Book of panels and abstracts
Politics of Human Rights Discourses and the ethics of violence
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- How to lose friends and alienate people: being a critical theorist
- 15. REVOLUTION, COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE LAW
- Panel 1: Thresholds: Revolution and the State of Exception
- Hamburg’s danger zones as a state of exception – A critical analysis drawing on Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin
- On Exception, Fiction and the Performativity of Law
- Panel 2: The Other Side: Revolution, Law and Marxism
- Marx against Schmitt: Democratic Dictatorship and Dictatorial Democracy
- Towards a Revolutionary Jurisprudence
- Panel 3: Revolution and Beyond: Law, Reaction and Transition
- Precarity and Cumulative Radicalisation: Nazi Law as Revolution and Reaction
- Law’s Monsters: The Reductive Framing of Enemies in International Discourse
- 16. THE TIME AND TEMPORALITY OF VULNERABILITY
- Panel 1.
Politics of Human Rights Discourses and the ethics of violence Ozan Kamiloglu, Birkbeck, University of London This paper looks at the different stages of the evolution of human rights discourses in Turkey in relation to questions surrounding revolutionary violence, tactics and strategies, and ethics of resistance. It will focus on one particular association, Insan Hakları Derneği (Human Rights Association) that have been founded in the late 80ies by people mostly define themselves as socialist. The paper will focus on different stages of theoretical discussion in the Human Rights Association particularly those after Amnesty International’s International Council Meeting (ICM) in Yokohama, Japan (31 August 1991); after which “AI expands its mandate to include work on abuses by armed opposition groups (as well as by the State)”. Human Rights Organisation finally adopted the position of Yokohoma declaration but this paper claims the question about does all kind of violences particularly the one of the oppressed or the one of the oppressor should be taken as same and condemned by a human rights organisation gives clues about a more general trend over the construction of human rights discourses after 70ies. If we follow the term ethical turn of Jacques Ranciere, loss of the separation between what is and what ought to be, the discussions in the Human Rights Organisation in Turkey can be read in parallel with the discussion in France during 70ies over the use of violence in the anti-colonial struggles (Cristofferson, 2004; Arthur 2010 ) and be seen as reflections of a more general discussion over the loss of the political and human rights discourses. How to lose friends and alienate people: being a critical theorist Adam Gearey, Birkbeck – a.gearey@bbk.ac.uk This paper addresses the doing of critical thinking and the sensibilities of those unhappy souls (in the strict hegelian sense) who engage in such aquixotic pursuit. Drawing on the work of Dale Carnegie and Cardinal Newman, the paper examines the conditions of knowledge production in the neo liberal university, doubt, academic emotions and the tasks of critical legal thinking. 15. REVOLUTION, COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE LAW Stream organisers: Cosmin Cercel (University of Nottingham) and Simon Lavis (Open University) This stream aims to approach the question of whether we are living at a decisive moment for European history through critical reflection on the potential as turning points of the precarious political situations that litter Europe’s recent past. Taking a genealogical perspective informed by theory and historiographical inquiry, we will hold a magnifying glass over the concept of a ‘turning point’ itself, examining when an apparent rupture is truly a turn in a new direction and when it is merely a turn backwards onto itself. We thus aim to explore and problematize further the very core of revolutionary change by examining the status of law in both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory and practice. The legacy of the 20th century bears witness to a host of moments and periods of eruption, change and precariousness, fostered by either failed or detoured revolutions or by overt authoritarian regimes aimed at quelling dissent. For example, the Russian revolution and ensuing civil war, the European revolutionary movements of the early interwar, but also the rise of fascism, and the Nazi seizure of power and subsequent Holocaust, indicate an ambiguous relation to the law that these movements aim to destroy, reconstruct or protect. Moreover, the numerous regime changes of the post-war era, and the emergence of transitional justice mechanisms render the relation between law and historical change even more opaque. Politically, culturally and crucially legally, these movements and regimes are often described or have presented themselves as revolutions – moments of radical change and reinvention – with incredible outcomes and mass upheavals that appeared unimaginable as part of the existing fabric of history. On closer inspection, superficial points of rupture can disguise deeper currents of continuity, and more obvious signs of precarity are merely the smoke and lava indicating a more fundamental, subterranean volcanic instability. Law, as a part of the structure of society, may be seen to join eras together rather than contributing to their disruption By interrogating law’s role in the architecture of historical moments of revolution and counter-revolution, we aim to highlight the question of when a turning point is really a turning point, and shed light on whether at this moment in European history we really are witnesses to a new epoch. Panel 1: Thresholds: Revolution and the