CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Gaza, Venezuela and International Law
Left: Maduro Captured (US Military, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) | Right: Trump with members of his cabinet at Mar-a-Lago during "Operation Absolute Resolve" (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 1. After the genocide in Gaza, we did not expect 2026 to be a year of peace. The biggest desire of Trump, "the great peacemaker," was to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But his first statements after the attack on Venezuela and Maduro's abduction show that the peacemaker was just a mask behind which hid a warmongering old man who was as excited about the military operation as a child who had just opened his New Year's gifts. "It was an excellent plan and many excellent military personnel and excellent people," Trump told the New York Times. "It was a brilliant operation." The legal language was left to others—ministers and government officials—who explained that Maduro would be "brought to justice" for corruption, drug trafficking, and...
ARTICLES
The Slave Ship Embodies the Whole Story of Slavery
The man refused to eat. He had been sick, reduced to a ‘mere skeleton.’ He had apparently made a decision to die. Captain Timothy Tucker was outraged, and probably fearful that his example might spread to the other 200-plus captives aboard his ship, the Loyal George,...
A Walk in Yarl’s Wood
On a fine winter’s day, the first fine day after weeks of storms and rain, I went for a walk in the country. I found myself in a typical English rural landscape, driving down hedge-lined lanes that grew progressively narrower. A couple of dead badgers lay whitening on...
Bodies, Buses, and Permits: Palestinians Navigating Care
In May 2013, I traveled to Palestine for six months to collect data for a research project that examines the cultural and visual productions of natalist images, including pregnancy and birth. During the time I spent traveling throughout the West Bank and Israel, I...
It is our belief that Palestine is a feminist issue ….
So long as antiwar activists denounce the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but not Israel’s occupation of Palestine, I will keep drawing the parallels. So long as Western feminists denounce the oppression of Arab women as a result of Islamic fundamentalism, but not as a...
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...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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