The ‘Lawful’ Political Killing of Bogotá’s Mayor: Gustavo Petro
One of the longest living myths in Latin America is that Colombia is one of its most stable democracies. Of course, formally, the country has not suffered a military dictatorship in the last fifty some years and all the internal clockwork of a republican system seems...
If the state isn’t a corporation, what might it become?
That British and other states are becoming increasingly privatised is the sad litany of our age. So too is the way states incorporate market principles of price and competition within their own internal governance structures. And now, with companies running public...
“We are not from another planet”: Justice 4 Cleaners Campaign and the Struggle for Recognition
The on-going struggle of the SOAS Cleaners for acceptable working conditions and equality in the workplace has received some media attention since its inception in 2007–2008. For a thorough and engaging analysis of the history of cleaners’ labour activism across the...
(K)not Politics: Thoughts on Ukraine and Protest
The events in Ukraine have caused many to wonder what sparked the protests in November and why things unfolded into such violence this February. How do we understand European and Russian interest in this country, and what media, what sources of information can be...
Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO
The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (MAP) opens by noting the depth of the current crisis – “cataclysm” – and a negation of the future by “coming apocalypses”. No need for alarm however: there is nothing political-theological here whatsoever, so those who...
What’s Going on in Venezuela?
It’s difficult to briefly explain the situation in Venezuela right now. The difficulty lies in the fact that it is complicated, like most things. No matter how various political protagonists, human rights groups and news media would like to paint things as simple,...
Racism as Excessive Legalism
We rightly celebrate that we live in a society where law and order prevail. The capacity to follow established rules allows for the smooth operation of the many necessary transactions that make up our everyday life. And the law, among other things, guarantees that we...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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