CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Gaza Tribunal: A Simulacrum of Justice
The contemporary discourse on genocide is dominated by international criminal law, designed to punish individuals after the fact. Yet the framework derived from Public International Law and the Genocide Convention’s founding purpose was not punishment but prevention. What remains today is an inversion of that project: law intervenes only when prevention has failed, when the catastrophe has already unfolded. The international community’s legal architecture thus performs justice retrospectively, as though theatrical re-enactment could substitute for interruption. Nowhere is this more evident than in the International Court of Justice’s hearings on Gaza, where the legal spectacle unfolds long after the fact, promising order while staging absence. What we encounter here is less a system of justice than an image of it—what Jean Baudrillard called the simulacrum: the copy that no longer has a connection to its original. International law, in its modern formation, operates through...
ARTICLES
The People Returns: A footnote to protests in Slovenia
History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Marx wrote in his Eighteenth Brumaire. This famous remark fits well to the current situation in Slovenia, when the country experiences the largest protests since 1989. The person standing in the centre of...
Slovenians Demand Radical Changepr
During the closing months of 2012, Slovenia has seen a series of mass popular protests. Thirty thousand demonstrators gathered on November 17 for the first protest, organised by trade unions, students, and organisations of retired people and artists. Dozens of...
Compliance: The Uncomfortable Reality of Docile Bodies
The movie ‘Compliance’ is disturbing on many different levels, and left me with a feeling of extreme discomfort, and even disorientation, long after the credits rolled, no less because it is based on true events, referred to by the American media as the “strip search prank call scam’. As the story unfolds in the movie in the same sequence as it did in reality, Sandra, the manager of an Ohio “Chickwich” fast-food outlet, receives a call from a man falsely claiming to be a police detective. Referring to himself as “Officer Daniels” or “Sir”, he accuses a young female cashier, Becky, of stealing money from a customer. He then enlists Sandra’s assistance in physically detaining Becky in the store room of the outlet and strip-searching her. Sandra and two other employees are caught up in events that become increasingly unsettling, escalate throughout, and ultimately culminate in the degrading sexual abuse and humiliation of Becky by Sandra’s boyfriend, Van.
The People’s Law Tribunals in Pakistan
QM: A set of movements you have been involved with in Punjab is the sath, a form of people’s law. What is a sath and how does it translate? What areas are governed by sath? What is your involvement? Finally, can you explain how the experience of law and justice...
We must resist the cunning of judicial reform
The death of the 23 year old woman following the brutal gang rape and assault on a moving bus on 16 December 2012 at a hospital in Singapore early this morning [Ed. Friday 28th December 2013] leaves all of us in states of deep mourning. This is a political death. Rape...
Ireland, Suicide and the Virtual Reality of a Political Elite
It has been apparent to many people in Ireland, across Europe and much further afield that the professional political class are living in a sort of virtual reality. [In Ireland] we have a political system that has been described as corrupt in all areas of public life...
Chastity, Virginity, Marriageability, and Rape Sentencing
The horrific gang rape incident in Delhi has led to demands for amending the law to provide for more stringent punishment for rape, including introducing the death penalty. Over the last few days, there have been various debates about the advisability of making such...
The ‘Politics’ in Ethiopia’s Political Trials
The Ethiopian regime is using the legal system to eliminate dissident voices and drag protesters to court under terrorism charges. Far from guaranteeing equality and justice, the country’s courts serve as an instrument in the Government’s hands to legitimize...
Greece and the Future of Europe
Delivered at The Southern Europe Crisis and Resistances, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 25 November 2012. Listen to the free podcast. In the summer of 1918, Constantin Cavafy met E. M. Forster in Alexandria. Cavafy compared the Greeks with the English. The two...
Pasolini’s Salò: Torture is Political
Pasolini’s controversial final film Salò (1975), based on Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), poses significant questions regarding the intersection between sadistic torture and sovereignty. The film is divided into four segments, heavily inspired by...
Human Rights or a Bill of Rights?
The debate over the future of the Human Rights Act ('HRA') has been somewhat surreal. The Labour position is schizophrenic. Labour introduced the Act but was justifiably accused of violating most of its principles in its obsession with security. But schizophrenia is...
