CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Blog Carnival: Victims, aesthetics and counter-aesthetics of international justice
Narratives of international criminal justice often depart from the horrors of World War II and the legal process of the Nuremberg Trials to set the scene for how the International Criminal Court addresses contemporary violence. These narratives can be found in academic books and articles as well as in films, even art works. There are goodies and baddies, conflict and resolution, war and justice. The problems with the over-simplicity of this narrative and how it renders some subjects hyper-visible and obscures others, are questions of aesthetics and of international criminal justice. The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice is an edited collection with chapters that set out to unpack and problematise how aesthetics and international justice interrelate. Engaging with questions of justice across a range of institutions, geographical sites and subject positions, there is a breadth of chapters that further advances the understanding of both...
ARTICLES
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (4) Universalism & Communitarianism are Interdependent
[image style="polaroid"]https://criticallegalthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Guernica-Sun.jpg[/image] The debate about the meaning of humanity as the ground normative source is conducted between universalists and communitarians. The universalist claims that...
Boston Marathon Bombings: the Emergency Declaration as a State of Exception
At the end of the 60s, American artist Martha Rosler produced a series of photomontages titled House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. One of those images, “Red Stripe Kitchen”, shows two GI soldiers rummaging through the immaculate kitchen of what looks like a...
A Boycott of Academic Ranking Systems?
Universities and institutions of higher education across the globe are being impacted by structural change, guided by principles of the entrepreneurial university. The imposition of New Public Management principles means that universities are increasingly being...
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (3) Neoliberal Capitalism & Voluntary Imperialism
Why and how did this combination of neoliberal capitalism and humanitarianism emerge? Capitalism has always moralized the economy and applied a gloss of righteousness to profit-making and unregulated competition precisely because it is so hard to believe. From Adam...
‘Adjunct’ Faculty in the Neoliberal University
Chris from Remaking the University writes to introduce a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi's opinion piece, "The Neoliberal Assault on Academia," produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have...
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (2) Power, Morality & Structural Exclusion
We will explore the strong internal connection between these superficially antagonistic principles, at the point of their emergence in the late 18th century here and in the post-1989 order in the next part. The religious grounding of humanity was undermined by the...
The Reactionary ‘Freeman-on-the-land’ and a Political Fracture
The Irish Times reports over 100 ‘Freeman’-style arguments used in the Irish courts this year, citing the Law Society Gazette [for the traditional legal response see here and here]. Last Tuesday, Francis Cullen (36) was sentenced to another three months in Mountjoy...
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (1) The Idea of Humanity
If ‘humanity’ is the normative source of moral and legal rules, do we know what ‘humanity’ is? Important philosophical and ontological questions are involved here. Let me have a brief look at its history. Pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of...
Homegrown Terror: The Boston Marathon’s Media Coverage
In the wake of the Boston Marathon explosions (15 April 2013), the Obama Department of Justice’s treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—American citizen and primary terror suspect—gained significant attention from liberal media. Dzhokhar will be charged as a civilian for...
The Lacanian Trials
The 30th anniversary of Lacan’s death in September 2011 was marked by an “intellectual dispute,” one which was not settled in the sphere of ideas or public academic debate, but in a defamation trial in the French criminal courts. While a still on-going war of...
Suárez and Rouse: Masculinity, Sport and Rape Apologies
As Luis Suárez joined Johan le Roux and Mike Tyson in the annals of sports-biting history this week, across the water in Northern Ireland Alvin Rouse continues to play in goal for Ballinamallard United Football Club, despite facing three counts of rape, two of sexual...
Thatcher: The Wound Festers
The passing of Margaret Thatcher was announced to this author via a simple text message, it contained only two words, ‘rejoice rejoice’. Its tone appeared to encapsulate one side of a debate which has exercised British political life for over three decades, the person...
All Rise: What Does Justice Sound Like?
Three years ago last Saturday, an oil rig around 50 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana exploded. The explosion killed eleven workers instantaneously, and marked the beginning of an 87-day period of uncontrollable crude oil spillage into the Gulf of Mexico, the...
The Philpott Trial, Welfare Reform and the Facialisation of Poverty
The British Right celebrates the personality cult of its heroine Margaret Thatcher this week, at a time when an obsessively individualised personality-politics dominates the press and is increasingly redefining the terms of political debate and proffering mandates for...
Mao Tse-Tung in Bogota: The Pragmatism of FARC and its Parallel in China
Several analysts of the peace process currently under way in Colombia have overlooked the curious parallel between the guerrilla insurgents' proposal to establish some 50 Peasant Reserve Zones (ZRCs in their Spanish initials) in the national territory and the policy...
Sumak Kawsay, Interculturality and Decolonialization
Many commentators have been highlighting the novelty of the Ecuadorian constitution’s recognition of the right to nature and even the concepts of buen vivir and sumak kawsay (‘good living’ in Spanish and Quechua respectively), analyzing them as though they were simple...
Thatcher: a wound reopens
Last night in Brixton, London, George Sq. Glasgow, Easton in Bristol, Derry in Northern Ireland, and in pubs and working men's clubs across Britain, people cheered, raised a glass, partied, danced in the streets, to mark the death of Margaret Thatcher. Some people...
Towards a Critical Arab Social Science
What does being a critical social scientist mean in the Arab world today? Or to ask the question differently: How can social scientists think Arab societies critically following or amidst the upheavals of the last few years? Such questions do not demand prescriptive...
Another Forum is Possible
I waited a couple of days before sitting in front of my laptop and trying to organize the combination of feelings that had been invading me since I left Tunis and the 2013 World Social Forum. It was my first time, and, as every first experience, I had charged it...
Debating BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions): Fraser v UCU
On March 22nd, 2013 the Employment Tribunal (UK-London) rendered judgment in the case of Fraser v University & College Union (UCU). Ruling in favour of UCU, the Tribunal's judgment brought immense relief to UCU members, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions)...
Happiness and Human Rights in Shangri-La
In the early 1990s, Indra was forced to flee her home country of Bhutan after her father had been imprisoned and tortured. “In prison they hung my father upside down and beat him. Then they hung him over chili smoke,” she explained. “After that they ordered him to...
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