1,721,009 research outputs found
Democracy’s Empire: Sovereignty, Law and Violence
No full textThe essays in this volume take on the challenge of explaining the current formation of the relation between sovereignty, law and violence in what is termed 'Democracy's Empire'. "Democracy's Empire" captures the co-appearance of the proliferation of democracy as the political formation that institutes and sustains freedom, equality and emancipation - and along with it, the proliferation of death, destruction and the abject condition of life. A period of history where there was supposed to be some consensus about the legitimate source of authority and the legal structures that would administer such norms has turned out to be a time when war as a sovereign exception has been instituted in an ever increasing number of places.This volume contains a situated discussion of the institution of democracy and related juridico-political problems. From the death of politics in South Africa to the institution of a certain normalisation of death in the 'constitutional' process taking place in Iraq, this thought-provoking volume poses the problem of violence and death at the heart of the institution of democracy
As if: constitutional narratives and 'forms of life'
No full textBook synopsis: The book seeks to open and explore the liminal space of critique at the intersection of law, aesthetics and politics. The essays in this volume elaborate and expand the meaning and significance of critique through an engagement with aesthetic forms. Although this endeavour has wider significance, the focus is primarily on South Africa. The various contributions arose out of a process of reading, writing and discussion among visiting scholars at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 2010. The project responds to the limits of the transplantation of critical legal studies into different jurisdictions, especially South Africa. The essays develop an approach to critical legal thinking that is conscious of critique as a problem of genre and seek to open up this problem of genre in the context of critical legal studies
The Indian Ocean as archive of the present
No full textBook synopsis: The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law’s limited repertoire for assembling the archive after ‘the disaster’. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or ‘storehouse’ of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law’s authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law’s archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an ‘archive’, this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law’s counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence
Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (Essays in Honour of Peter Fitzpatrick)
No full textSpectres of Communism in Post-apartheid South Africa
No full textThis collection of incisive papers looks back on a decade of political, social and legal transformation in South Africa. Over this decade many changes and shifts occurred. Of these the shifts from authoritarianism to democracy; from white minority rule to representative government; from parliamentary sovereignty to constitutional supremacy; and from common law jurisprudence to 'transformative constitutionalism' are the most prominent. The thought and theory of Hannah Arendt serves as an inspiration for many of the arguments raised.It discusses the tension between public and private and between equality and dignity; the notions of sovereignty; aesthetics; action and revolt. A concern shared by all contributors is the importance of the political, its demise under the onslaught of liberalism, pragmatism, globalisation and capitalism and critical ways of rethinking it
Introduction - Law, memory, violence: uncovering the counter-archive
No full textBook synopsis: The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law’s limited repertoire for assembling the archive after ‘the disaster’. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or ‘storehouse’ of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law’s authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law’s archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an ‘archive’, this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law’s counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence
Introduction
No full textBook synopsis: The book seeks to open and explore the liminal space of critique at the intersection of law, aesthetics and politics. The essays in this volume elaborate and expand the meaning and significance of critique through an engagement with aesthetic forms. Although this endeavour has wider significance, the focus is primarily on South Africa. The various contributions arose out of a process of reading, writing and discussion among visiting scholars at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 2010. The project responds to the limits of the transplantation of critical legal studies into different jurisdictions, especially South Africa. The essays develop an approach to critical legal thinking that is conscious of critique as a problem of genre and seek to open up this problem of genre in the context of critical legal studies
A new nomos offshore and bodies as their own signs
Full text linkThis paper begins with the paradoxes that accrue around the appearance of Robinson Crusoe and his “Man Friday” within recent judgments relating to the Chagos Archipelago. These references are understood as revealing the complex of anxieties and limits that are the final legacy of these rulings. In particular, we trace the ways in which – through Daniel Defoe's iconic characters – these judgments enact a troubling retreat from review of executive action, and a fuller withdrawal of sensibility from situations of “otherness” that both bear and cannot bear analogy to that of Friday. The paper then more briefly considers a similar complex of anxieties and limits, retreats and withdrawals enacted by recent judgments relating to Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. This allows us to suggest that between these two series of highest court rulings, the Anglophone common law is currently constructing the Indian Ocean as an offshore: a site excised from judicial review, and a site in which certain figures – peoples, individuals – are not considerable in both senses of the word. But in fathoming this, we turn to Derrida's insights on sovereignty to argue that, far from being new, this construction of a common law of the Indian Ocean tells us about the affront of an archaic sovereignty that always already determines and is determined by law. Across the arguments of this paper, these perceptions of judgment, geography and sovereignty are enabled by literature, and specifically by reading the return of Crusoe and Friday in a recent novel form (by J. M. Coetzee) that also broaches the limits of judgment and recognition, but through a kind of vigilant silence – an abstinence – that craves an alternative commonality: and in this very longing, resists the silencing complicities of the UK and Australian judgments with the disembodiment of a littoral nomos, offshor
Introduction: developing a counter-archival sense
No full textBook synopsis: The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law’s limited repertoire for assembling the archive after ‘the disaster’. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or ‘storehouse’ of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law’s authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence.
This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law’s archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an ‘archive’, this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law’s counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence
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