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This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
general and hence necessarily abstract perspective –, all the problems of the coercive, violent nature of the law reappear in their original, unaltered form. (ii) It is for this reason that, according to Andreas Fischer-Lescano, it is not enough to focus only on the humanity of the legal practice when seeking to reduce law’s potentiality for violence. Instead, the latter requires a truly “new form” of law, which Fischer-Lescano, using a term coined by Koskenniemi, outlines as follows: “The goal is to establish a non-violent functioning of law. Law would then no
which there is “no clear distinction between the act for which the killer is being punished and 10 10 Lead essay the punishment itself.”16 Retribution is neither the one nor the other because it is essentially both at once. The justice of retribution –that it restores balance against a boundless deed –and its violence-begetting violence –in which it repeats the boundlessness of the crime it repays –are two sides of the same coin. Retribution harbors an equivocation that lets its justice disintegrate into an undecidable strife between enemy parties: was it the
insurgency make analysing terrorism and CT in India immensely challenging, and the confusion between these two categories is plainly reflected in India's CT and counterinsurgency (COIN) responses, which are at times indistinguishable, much to the detriment of both. Thus, rather incomprehensibly, India's CT doctrine tends to be framed in the population-centric ‘hearts and minds’ rhetoric that traditionally underpins COIN rather than CT strategies. At the same time, despite this hearts and minds rhetoric, India's response to both pure terrorism and insurgencies that use
Conspiracy theory and American foreign policy examines the relationship between secrecy, power and interpretation around international political controversy, where foreign policy orthodoxy comes up hard against alternative interpretations. It does so in the context of American foreign policy during the War on Terror, a conflict that was quintessentially covert and conspiratorial. This book adds a new dimension to the debate by examining what I coin the ‘Arab-Muslim paranoia narrative’: the view that Arab-Muslim resentment towards America was motivated to some degree by a paranoid perception of American power in the Middle East. Immediately after 9/11, prominent commentators pointed to an Arab-Muslim culture of blame and a related tendency towards conspiracy theories about America’s regional influence as an important cultural driver of anti-Americanism. This narrative subsequently made its way into numerous US Government policy documents and initiatives advancing a War of Ideas strategy aimed at winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of Arab-Muslims. The book provides a novel reading of the processes through which legitimacy and illegitimacy is produced in foreign policy discourses. It will also appeal to a wider cross-disciplinary audience interested in the burgeoning issues of conspiracy, paranoia, and popular knowledge, including their relationship to and consequences for contemporary politics.
the upkeep of civilisation, both the concept of civilisation and the notion of international politics it constructs should be carefully analysed. Civilisation and civil society Adam Ferguson coined the term ‘civil society’ in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767). In today’s idiom, Ferguson described how modern society, with its elaborate
/October 2006 ), 681. 3 D. Benest, A liberal democratic state and COIN: The case of Britain, or why atrocities can still happen’, Civil Wars , 14:1 ( 2012 ), 45. 4 Kerr, The Military on Trial , p. 3. 5
between and within states, with at least fifty million lives lost in Europe alone. In the words of Ian Kershaw, violence had ‘ epochal character , it determined the age’. 19 It was ‘total war’ that gave the age its violent character. Coined in France during World War I, the term later found its fullest and deepest realisation during World War II, most especially in the war of barbarisation waged on the
. The trouble in party debate in the mid 1950s was therefore how the SAP would rethink its role in an industrial society, where economic development seemed to bring about more security for all. 5 In the election campaigns of the late 1950s, the slogan of ‘the strong society’ was coined as a way of facing up to this dilemma. 6 The slogan came about in coffee table discussions
into parliamentary power. In two articles, he coined the phrase ‘productive’ or ‘prophylactic’ social policy, for social policies with long-term structural effects on national efficiency. Myrdal did not view his intervention as primarily an ideological one, but rather as a scientific and economic one that set out a ‘rational’ role for social policy in a modern, planned, economy. Prophylactic social