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
Blockupy in Frankfurt: Die Linke seek to overturn Blockupy ban
The City of Frankfurt has attempted to close down demonstations planned for 16-19 May in the city's banking district by requiring that any public order discussions prior to general approval only be entered into if organisers guarantee that no violence or other illegal...
Institutional Xenophobia against Immigrants in Spain
Faced with the difficulty of explaining how the image of immigrants has been constructed by the migratory policies in the majority of receiving countries (as certainly is the case in the USA and the EU), many of us have turned on more than one occasion to the metaphor...
Argentina’s Expropriation of Repsol’s YPF (A Reversal of Fortune): Understanding the Decolonial Turn in Latin America
Far from being an implausible paradox, the difference between what is happening in Europe and in Latin America lies at the epicenter of a 500-year long farce: coloniality. In a monumental reversal of fortune, the peoples of Latin America are deconstructing coloniality...
Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II)
Christopher Mattison: To continue our earlier discussion about Bolivia in relation to “refunding” or “decolonizing”—you’ve stated on a number of occasions that capitalism or socialism, as they are currently constituted, are not the answers? One of the alternatives that you offer to this issue is “delinking.” Could you expand on what you mean by delinking in this particular instance and how it integrates into modes of dewesternization and the various layers of decolonization? ¶ Walter Mignolo: Let me first re-state that the world is currently moving towards both rewesternization and dewesternization. The political ambition of the US (announced by Hillary Clinton in Honolulu and followed up by President Obama) is to mold the Pacific into the American Century. This is in line with President Obama’s politics of regaining world leadership for the US, which was severely shaken by the presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Obama’s famous discourse in Cairo was one of the first moves in this direction. The turn to the Pacific was the second. However, this move came too late because of the growing confidence of the remaining world, most specifically in the Pacific.
Trouble in the Garden: Critical Legal Studies & the Crisis
By modest reckoning 2012 is the fourth year since the Great Recession began. Over the last four years the victories won by socialist and trade unionist movements over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (universal health care, access to education,...
Notes on the ‘Loss of Sovereignty’
A standard justification for the cuts to public services, the policy of prioritising the repayment of private speculator debts over funding for hospitals and schools, the policy of converting private speculator debt into sovereign debt, is that ‘we’ have lost our...
The New Irish Constitution
Following the Irish Government's decision to modify the constitution of 1937 following a new constitutional convention, the Ice Moon Blog - which has contacts in the highest places in the Irish State - has been able to obtain a secret government memo with a full...
Debt as a Mode of Governance
Capitalism has complete control over life: it has “biopolitical” control. In the primitive society, debt is charged through the primitive inscription, or coding, on the body. Blood-revenge and cruelty address a non-exchangist power. In the despotic society, all debts become infinite debts to the divine ruler. In capitalism, all debts finally break free from the sovereign and become infinite by conjoining flows. With capitalism, debt is continuous and without limit: student debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt. Whereas in the primitive system debt is incurred through inscription and, in despotism, exercised by divine law, in capitalism “the market-eye keeps a watch over everything”. In other words, the market-eye becomes the new normal that constitutes the biopolitical control around a weightless, infinitely circulating, immortal debt. We now live in the era of debt in which it is the soul of the individual that is imprisoned […]
When They Make a Battlefield of Her Choice: The Harassment of Women and the Right to Protest
When I first noticed their banner as I walked by Bedford Square, in London, I didn't think too much about it. It registered as a depressing example of the public expression of a position I had strong opposition to, not much more. It wasn't until sometime later that I...
On Trayvon Martin and the Cost of Suspicion
A few weeks ago, while walking to my car after teaching a class, I saw a white woman who was approaching me on the sidewalk clutch her purse on her hip, cross the street, and head past me continuing in the same direction. Out of curiosity, I looked backwards, and I...
Open Wounds in El Salvador: Action of the International Tribunal for the Application of Restorative Justice
The many experiences of transitional justice taking place in a number of countries today do not follow a predefined model. They are shaped by the variety of transitional processes which, in turn, vary according to the political and military repression through which...