State of Exception Chair: Cosmin Cercel Agamben and Marxism on the State and Civil War Daniel McLoughlin, University of New South Wales - Daniel.McLoughlin@unsw.edu.au In the Introduction to Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben presents his analysis of sovereignty and the state of exception as a response to the conceptual limitations of Marxist and anarchist theories of the state. In this paper I argue that, while Agamben is certainly critical of the vulgar Marxist reduction of the logic of the political to that of the economic, his analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and sacred life is nonetheless informed by the Marxist argument that state’s basic function is to prevent class divisions from flaring into civil war, through the use of violence if necessary. I make this argument by examining three aspects of Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty that have been underplayed in the critical literature: the debt that his analysis of the state owes to the work of Alain Badiou; Agamben’s claim that Marx’s account of class conflict is a manifestation of the fundamental political division between bare and political life; and the barely submerged role that the threat of civil war plays in many of his examples of the sovereign exception. However, I argue that Agamben’s analysis of the division between bare and political life often conflates two different forms of political division that are quite distinct in the work of Badiou and Marx: the structural exclusion that the ‘normal’ order rests upon, and the state’s production of bare life in response to the threat of civil war. Hamburg’s danger zones as a state of exception – A critical analysis drawing on Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin Thomas Hirschlein, New School for Social Research, New York City - hirst099@newschool.edu Since 2005 Hamburg’s local police have been authorized by law to declare parts of the city so-called danger zones in which they have virtual free reign of action to preventively combat offenses. Effectively this means the police can stop and question people, take them into custody or even issue residence bans without any juridical legitimation and any evidence of misconduct. As elaborated in this paper, what is sometimes an unfortunate aspect of daily life elsewhere constitutes for the Federal Republic of Germany and the city of Hamburg a state of exception. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin in the analysis of the described law, this paper argues that we are here indeed confronted with a new and reconfigured form of sovereignty in contemporary Western democracies that operates through the state of exception and the police. After a brief introduction into the empirical case, the law and its application by the police, it analyzes Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty in his Political Theology and explains its three elements: state of exception, decision and sovereign. Applying Schmitt’s definition to the empirical case, it points out the critical connection between danger zones understood as a state of exception and the police as the deciding, ergo sovereign subject. The paper then reconstructs the central aspects of Benjamin’s criticism of the police and its relation to the state of exception in his essay “Critique of Violence”. The police, according to him, are characterized by the problematic suspension of the separation between lawmaking (legislative) and law-preserving (executive) power. Drawing on this insight, the paper demonstrates that the police in our empirical case not only act as a means to preserve the law, but rather by declaring danger zones and having virtual free reign of action in them, they in fact make the law. On Exception, Fiction and the Performativity of Law Gian Giacomo Fusco, University of Kent - giangiacomofusco@yahoo.it Three days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of national emergency. After this declaration, the US introduced radical legal instruments, such as the USA PATRIOCT ACT (2001), the establishment of a new military commission process, and the designation of prisoners of war as “enemy combatants”. This radical transformation posed legally since 2001 and ongoing ever since, has placed the US in a perpetual state of war, without an actual war. Confronted with this renewed legal and political context, an impressive legal, political and theoretical debate has been generated, and the question of the state of exception has been put back on the agenda of legal (among else) scholarship. Nevertheless, despite the multiple contributions, and the varied elaboration of models of emergency powers, the nature, scope and meaning of the state of exception remains an open question. In this paper, I will undertake a different conceptual path in order to gain a better comprehension of the state of exception. Starting from some suggestions provided by Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and Yan Thomas, I will analyse what has been defined as “fictional state of exception”. In this paper, it will be advanced a critical account of a still current and globalized emergency, through the concept of “immunisation”, and through the paradigm of the performativity of law. In analysing this issues I will suggest that the process of “normalisation” of the exception – and its codification – into a general doctrine of the state of emergency, made of the exception a “fictional” element of law, ultimately dependent on a subjective (that is to say dependent by the will of a specific agent) decisional act. The normalization and regulation of emergency provision – the fictional state of exception – legal systems seek to ensure, using Agamben’s