CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Iran’s Uprising: Between Clerical Violence and Neo-colonial Aggression
The beginning of 2026 marked yet another human tragedy for Iranian society. In January, hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters took to the streets in over 100 cities in response to political repression and growing socio-economic hardships. This new wave of popular uprising was met with ruthless violence by the clerical regime, resulting in significant loss of life. Thousands of protesters are believed to have been killed within only a few days. Meanwhile, Iran remains largely isolated from the global internet, as authorities enforce a near-total communications blackout to conceal the scale of the nationwide protests and brutal crackdown. At the time of writing, media are saturated with images of bloodshed, corpses, and destroyed buildings and present an exhibition of necropolitical victimhood. Human rights organizations are engaged in a race to produce casualty figures, reducing human suffering to a spectacle of statistics. Western leaders are, in turn, manoeuvring around these…
ARTICLES
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…
#14N: European General Strike
Last month, Portugal ’s largest trade union CGTP called a general strike for November 14 against the “exploitation and impoverishment” of the Portuguese population. The union stressed the need to change government policies “for the sake of a better future” and urged…
In Germany insolvency law becomes financialised
The Amendment of the German Bankruptcy Act, which came into effect six months ago, has opened the door to widespread abuse alleges the industry association VID, which claims to represent more than half of liquidators. "A few influential and wealthy creditors now…
The Right against the City
“Reclaim our cities”. “Self-organise”. “Take neighbourhood action”. Consider these slogans for a moment. Sound familiar? Indeed they should, echoing as they do a body of scholarship (e.g. Amin & Thrift, 2005; Butler, 2012; Chatterton, 2010; Dikeç, 2001; Harvey, 2003; Leontidou, 2006, 2010; Marcuse, 2009; Mayer, 2009; Simone, 2005) stemming from Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1996; henceforth RttC). Despite this common origin, interpretations of the Lefebvrian “right” have been most diverse; perhaps his own often-times abstract writing has inadvertently caused this scholarship to reach outside the confines of his own political allegiance and thought: ten years ago, Mark Purcell (2002) protested that the original RttC notion was more radical than his own concurrent literature would make it appear. But today, a reformist interpretation of Lefebvre might be the least of the worries we are faced with here, on the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean that is the Greek territory.
The Criminalisation of Political Dissent: Huckstering the Law
The subversion of law begins with the reduction of politics to a crime. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street…
End the Criminalisation of Protest: The Case of Trenton Oldfield
On the 7th of April 2012, Trenton Oldfield undertook a direct-action protest at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The aim of his protest was to focus attention on the long-standing and entirely unjust inequalities in British society that are being severely exacerbated by government cuts and reductions in civil liberties. Trenton chose the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race because it is a symbol of class, privilege and elitism in Britain.
An astonishing 70% of the cabinet in the current government are Oxford or Cambridge graduates. This government is protecting the privileges of the wealthy while cutting the essential necessities of the majority and the poor and reducing people’s rights and freedoms. In the three days before Trenton’s protest, the coalition government (1) received royal assent for its bill to privatise the NHS, (2) introduced the Communications Data Bill to legalise surveillance of all digital communications of UK subjects, and (3) called on people to ‘shop their neighbours’ if they suspected they might protest at the 2012 Olympic Games. Trenton’s protest aimed at drawing attention to these injustices. He swam into the course of the boat race. The race was halted and restarted 25 minutes later. The action was seen by an international audience but it affected just 18 rowers and a handful of event organisers on a closed river, on a long weekend. The direct-action protest was wholly consistent with Trenton’s decade+ work in London on addressing this city’s unnecessary poverty and inequalities. The audience for the free event experienced a minor delay of 25 minutes. The BBC coverage ended at its pre-scheduled time-slot. Not a single complaint was received from the public by either the Metropolitan police or the BBC.
Are we aware of the current recolonisation of the South?
It would not be surprising if, in the context of an international conference, a group of jurists from different nations identified a set of common juridical references based on different legal systems. This occurrence would be attributed to the process of…
The Need for Public Protest
Earlier last week, Trenton Oldfield was convicted of ‘Causing a Public Nuisance’ by a jury at the Isleworth Crown Court. Previous instances of this rarely prosecuted offence include impregnating the air with “noisome and offensive stinks and smells” causing “a nuisance to all the King’s liege subjects living in Twickenham” But Oldfield was the man who had the temerity to disrupt the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race last April, by choosing to take a swim, just as both boats were getting into their stride.
The prosecutor explained to the court that his actions had “spoiled the race for hundreds of thousands of spectators” and for this, the judge has adjourned sentence, commenting that she is not ruling out a prison sentence.
Five reasons why it was a bad idea to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU
1) The reporting on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union has been substandard in its simplification of perspectives to a “for or against” binary. It has been assumed that a view on the awarding of the prize has correspondingly also been a view…
The Politics of Spinozism – Composition and Communication (Part 2 of 2)
Étienne Balibar approaches Spinoza as a thinker of interaction, of the constitutive character of relations. Spinoza’s question, in Balibar’s view, is the following: ‘What is the mode of reciprocal action that characterizes the existence of a body politic?’
