Public Meaning of the Zasulich Trial 1878: Law, Politics and Gender

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Tatiana Borisova
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Right

The article aims to demonstrate that while the jurors’ acquittal of the famous terrorist Vera Zasulich has often been interpreted in terms of sympathy for ‘a desperate girl’, previously underestimated legal and political claims also played an important role in the trial. The key legal experts at the trial – her defense attorney Aleksandrov and the president of the court Koni – interpreted Zasulich’s attempt on Trepov’s life as an act of societal self-defense: Zasulich was presented as a victim of a society which could no longer tolerate arbitrariness by authorities. The flogging of political prisoner Bogolyubov following Trepov’s illegal order made Zasulich desperate to take revenge in order to alert Russian society of the humiliating arbitrariness and the unfairness of the political and legal structures of late Imperial Russia. Her victimization highlighted her “moral right” to act as a defendant of true law and legality in Russia. This idea of “moral right,” which empowered Zasulich to act in defense of society, was supported by Koni’s conceptualization of law and state power as an embodiment of the people’s will and responsibility. This conceptualization was elaborated in detail in his scholarly legal writings scholarship on the right to self-defense. The article brings together Koni’s theory and his practical role in Zasulich’s acquittal and demonstrates tensions between the Great Reforms and their political and social limitations.

scholarly journals Self-Defense Mechanisms of Democracy during the Crisis: The Baltic States in Comparative Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Joanna Rak
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Defense Mechanisms ◽  
The Political ◽  
Use Of Self ◽  
Baltic States ◽  
People's Party ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The Baltic

Theoretically embedded in studies on militant democracy, the study offers a comparative analysis of the use of self-defense mechanisms of democracy during the Coronavirus Crisis in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The research aims to identify what anti-democratic measures were adopted to influence the sovereignty of the political nations and which served to either strengthen, maintain or undermine that sovereignty. Although neo-militant democracy goals prevailed in the Baltic states’ pre-pandemic political and legal structures, the pandemic-induced measures resulted in variation. In Estonia, the restrictions put the sovereignty of the political nation in jeopardy. Simultaneously, in Lithuania and Latvia, the sovereignty of the political nations remained unthreatened. In Estonia, the electoral successes and increase in support for the extreme-right political party Conservative People’s Party of Estonia turned conducive to the movement from neo- towards quasi-militant democracy. In Lithuania and Latvia, the extreme groupings did not receive comparable support and could not initiate an anti-democratic turn.

Black Femininity and Stand Your Ground: Controlling Images and the Elusive Defense of Self-Defense

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1093-1107
Author(s):  
Terressa A. Benz
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Gender Biases ◽  
Controlling Images ◽  
Gender Neutral ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Right ◽  
Miscarriage Of Justice

Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws are color-blind and gender neutral in language, providing all citizens the right to use deadly force with no obligation to retreat when they experience a “reasonable” threat. However, SYG protections depend on implicit racial and gender biases. Using the case of Siwatu-Salama Ra, the elusive nature of SYG protections is explored as it relates to dominant stereotypes regarding Black femininity. The argument is made that this othering of Black women as aggressive, fearless, and in need of discipline is a miscarriage of justice and provides the ideological groundwork for the exclusion of Black women from self-defense protections.

scholarly journals Revolt from the Right: Russia’s Right-Wing Students Between Conservatism and Radicalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
George Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Right

The article examines the Academist movement between 1900 and 1914 – the student branches of a number of right-wing groups that emerged in the Russian Empire between 1900 and 1905 and endured throughout the late imperial period. It will argue that these groups arose separately from the Russian autocracy, and formed part of an independent, ‘right-wing’ approach to the problems facing Russian society in the late imperial period. It is particularly concerned with the idea, widely present on the right, that the Russian present was in a period of crisis and a more drastic approach to moral and spiritual renewal was needed. It will consider the nature of the Academists’ conceptions of moral education, spiritual renewal of society, and also their violence, anti-Semitism and emergence of an ethno-populist politics. The contention is that the emergence of an independent right-wing movement contributed to the wider instability in the Russian autocracy in the late imperial period.

