CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
From Hyper-Chaos to the Irreversible
My philosophical project of radical democracy stands on two foundational intertwined discoveries that offer a firm ontological grounding of power.[i] 1. The world is radically contingent but is simulated by a world that presents itself as necessary through potestas (power as domination) and Entelecheia (when becoming obeys an external finality). 2 Politics can only be grounded in democracy and democracy can only be grounded in Energeia (unqualified, anarchic, synergistic power). The point of this article is to show how both discoveries are necessarily grounded in what I consider the foremost radical philosophical creation of our times, perhaps of Modernity, Quentin Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos. Nevertheless, paradoxically, Hyper-Chaos concomitantly offers my project its primordial ontological mainstay: sheer contingency as the sole unfounded base of the world and thus of Energeia, and its...
ARTICLES
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...
Egypt’s Orderly Transition? International Aid and the Rush to Structural Adjustment
Although press coverage of events in Egypt may have dropped off the front pages, discussion of the post-Mubarak period continues to dominate the financial news. Over the past few weeks, the economic direction of the interim Egyptian government has been the object of...
Reanimating Human Rights
It seems that the discussion over intervention in Libya and revolutions in Arab countries is over. In the midst of discussion over legality or righteousness of the intervention in Libya, the problem of the victims of the situation that lead to the intervention (and...
The Suppression of the Arab Spring in Syria
Syria video released by Amnesty International “Images of unarmed civilians shot in the head help explain why there have been so many fatalities. Together with footage of soldiers celebrating deaths, they document what appears to be a ‘shoot to kill’ policy,” said...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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