Ask not what you can do for your country but what we can do for each other
I am thinking of the 77 year old Greek pensioner who took his life earlier today in Syntagma square, Athens. I am thinking of JFK’s 20th of January 1961 inaugural address speech where he uttered these well cited words: “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” The Greeks are not Americans. J.F. Kennedy in this inaugural speech was talking about a new world, where poverty, disease and injustice could be obliterated globally and where, “a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved”. And of course such a world could not be motivated into existence through this speech, nor does it exist […]
What follows farce?
At this week's UK Treasury Select Committee hearing on the Budget of 2012, attendees were invited to draw parallels between George Osborne's view of economics and the military stratagems of Field Marshall Haig. It seems that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has...
Toxic Mega-mining in Mexico: Death and Despoilment 500 Years On
On 15 March this year, when many families were preparing to get away for the bridge weekend (or in reality the few able to), Bernardo Vázquez Sánchez, leader of the committee of the United Peoples of Ocotlán (Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Ocotlán, CPUVO) was killed in a shooting that also left Rosalinda Canseco and Andrés Vázquez Sánchez wounded. The gunmen – clearly identified by the community – were sent by the Mayor of San José de Progreso, Alberto Mauro Sánchez who, accused of assassinating another opponent of the mining project on 18 January 2012, is a fugitive from justice. But it was the Canadian mining company, Fortuna Silver Mines (operating in Mexico under the name Minera Cuzcatlán) that was responsible directly for guiding the fingers that pulled the trigger, not to mention the impunity and disdain that holds sway in the administration of Gabino Cué, Governor of the state of Oaxaca […]
Kettling and the Fear of Revolution
In November 2010, British students staged a series of demonstrations in several cities of the UK and Northern Ireland. Organised by the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), thousands marched against spending cuts to further education and an increase of the cap on tuition fees by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. The 2010 protests have marked something of a turning point in modern British history: the political protest was back. After the 2003 anti-Iraq war protest in London which attracted almost a million people, the 2010 protests showed once more that it is the political protest that shapes the world for the better. But if these protests made dissensus visible, and posited it at the heart of British politics, they also gave police an opportunity to widely use a scare tactic, ensuring that protest against the status quo is effective. The tactic is called ‘kettling’, which so easily turns a legitimate protest into a ‘violent disorder’ […]
Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I)
Christopher Mattison: During an interview that you gave with Madina Tlostanova in 2009, you posed the question (as a response) “Why save it at all?”—in regards to the economic system and the looming financial crisis. You continued by stating that it wasn’t the...
Large-Scale Housing Projects: Bombardment in the Cities
San José, Colombia. We were searching for the only house in the street left standing. Jump by jump, we dodged so much debris that I began to imagine I was moving through one of those photographs of the bombing that took place during the wars in Europe. What surprised...
The Muppet Show
Greg Smith’s resignation letter in the New York Times yesterday, announcing a bridge-burning departure from his position as Executive Director of Goldman Sachs’ Equity Derivatives Division (Europe, Asia, Africa) certainly brought Wall St. to a relative halt. GS cancelled conference calls and the Goldman Flacks (PR goons) were rounded up to pour scorn on Mr. Smiths allegations as “unrecognisable”.
The importance of the letter was not so much it’s revelation of a eat-what-you-kill culture in which clients are the main course, not even the contention that somehow GS had changed culture – it hadn’t any more than any other investment bank since the Big Bang. The letter was important because it effectively took GS clients’ faces and slammed them against the restaurant window, through which they could now see their GS contact engaged in anthropophagia between raucous tales of how the current dish had of its own volition signed up to sit on the plate […]
Rights, Politics and Paradise: Notes on Zizek’s Silent Voice of a New Beginning
The Silent Voice of a New Beginning was a talk given by Slavoj Zizek at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on the 20th November 2011. Upon recently hearing a recording, it struck me as an incredibly rich session in terms of political substance—what is to be...
Revolutionary Ambition in an Age of Austerity: An Interview with Neil Smith
David Hugill (DH): You’ve suggested that the neoliberal project has started to exhaust itself, that it has ceased to be generative of new ideas. But doesn’t it seem like new fronts of neoliberal assault are always opening up? Take Governor Scott Walker’s attack on...
The Critique of Science: Von Braun and the Ethics of Techno-Capitalism
Like an empty vessel, an abstract practice floats aimlessly in suspense of its navigator. Once boarded, it acquires a direction, an intention – the first instance of its ethical contamination. The navigator harnesses the vessel’s potential for something, injecting it...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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