Conclusion: Torture in a State of Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-188
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
High Profile ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Primary Form

Colonial Terror concludes by exploring how the attempts of the British colonial regime in India, in the decades following the Madras torture commission, to deny the ongoing prevalence of torture in the Indian police began to unravel in the early twentieth century thanks to the emergence of a voluble Indian press and a mass nationalist movement. But it was not until 1909, following the failures of a series of high-profile ‘conspiracy’ trials due to the ongoing reliance of the police on extorted confessions as their primary form of evidence, combined with pressure exerted by yet another group of reformist MPs, that torture once again erupted into scandal. The Indian and British governments were thus forced to act, but although the actions they took exposed the sheer scale of police torture in colonial India, they did little, once again, to attempt to eradicate it, since eradication was impossible thanks to the importance of torture to the maintenance of colonial rule. They endeavoured, instead, to make it disappear by renaming it, as well as to transform India into a fully-fledged state of exception in which police torture could continue to flourish, freed from the constraints placed on it by the rule of law.

The Village Courts in Bangladesh

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Berger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Local Institution ◽  
International Donor ◽  
Donor Agencies ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The Village

This chapter embeds contemporary translations of ‘the rule of law’ in their historical trajectory. It reveals how the introduction of village courts by the colonial administration at the dawn of the twentieth century and current efforts by international donor agencies to activate these village courts follow strikingly similar logics. The village courts are therefore neither an exclusively global imposition nor an ostensibly local institution; instead, they have emerged in complex processes of translation in which the global and the local have become inseparably intertwined. Having reconstructed this historical trajectory, the chapter also provides a brief overview of Bangladesh’s recent political history and maps the country’s contemporary legal landscape.

The Moral Dimension of Constitutional Faith

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanford Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the relationship between the Constitution—and the sovereign people ostensibly represented in its terms—and morality. Constitution faith requires the linkage of law and morality even as most twentieth-century jurisprudence has emphasized their analytic separation. All calls for renewed faith in the rule of law and renewal of the constitutional covenant imply that submission to the Constitution will create not only order but also the conditions of a social order worthy of respect. In order to see the logic and desirability of submission to the rule of the Constitution, the assumed linkage between it and morality must be closely examined.

Administrative Law

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Jowell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
State Power ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Stages Of Development ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Control

This chapter examines the stages of development of administrative law in Great Britain during the twentieth century, describing the different attitudes towards the exercise of state power and its legal control over the century. It explains that the century began with a concern for procedural justice and a particular concept of the rule of law, and ended with judicial constraints upon both the procedures and the substance of official decisions, justified by constitutional rights.

scholarly journals Reproductive Politics in Twentieth-Century France and Britain

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn ◽  
Caroline Rusterholz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
News Media ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Medical News ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Flow Of Information

This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAZMUL S. SULTAN
Keyword(s):  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Indian People ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Indefinite Future

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of “underdeveloped” colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people “unfit” for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty.

scholarly journals “Imperium in Imperio”: The Corporation, Mining, and Governance in British Southeast Asia, 1900–1930

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
DAVID BAILLARGEON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
State Model ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Corporate Ventures

This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

THE RAJ AND THE PARADOXES OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: BRITISH ATTITUDES AND EXPEDIENCIES

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIJAYA RAMADAS MANDALA
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Game Species ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Infrastructural Development ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Wild Predators

AbstractThis article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.

Decolonizing Justice in Tunisia

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Corinna Mullin ◽  
Nada Trigui ◽  
Azadeh Shahshahani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Popular Justice ◽  
Justice Process

Building on decades of struggle, the January 2011 Tunisian uprising triggered a wave of popular revolt that spread across North Africa and West Asia. After the uprising, Tunisia became the focus of a celebrated project of transitional justice, which is now the globally mandated method of reconciling victims and perpetrators following a nonrevolutionary regime change. However, Tunisia's process of transitional justice must be critically examined. The very paradigm employed—that is, the rule of law that transitional justice consistently seeks to impose—is skewed in favor of imperial interests, which can be traced to the paradigm's origins in the mid–twentieth century victory of European powers over Nazi Germany and its allies. There are other models of justice, however, that are not rooted in this Eurocentric victor's history, but instead derive from revolutionary traditions. A key one is the People's Tribunal, used since the late 1960s. The convening of a People's Tribunal in Tunisia could help amplify and extend the popular-justice claims that surfaced during the country's recent transitional-justice process. Establishing such a tribunal might help build a symbolic reservoir and organizational force that could ultimately contribute to substantial revolutionary change in the country.

The Bakungu Chiefs of Buganda under British Colonial Rule, 1900–1930

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New Situation ◽  
Primary Materials

In 1959 C. C. Wrigley published ‘The Christian revolution in Buganda’. an important essay summarizing a decade of intensive research into Buganda politics during the nineteenth century. There he demonstrated how ‘Ganda society had undergone, immediately before the advent of British imperial power, a genuine revolution, which had brought about drastic changes in ideology and in the structure as well as the personnel of government and that as a result of these [and other] changes it was uniquely fitted to cope with the new situation which confronted it in the last years of the nineteenth century’. This essay seeks to reconstruct an intriguing attempt made by the Bakungu client-chiefs who triumphed in that ‘Christian revolution’ to perpetuate their power in the Buganda kingdom by making further institutional changes during the second decade of the twentieth century. But first it is necessary to discuss the general factors shaping political relationships between these client-chiefs and their European rulers during the first and third decades of this century. In this it is possible to take account not only of several secondary sources published since the appearance of Wrigley's article nearly ten years ago, but also of certain primary materials which have recently come to light.

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