terminology, an anchorage with the outside; the possibility of the transgression of legality in the form of an action in an anomic context. From this point of view, the exception is structured as a specific form of immune reaction for the protection of the entire system, bringing with it all the risks entailed in the process of immunisation. Panel 2: The Other Side: Revolution, Law and Marxism Chair: Simon Lavis Revolution Under Siege: Law, Violence and Marxist Legal Theory Cosmin Cercel, University of Nottingham - Cosmin.Cercel@nottingham.ac.uk This paper aims to explore some of the major paradoxes that the unfolding of the October Revolution has unearthed: the relation between Revolution and civil war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the place of law within the transitional period starting in its immediate aftermath. My intention is to map some of the penumbral jurisprudential aspects of the dissolution of the classical categories of war, legality and peace, as well as it is to explore the conceptual framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The meta-theoretical thread supporting this reflection is one following the significance of the law for and within the revolutionary struggle. In doing so, I intend to capture the specific jurisprudential significance of the series of material practices and intellectual tropes opening the law to radically new uses. In doing so my focus would follow the history of the Russian Revolution from the initial seizure of power through the years of the civil war to the dawn of the Revolution from above. This analysis is not confined to Russian context at least for two reasons. First of all, the Revolution of 1917 was originally conceived by its standard-bearers as being only the first stage of a world revolution. Not unrelated to this creed shared by the Bolsheviks, the revolution has materially affected not only the Tsarist Empire and its neighbours, but it has acted as a forerunner for a series of revolutions and social convulsions in Europe following its immediate aftermath. As such, the revolutionary turmoil was to be contained not only through repression, but also through ideological reaction. Within these strategies of containment, law was to play an unsurprisingly important part both as an instrument of repression, but also as a vector of legitimation. In this chapter I shall first try to map together with Trotsky and Schmitt the relation between dictatorship, war communism and the dissolution of classic categories of legality. In a second part I shall follow Lenin’s steps in understanding the place of the state as the dictatorship of the proletariat. As these developments hint to a limit state of the law, this chapter shall inquire into the theory of law developed by Evgeny Pashukanis in order to explain both the persistence of the juridical within the Soviet polity and to further speculate over the contingent historical form it took. Marx against Schmitt: Democratic Dictatorship and Dictatorial Democracy Dimitrios Kivotidis, Birkbeck School of Law - dkivot01@mail.bbk.ac.uk Despite its abstract title, this paper begins with the analysis of something very specific: the question of the Greek referendum of July 2015. In less than one calendar year, part of the political life of Europe has revolved around -among other important issues- two questions that were referred to the Greek and the British peoples. In this context it was discussed many a time what it means to fight for democracy against neoliberalism, or what it means to reduce EU’s democratic deficit. Drawing from the experience of the Greek referendum, this paper seeks to examine how the most democratic form of expression of the popular will came to accompany yet another round of austerity-driven measures in Greek society. In particular it aims to do so through a questioning of what democracy is. Is it simply a relation between majority and minority? Is it a relation between rulers and ruled? Can democracy be separated from the relation of exploiters and exploited? Points of navigation in this quest will be E. M. Wood’s analysis of the relation between democracy and capitalism, as well as Schmitt’s treatment of the relation between democracy and dictatorship. Democracy and dictatorship are not antithetical for Schmitt, who locates the main antithesis between liberalism and authoritarianism. To his concept of a dictatorial (authoritarian) democracy the Marxist concept of a democratic dictatorship will be juxtaposed: democratic as a form and dictatorship as per property and productive relations. This will enable a discussion of democracy in its relation to questions of social and economic power and the reposing of the question: democracy for whom? Towards a Revolutionary Jurisprudence Tormod Johansen, University of Gothenburg - tormod.otter.johansen@law.gu.se The relation between legal scholarship and revolutionary Marxist thought has oscillated between being quite productive and non-existent. A brief period of creative legal thinking on communism and law in the wake of the Russian revolution gave way to a dark age that has lasted. While Marxism and historical materialism thought has been a great influence for many important critiques of legal phenomena and contemporary society throughout the 20th century up until today two important questions have not been given sufficient attention: 1) law as potential means towards or threat against revolutionary change and 2) law as it might/can/must exist in post-capitalism/communism. The paper attempts to outline some thoughts on both the issue of law towards revolution and law after revolution through a reading of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Evgeny Pashukanis, Gilles