Violence, Politics, and Gender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabrielle S. Bardall
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Key Questions

This article presents a conceptual orientation to the intersection of gender, politics, and violence. The first part of the article will introduce the subject by reviewing the primary conceptual framework and empirical knowledge on the topic to date and discussing the theoretical heritage of the concept. Establishing a key distinction between gender-motivated and gender differentiated violence, this article will discuss the gender dimensions of political violence and the political dimensions of gender-based violence. The latter half of the article reviews a number of the key questions driving research and dialogue in the field in the 21st century.

Dance in Chains

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Kenney
Keyword(s):  
Political Prisoners ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Amnesty International ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Guantanamo Bay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
Political Imprisonment

The political prisoner is a creation of the modern era, in which states deploy police, courts, and prisons against organized opposition movements. Dance in Chains traces the history of political imprisonment from the 1860s through the present day, using the struggles of opponents from a wide variety of regimes. They range from colonial South Africa through the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and from the right-wing dictatorship in 1930s Poland through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The book asks why regimes incarcerate opponents, and why political prisoners are important to opposition movements. It examines the contest in the cells themselves, as political prisoners organize themselves and engage in acts of protest and resistance, and how prisoner assistance movements like Amnesty International help to make the political prisoner a recognizable figure in global history.

RUSSIA IN THE AGE OF WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1880–1940

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1055-1067
Author(s):  
DANIEL BEER
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Revolution

The alcoholic empire: vodka and politics in late Imperial Russia. By Patricia Herlihy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. vi+244. ISBN 0-19-513431-1. £25.00.Nikolai Sukhanov: chronicler of the Russian Revolution. By Israel Getzler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xix+226. ISBN 0-333-97035-7. £45.00.Making war, forging revolution: Russia's continuum of crisis, 1914–1921. By Peter Holquist. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+359. ISBN 0-674-00907-X. £29.95.The Russian Civil War: primary sources. Edited by A. B. Murphy. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+274. ISBN 0-333-77013-7. £45.00.Homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia: the regulation of sexual and gender dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+392. ISBN 0-226-32233-5. £25.00.These five volumes under review each address different aspects of Russia's experience of modernization and revolution from the 1880s to the 1930s. Our understanding of the scale and complex nature of the changes wrought during these years has been immeasurably enriched by two important factors: first, the recent opening of the former Soviet archives and the detailed case studies that their contents have facilitated; secondly, a mounting reluctance to see 1917 as a radical break with the past and hence an increasing tendency to reinsert the Revolution into a broader series of dynamic and momentous changes that rocked Russia during the period. The rapid expansion of cultural history in the discipline has prompted many scholars to rethink central features of the revolutionary period and to open up new fields of study. Over the last decade, attention has turned to the dynamism and diversity of late tsarist and early Soviet culture embracing topics as wide-ranging as crime, popular religion, the natural and social sciences, and representations of sex.1 Another recent focus has been the experience of conflict across the years of the Revolution and Civil War and its impact on prospects for democracy in Russia.2 The rise to prominence in the historiography of the term ‘modernity’ is an obvious feature of a more comparative analytical framework that has sought to re-insert Russia's revolutionary experience into a pan-European perspective.

Illegal Occupation and Its Consequences

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 201-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaël Ronen
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Peremptory Norm ◽  
International Responsibility ◽  
Territorial Status ◽  
The Right

This Article explores the grounds and consequences of illegal occupation. It proposes that an occupation may be considered illegal if it is involves the violation of a peremptory norm of international law that operates erga omnes, and is related to territorial status. Accordingly, illegal occupations are primarily those achieved through violation of the prohibition on the use of force and of the right to self-determination, or maintained in violation of the right to self-determination. This examination forms the basis for a systematic analysis of specific occupations that have been declared illegal by U.N. organs. The second part of the Article addresses the consequences of an occupation's illegality, in view of the political and legal objectives of determining such illegality. It considers the international responsibility for an illegal occupation; the obligation of non-recognition and the law applicable to an illegal occupation; and the right to self-defense. The Article concludes by commenting on the role of “illegal occupation” as a category under international law.

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