In this respect, the uniqueness of Spinoza is that of taking the movement (both outer and inner, so to speak) of the masses as the object of political science, and not just the legitimacy of sovereignty or the claims of order. (Of course, we may be tempted to ask, to what extent are the masses, or rather the multitude, the subject or object of politics?)
From here derives, in Balibar’s reading, both the centrality and aporetic character of the notion of democracy. Democracy is defined as a ‘united body of men which corporately possesses sovereign right over everything within its power’, as the combination of the reciprocity of duties and the equality of rights. As both Macherey and Negri note, this is not to be understood simply as another figure in a political typology of forms of government, but is an immanent tendency of political life, inscribed in the dynamic of reason and into the vicissitudes of human nature. Or, as Balibar puts it, democracy is both a kind of political order and the truth of every political order. Democracy can also be understood as the power of the multitude coordinated, cultivated and instituted without the imaginary displacement represented by sovereignty, by the alienation of the power of human singularities into the empty and formally unified place of power (the Hobbesian option, as it were). Whence the radical novelty of Spinoza’s question: How does power originate in the multitude? And, one should add, how does it continue and persevere, how is power not just originated, but also continuously constructed, in and by the multitude?
The Politics of Spinozism – Composition and Communication (Part 1 of 2)
As many scholars have noted, Spinoza’s relation to the history and practice of philosophy is unique. Though often portrayed in the academy as a thinker integrated into the ‘rationalist’ tradition, Spinoza has repeatedly emerged as what Antonio Negri famously called a ‘savage anomaly’. Whether in the radical enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries, the Pantheism controversy that played such a formative role within German Idealism, or in the philosophical radicalism catalysed by May 1968, Spinoza has been repeatedly invoked as a point of reference and inspiration at moments when the very meaning of philosophy and its link to the contemporary world was at stake. Toscano’s initial question is therefore the following: How is it that a philosopher renowned for thinking, with supreme detachment, ‘sub specie aeternitatis’, could play such a forceful part in debates over what Michel Foucault called ‘the ontology of the present’? In order to address this matter, Toscano concentrates specifically on the latest ‘wave’ in the long history of Spinozism, and focuses on three thinkers who have played a crucial role in the recent resurgence of interest in the work of the Dutch philosopher: Gilles Deleuze, Etienne Balibar, and our guest in this colloquium, Antonio Negri. More specifically, Toscano is concerned with how Spinoza has served as a spur for these three thinkers in their radical interrogations of the meaning of politics, democracy and the common. He does this by fleshing out three concepts through which Deleuze, Balibar and Negri respectively affirm the relevance of Spinoza’s ontology and ethics to any reflection on the contemporary status of the political: composition, communication and constitution.
On the Militancy of 2011 and the Time of Revolution
New York Police officers attack protesters with batons, pepper spray and horses in an attempt to prevent them from gathering in Times Square. Police officers’ rage is understandable, for in this photograph, we witness angry protesters who have turned the world upside down. What the image suggests is that people are no longer determined by capitalist excess, but determine the conditions that determine them. It shows the interaction between the virtual (a philosophical ideal, revolution) and the actual (angry protesters) that is at war with visible reality (neoliberal capitalism). The image, therefore, captures a moment in which the stability and the certainty of neoliberalism became yesterday’s bad memory. Times Square, the capital of consumerism and the capitalist spectacle, makes a powerful setting for this picture: “shiny walls of towing glass, the citadels of corporate entertainment, dazzle among the giant screens” (Jones, 2011).
The Political Economy of Indigenous Dispossession: Bare and Dispensable Lives in the Andes
The expansion of the extractive industries has, as counterparts, first, the reaction of indigenous communities in the defense of their communal goods (land, water, grazing, etc.), and second, the violent counter-attack of the state through police and military repression, legitimated many times by the of exception (in Peru the “state of emergency”, a kind of state of exception, has been applied by governments in previous years to control socio-environmental protests). Political economy and legal policy are both relevant to this situation and both are functionally connected.
In respect of political economy, let us bring to mind what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”, which is just the theoretical update of the “primitive accumulation” described by Karl Marx, that is to say: capitalist expansion requires the violent transformation of common goods into commodities in order to be appropriated and then used by exchange mechanisms.
A Tribute to Eric Hobsbawm
‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the twentieth century, it was Karl Marx’ Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his last book ‘How to Change the World’ published in 2011. Perry Anderson entitles his review of Eric’s autobiography ‘Interesting Times’, ‘The age of Eric…
Rights and property paradigms: challenging the hegemony
The interrelationship of (human) rights and property paradigms raises particularly profound questions when played out in respect of environmental claims. It is therefore no surprise that contributions to this edition invoke ontological and epistemological concerns…
KEY CONCEPTS
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
SERIES / SYMPOSIA
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.