Dauvé, China Miéville and Giorgio Agamben. A long standing tension in the communist/socialist tradition centers around the relation to the state and its role in revolutionary transformation. Although state and law are intimately intertwined in modernity and under capitalism, this must be contrasted with the fact that law as a phenomena is many times older than both capitalism and the modern state. The analysis concludes that fundamental legal questions are disregarded in communist thought, based on simplistic and false dichotomies between concepts such as law/rules and state/organisation as well as the reliance on legal questions being resolved when capitalist social relations are replaced with communist ones. These escapes have made revolutionary thought escape the legal questions and made the theoretical thought on them shallow. Panel 3: Revolution and Beyond: Law, Reaction and Transition Chair: Daniel McLoughlin Apparatuses of Neoliberal Transition: Transitional justice as Omnus et Singulatem Josh Bowsher, University of Nottingham - ajxjb3@nottingham.ac.uk First developed by human rights lawyers and activists, transitional justice emerged from the so-called third wave of democratisations in Latin America. Over the last 30 years, transitional justice has risen to become a ‘global project’ of global neoliberal governance, and is now intertwined with the peacebuilding initiatives of the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank. It has come to denotes a series of practices that are largely understood to be “common sense”, including truth commissions, criminal trials, and lustration, that are designed to deal with the human rights legacies of societies emerging from conflicts or authoritarian rule. Locating the emergence of transitional justice within the global rise of neoliberalism, a shift that Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval have described as the ‘great turn’, this paper shows that transitional justice serves an important function in regards to the particularly neoliberal contours of many transitions. The precise terms of their relationship, I argue, is best understood with recourse to what Wendy Brown describes as neoliberalism’s practice of omnus et singulatum, a double process through which ‘communities’ are gathered together as stakeholders to take part in economic activities whilst simultaneously being individualised as “responsiblised” and self-sufficient entrepreneurial units. Taking this concept, I argue that transitional justice is a counterrevolutionary ‘apparatus’, which also undertakes a process of omnus et singulatem that usefully prefigures and supports processes of neoliberalisation during ‘transition.’ I show that transitional justice mechanisms bring societies together in the construction of shared truths about the past, which are not founded in any form of communitarian identification that conceptualises the past in collectivised or socio-economic terms. Rather, underpinned by the lexicon of human rights law, transitional justice simultaneously individualises the past by producing members of transitional societies as the individual victims of human rights abuses. I argue that transitional justice aims to create the same kind of “empty solidarity” that defines the neoliberal project as a whole. Transitional justice, I conclude, does the necessary work of bringing conflictual, traumatised, societies back together, whilst doing so on terms that do not threaten but instead prefigure the individualising demands made upon subjects at the sites of neoliberal transition. Precarity and Cumulative Radicalisation: Nazi Law as Revolution and Reaction Simon Lavis, Open University - Simon.Lavis@open.ac.uk The Nazi period of rule in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was in many ways a precarious era. The situation of Jews, social aliens, political enemies and others was made increasingly dangerous and uncertain, and Hans Mommsen’s concept of ‘cumulative radicalisation’ maintains that an enduring Nazi state was impossible, despite Hitler’s ambition for a 1,000 year Reich, because of its tendency towards progressive self-destruction. Furthermore, the Nazi assumption of power is generally considered to be counter-revolutionary and its ideology reactionary, calling into question its claim to be a genuine revolutionary ‘turning point’ in European history. The comparatively under-historicised and theorised area of Nazi law has also been influenced by this representational paradigm. The dominant interpretation has Nazi policy as the progressive instrumentalisation and then destruction of the pre-existing Rechtsstaat, replaced by chaos and uncertainty, rather than an authentic Nazi law. This theory has been influenced and supported by two important contemporary analytical concepts: Ernst Fraenkel’s ‘Dual State’ and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth. However, Holocaust historian Dan Stone has argued that attempts to integrate Nazism within the framework of modernity and the continuity of historical development ‘do not consider that the very excess, the rush of energy which permitted normal societal structures to become organs of mass murder, may prevent the Holocaust from being incorporated into a cognitive-rational approach’ (Stone, 2001, p239). This paper will focus on the transformation of law as a ‘normal societal structure’ into an ‘organ of mass murder’ and consider whether Nazi ideology can be viewed as the revolutionary reconstruction of law. And if it can, what are the implications for the ‘rupture thesis’, the idea of Nazi law as a point of rupture from normal legal development? Through an evaluation of Nazi legal history, this paper will seek to interrogate