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Consuming Drugs: Soft Drugs, Colonialism and Slavery
No full textWhat is a drug? Is harmfulness the criterion of legality and illegality of substances, or does power construct their legal status regardless of harmfulness?
The chapter examines these questions by focusing on the social construction of drugs. That is, the cultural, contextual and political processes that determine the legal or illegal status of substances alongside how these definitional dynamics are linked to state and corporate imperial power and harms. Drawing on cultural criminology, it explores how meanings of drugs and drug control are constantly being shaped by power, discourse, and resistance, particularly within the context of contemporary media-saturated, consumerist societies. The chapter challenges dominant discourses on drugs by focusing on sugar (a legal psychoactive substance), whose production and consumption are not constructed as deviant or criminal. The case study of sugar reveals how legal substances can cause far-reaching harm. Through a contrapuntal, decolonial lens, it traces sugar’s entanglement with European colonial expansion, slavery, extractivism and global capitalism, revealing the historical and ongoing violence obscured by its legal status. The chapter illuminates the exploitative and harmful foundations of the international legal trade of soft drugs, highlighting silenced histories and contemporary injustices perpetuated by the Global North
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Where’s the Harm in Tourism?
No full textThis chapter critically explores the tourism industry through the lens of harm, discourse, and coloniality (power). It reveals how exotic imageries of paradise and discourses of sustainable development mask, negate, and normalize far-reaching harms, from exploitation, exclusion, and infringement of local communities’ human rights to cultural erasure and environmental degradation. It also shows how promoting tourism by powerful institutions like the World Bank under the guise of development reproduces colonial relations of power between the Global North and Global South, with most profits flowing back to the Global North instead of enriching the local economies in the South. Using the decolonial concept of coloniality, an ubiquitous and enduring matrix of power that shapes global and local hierarchies, it illuminates how tourism reinforces economic, epistemic and racial domination constituted during colonialism. Following decolonial thinking, it positions tourism as an energetic site of modernity and its darker side, coloniality. Doing so unravels the harms of coloniality (death, destruction, ecocide) masked and legitimized under the guise of successive ‘benevolent’ discourses of modernity: civilizing mission, modernization, progress and development. Tourism then becomes an essential site of modernity’s and coloniality’s entanglement, which continues to justify violence, exploitation and exclusion under the disguise of development, security and freedom
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Introducing crime, harm and the state
No full textThis chapter introduces and provides an overview of the edited volume, Crime, Harm and the State. Exploring the concepts invoked by the title (‘crime’, ‘harm’ and ‘the state’), it introduces the key themes around which it is organized: power, discourse and resistance. In doing so, it draws on a variety of different perspectives, including zemiology, decolonial perspectives, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Foucault’s concept of biopower. The chapter introduces the idea that distinctions between crime and harm – and responses to them – reflect and reinforce power, particularly state power, while also providing spaces for resistance. Particular attention is given to the roles of colonialism and ongoing coloniality in shaping inequalities between the so-called Global North and the Global South, while also problematizing such conceptual binaries for reinscribing coloniality. Consequently, the chapter advances epistemic responsibility as an essential feature of contemporary scholarship to recognize and critically reflect upon the positionality of authors and their texts
Constructing ‘indigenous people’ reproducing coloniality’s epistemic violence: a content analysis of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report
No full textThis chapter interrogates the knowledge production process embedded in global anti-trafficking policy initiatives, as reflected in the annual U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report (TIPR). Using the conceptual framework of coloniality, we undertake content analysis of the TIPRs 2001-2020. We show that policy interventions are still central in imposing colonial frameworks of knowledge and interventions globally and locally. Three main findings emerge from the content analysis: firstly, the references to ‘indigenous communities’ and ‘indigenous victims’ have been amplified over time. Specifically, from 2003 onwards there is a gradual but clear trend towards more of these references appearing in each subsequent iteration of the Report. Thus, there is a shift from a state of silence towards both wider visibility and labelling Indigenous victims of trafficking as extremely vulnerable. Secondly, these references portray Indigenous communities and individuals in relation to human trafficking as either ‘at risk’, ‘at high risk’, ‘particularly vulnerable’ or ‘most vulnerable’. While Indigenous victimisation is becoming more visible, in most instances the problem is framed as human traffickers preying on individual victims or on certain communities, rather than recognising how the continuous impact of the colonial matrix of power (i.e. coloniality) permeates Indigenous lives including their victimisation. Thirdly, there is a clear geographical clustering around the regions of Central Africa, Central and South America, and also Southeast Asia, which reflects global imperial hierarchies of power. Based on our findings we argue that the reports are infused with colonial systems of thought, which inflict and reproduce epistemic violence and colonial relations of power locally and internationally
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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Crime, Harm and Sexuality
No full textThis chapter considers the ways in which sexuality has long been a concern of the state, particularly where LGBTQ+ individuals are concerned. Looking at the regulation of sexuality through the lens of discourse, it explores the role that the state and other powerful institutions play in criminalizing and harming individuals, highlighting the less obvious harms that have been, and continue to be, suffered by people whose sexualities do not conform to societal norms. The chapter also examines the role of resistance to norms, exploring how those who are subject to regulation can themselves shape and reshape discourse ‘from below’, highlighting some of the ways in which certain sexual acts and identities emerged from behind closed doors into more accepting public spaces
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Understanding States: Making Law, Making Order?
Get PDFThis chapter entails an extended and multifaceted focus on the nature and role of the state. It emphasizes how states take different forms and do not always act or operate in the same way – thus ‘the state’ is a contested entity. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, it is also a part of everyday life and discourse which is assumed and upon which there is often little reflection. This chapter investigates competing definitions of, and different theoretical perspectives on the state – notably pluralist, elite and Marxist theories of the state. It consistently explores how states seek to make social order, not least through law, using concrete examples of the variety of ways in which this task is (or is not) accomplished. It investigates state rule, in relation to borders, violence and hegemony – the latter always involving consent and resistance
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