CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Dream-walker in the Academy: Self, Time, and the Borders of Critique
I have returned to the classroom. After years inside bureaucracy – the slow gravity of minutes, clearances, and protocols – I am again among students, texts, and the low hum of ideas. The air is lighter; my wings that carry my creativity remember their work. It has been thirteen years since I stood at a graduate conference lectern at Birkbeck College, reading an early paper with a seriousness that only the young can afford. The text, Draft for BBK Graduate Conference, had slept in a forgotten folder until recently. When I opened it, the voice that greeted me felt both intimate and foreign – earnest, over-theorised, and trembling with the ambition to be critical. “Pero yo ya no soy yo,Ni mi casa es ya mi casa.”Federico García Lorca, “Romance Sonámbulo” Much has changed since then: the world’s crises, the university’s tone, the language of critique itself. I have changed too – moving between diplomatic corridors and lecture halls, between state service and the solitude of thought. Now,...
ARTICLES
Crises of Multiculturalism (pt 2)
This is the second part of an extract from Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley’s new book, The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, published in July 2011 by Zed Books. The Les mots sont importants collective points out that opposing the 2004...
Crises of Multiculturalism (pt 1)
This is an extract from Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley’s new book, The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, published in July 2011 by Zed Books. The extract is taken from chapter 3, ‘Free like me: the polyphony of liberal post-racialism.’...
The pillars of ignorance
Deleuze told us that for something to constitute an event, it must go all the way down. The death of the News of the World (soon to be resurrected as the undead Sun on Sunday) is not an event of itself, though it does constitute the sign of an event. This event,...
Malaysian Governance 101: How to Deal with an Impending Street Demonstration for Electoral Reform
In memory of the late Peter Falk, this article shall loosely mimic the format of the detective TV series Columbo. The answer is revealed from the beginning, and the issue to be dealt with is how do we get from not knowing much at all to knowing enough to come to a...
Whats this Liberal Doing in my Head – the problem of ‘illegitimate’ protestors
In the wake of recent protests, and through the pre-emptive arrests for the royal wedding, the government and police have made it clear recently that only ‘legitimate’ protesters are protected by our ‘right’ to protest. I would expect them to make this distinction but...
The Fetus Fetish & the Erosion of Reproductive Rights in the USA
Rennie Gibbs, a 15 year old girl from Missisippi, has been charged with murder for the following reasons: her baby was born dead, and she apparently took cocaine during pregnancy. A direct causal link between the drug use and the stillbirth was not established. In...
Strike for the Present, Perhaps This Is All There Is
José Saramago’s Death at Intervals (2008) tells the story of Death going on Strike. In Saramago’s imagined country ‘since the beginning of the new year, or more precisely since zero hours of the first day of January’ that there is ‘no record of anyone dying’ (2008:3)....
Anger and Indignation in Ireland, Greece & Tunisia
Politics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are striking back. Portugal, Ireland Greece and Spain. Except that’s not quite right. I will address the failure of Irish radicalism and contrast that with Greece and Tunisia, in order to begin to...
Our Society is Bigger than Yours: Squatting and the Wider Political Rumblings
Despite the attempts of Tory backbenchers to delegitimize squatting, and divide it from the issue of homelessness, the two remain inextricably linked: un-met housing needs, a supply of empty property, and squatting, go hand in hand in hand. But that’s about as far as...
Home & Apart: Spatial Justice in ‘Women of Cyprus’
On the 16th of June 2011, the Westminster International Law & Theory Centre hosted the London premiere of Women of Cyprus, a documentary directed by Vassiliki Katrivanou and Bushra Azzouz, followed by a discussion with the first director. The film tries to capture...
Greek Politics from Below
Few people would want to be in the shoes of Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou these days. Faced with an ostensible mutiny in the ruling social-democrat PASOK party, his worries have been exacerbated by the appearance of an unprecedented, continuous wave of...
Zones of Rage & The Vancouver Riots
The Vancouver riots were a moment of rupture of the sanitized image that our local elites cultivate about Vancouver The Beautiful as a global brand. The corporate media lost control of the huge collective energies it contributed to releasing on the streets by...
Don’t shop? Then you must be undead
We record for posterity the views of Stephen Roach, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and faculty member of Yale University. According to Mr. Roach (paywall): The global economy is being hobbled by a new generation of zombies – the economic walking dead....
In Greece, we see democracy in action
When Stéphane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage! that indignation with injustice should turn to "a peaceful insurrection" perhaps he did not expect that the movement of indignados in Spain and aganaktismenoi (outraged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon...
Charging Protestors
Last Thursday and Friday saw around forty-two people in the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on charges relating to the protests before and after Christmas (10th, 24th and 30th November, 9th December 2010 and 26th March 2011). The court were clearly in a rush to...
Libyan War and Revolution – Unity & Multiplicity
The war that has been escalated in Libya over the last week is not the same as the revolt that gripped the country months ago. Even today in Benghazi there are two orders – war and revolt – at work, but the logic of war is destroying the multiplicity of a revolution....
To Dis or not to Dis? Disobedience and the Case of the Naughty in Relation to Law
This piece was originally written for and presented at the Disobedience Workshop (20–21 May 2011) at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. Since putting together my abstract a few months ago, there have been some alterations and additions and analogies that have...
The New School for Privatised Inquiry
In 1919, John Dewey and others founded The New School for Social Research, intended to offer a democratic and general education for those excluded by existing structures. On the faculty side, this meant a staunch defence of academic freedom in the face of increasing...
Generation OS13: The new culture of resistance
Mass Political Defiance: A Conversation with Gene Sharp
Gene Sharp, the most important theorist on non violent struggle, accepted to answer various questions about his work for the blog cosmopolita and the printed edition of El Espectador (20th of May 2011). In this interview Sharp speaks about his theory and also about...
War Crimes after the War Ended
The history of war crimes is one of the sites of the politics of memory par excellence. The arrangements of world politics today still seat on the consequences of the Second World War -the permanent members of the UN Security Council being one of the more visible. The...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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