law’s role in the architecture of precarity of the Nazi state. Law’s Monsters: The Reductive Framing of Enemies in International Discourse Lynsey Mitchell, University of Strathclyde - lynsey.mitchell100@strath.ac.uk Devetak writes how a particular type of imaginary emerged post 9/11; the gothic imaginary, in which hyper narratives of fear were placed at the heart of national security discourse. It is widely accepted that searching for the monsters and demons who lurk beneath these anxieties is dangerous. Yet, while international relations theory laments the invocation of anxiety for limiting the political possibility, law conversely is symbiotically reliant on the invocation of fear and anxiety, precisely because it is in those uncertain circumstances that the certainty of law comes to be actuated. This paper explores the allure of discourses of fear in framing the other, particularly international ‘enemies’, highlighting how such discourses appeal to the power of law, yet equally limit its capacity to offer solutions in times of crisis. By acquiescing to stereotypical Manichean framing of enemies as absolute evil and ourselves as virtuous, law limits its potential to offer an alternative understanding of international crises. Rather than open a space for law to operate and provide certainty where other disciplines have failed, the state of exception narratives reduce the capacity for law to know or understand the monsters, both real and imaginary, that lurk beneath our fears. As Kearney tells us, ‘Monsters are our Others par excellence. Without them we know not what we are. With them we are not what we know.’ Thus, this paper explores the potential of law to embrace the gothic aesthetic and accept that dark and complex characters lurk both at home and abroad, in both reality and the imagination. If these monsters reflect our contemporary fears and anxiety, then law must seek to interrogate these in both the actual and the imaginary, rather than seek to eradicate them. 16. THE TIME AND TEMPORALITY OF VULNERABILITY Stream organisers: Carolina Yoko Furusho (University of Kent and University of Hamburg) and Nayeli Urquiza (University of Kent) This stream invites proposals on critical, interdisciplinary and creative engagements with the notion of vulnerability from the perspective of time and temporality, paying attention to vulnerability’s legal, ethical and justice-related implications in an increasingly complex world. The complexity involves not only the local and global relationships and networks which are gradually and irreversibly becoming interdependent, but also the attempts to undercut, shape, and deny interdependency through disciplinary, coercive and/or violent laws and regulations. Our reflections on vulnerability arise in a context of growing dynamic mobility, transnational fluxes and constant technological innovation, while at the same time we witness immobility, exclusion, precarity and widening of socioeconomic disparities aggravated by globalizing forces guided by neoliberalism and propelled by economic, political and social crises. Taking time and temporality as critical categories of analysis, we invite contributions which examine the various iterations of vulnerability in law. For example, to what extent does time and temporality shape the appearance and becoming of vulnerable subjects? Taking a closer look, there are various fractures in how vulnerability is conjugated. Some argue that vulnerable subjects are invisible in present law and hyper-visible in the language of future risks and uncertainty, while others advocate to include it in a utopian future, away from the ossified past of the liberal legal subject. At the same time, others conjugate vulnerability as that which crosses over time, connecting and binding the archaeological time of the non-human with the human and inhuman. It is also possible that the potential of vulnerability discourses is in its power to unsettle the ascribed atemporality of legal norms, to reflect back and expose the horror and violence embedded within law’s aspirations. By all means, vulnerability consists in a conceptual pleochroism: from different standpoints, it allows us to observe distinct scenarios which reflect, refract or diffract what we think about what vulnerability is and its relationship to law. We welcome contributions that explore the potentiality of vulnerability from a plurality of epistemic stances and diverse conceptual starting points, which might encompass though are not limited to ontological, phenomenological or post-structuralist viewpoints and feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, critical race, radical, post-human, human rights, transnational, affective and other critical theories. We also wish to identify and discuss how vulnerability arises in the relationships among individuals, their social connections, States and the international community by and large, and how law and politics play a role in constraining, liberating, meeting the needs or even aggravating vulnerability when addressing ethical imperatives and social justice considerations. Panel 1. Framing the Temporality of Law and Vulnerability Chair: Nayeli Urquiza Directory: law law -> Law in American Society Black History Month Essay Contest law -> A brand New Image? Should Personality Rights be law -> Jurisdiction of the Courts law -> Luther V. Borden: a taney Court Mystery Solved law -> ‘Intellectual Property Rights in Sport’ law -> The law of tort introduction a. What is a Tort? law -> Law of Delict Chapter 1: General Introduction law -> Appendix C: Federal and Minnesota Case Law Summaries Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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