Blustering over the European Convention on Human Rights
One would think that it’s the Battle of Britain all over again. On 21 November 2012 the Daily Mail carried the headline “Defiant Chris Grayling says Britain can ignore Strasbourg fines if we ban prisoners from having the vote”. Cameron said that the idea of...
Why Israel Desires to be Hated by Palestinians
Yet another massacre is unfolding in Gaza, the largest prison in the world.* We are surrounded by familiar chatter: ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’; ‘Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to (the 1967) occupation’; ‘who started it this time?’ Most insidious, however,...
The Children of Gaza Have Names
I wake up in the middle of the night to go check on my child. She breathes, she makes little sleep-noises. I leave the room. Again, half-an hour later I go back to check if she is alright. If she still breathes. I go back again and again through the night because...
The Bombs that Blast Gaza: A View from the Ground
November 15, 2012 Gaza. As I begin to write this piece my computer falls from my hands to the floor as a bomb drops meters from the Abousalama family home in Saftawi neighborhood, Gaza, Palestine. I have grown accustom to the loud blast of bombs being dropped around...
Savita Halappanavar: Ireland, Abortion and the Politics of Death and Grief
This morning (14 November 2012) the Guardian reports on the case of Savita Halappanavar, who died last month at University College Galway, Ireland. It was, we are told, a case of "sudden maternal death". The Irish Times sets out the facts of the case as follows:...
A Bailout of the People by the People – Will it Work?
From 15 November 2012, a part of the Occupy Movement in the U.S. led by Strike Debt will be operating a “Rolling Jubilee” which their website describes as:
“A bailout of the people by the people.
We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals’ debt — instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.”
David Graeber, for example, has been tweeting about this enthusiastically and the Rolling Jubilee Facebook page has a picture of Slavoj Zizek holding the linked “Strike Debt” logo and a statement claiming that he too supports the campaign. My initial reaction to the plan was open-minded bemusement and a question which I see keeps recurring on the Rolling Jubilee FB page: “How does this work?.”
Occupy Policing: The Eviction of Occupy Melbourne
Inspired by the global call for action by the Indignados movement in Spain, the protests and revolutions across the Arab World and the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, activists organised to launch Occupy Melbourne in City Square on 15 October 2011....
After Sandy, The Politics of Public Things
In response to the contemporary neoliberal impulse to privatize everything and the difficulty, in such a context, of preserving public things and of articulating the importance of public things to democratic life, it is important to think about public things. A few...
Saying ‘We’ Again: A Conversation with Jodi Dean on Democracy, Occupy and Communism
Biebricher & Celikates (‘B&C’): You argue that democracy is so intimately tied up with what you call ‘communicative capitalism’ that every attempt from the left to re-appropriate the term, to give it a more radical meaning and to distinguish it from the electoral regimes of representative democracy has to fail. This seems difficult to accept for many people on the left.
Jodi Dean (‘JD’): There are a couple of reasons why I take this position. First, and most broadly, democracy is not a category of contestation anymore. Right and left agree on democracy and use a democratic rhetoric to justify their positions. George Bush claimed to be defending democracy all over the world by bombing all sorts of people. If that is democracy, then that is not a language that the left can use to formulate an egalitarian and emancipatory potential or hope. A second reason, which is a repercussion of the first one, is that democracy is a kind of ambient milieu, it’s the air we breathe, everything is put in terms of democracy nowadays. And this relates to the third reason: the rhetoric of democracy is particularly strong now in the way in which it is combined with the form of capitalism I call ‘communicative capitalism’, where ideals of inclusion and participation, of making one’s voice heard and one’s opinion known are also used by TMobile and Apple. Participation ends up being the answer to everything. If that’s the case, referring to it is not making a cut with our dominant frame, it’s just reinforcing it. If governments and corporations are encouraging one to participate then leftists don’t add one thing that’s not already present if they say that what we need is to make sure that everyone is participating and included—that’s already what we have. For the left to be able to make a break we have to speak a language that is not already the one we’re in.
Another Greek Myth: Freedom of the Press
A warrant for Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis' arrest was issued today [Ed. 28 October 2012] for the alleged crime of "violating privacy legislation" related to his bi-weekly magazine HOT DOC which published a list of 2,059 names and associated professions of Greek...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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