scholarly journals The Expansion of Prevent: On The Politics of Legibility, Opacity And Decolonial Critique

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (100) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Justin Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Political Islam ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
The Uk

It is argued here that the liberal state has authoritarian aspects that are irreducible to the authoritarian aspects of neoliberalism. The argument draws on James Scott's work on modern state ruling through bureaucratic 'legibility', and the decolonial work of S. Sayyid on how a form of political Islam he calls 'Islamism' challenges the west's construction of modernity as an intrinsically western project. The state's need for legibility undermines democracy by seeking to shape political debate and political activity to fit its bureaucratic channels for engagement, and Islamophobia caused by the UK state's reaction to Islamism, shapes how the UK state seeks control via legibility. Prevent expanded in 2011 from focusing on 'violent extremism' to 'extremism', with extremism defined in terms of normative commitments the state takes to be in tension with its conception of 'British values'. The state defined the Muslim population as opaque because they were taken to not be socially integrated. This was used to justify a repressive ubiquitous surveillance based on what is termed here a 'legibility of symptoms'. This was presented, after 2015, as paternalistic 'safeguarding', when workers in public sector bureaucracies became legally obligated to carry out Prevent surveillance. Left-wing and environmental organisations engaged in extra-parliamentary protest are now as defined as potentially extremist. With the expansion of Prevent in 2011, the state created a 'pre-crime' space in civil society that is taken to justify repressive surveillance, presented as paternalistic safeguarding to save individuals 'at risk' of 'radicalisation' from going on to commit criminal acts.

scholarly journals Securitisation as Depoliticisation: Depoliticisation as Pacification

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Jackson
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Uk

This article considers the development of the liberal state’s approach to national security in the era of the ‘war on terror’. The analysis focuses on state security strategies, considering how the state positions the politics of security historically through its representation of the current security ‘environment’. Drawing upon a critical analysis of the various layers of official strategy produced by the UK, US and Australia in this era, the article considers in the first instance the process of depoliticisation that defines the official understanding of security threats. The effects of depoliticising the issues and individuals deemed to constitute a threat to national security are subsequently considered through the theory of pacification plotting the links between securitization, depoliticisation and pacification. In doing so the analysis demonstrates how the framing of national security is pivotal to the official representation of ‘extremism’ and to the subsequent policing of protest and political activity. The article therefore suggests that the liberal state’s politics of security are defined by a pacification process that seeks to produce citizen-subjects who are unable and unwilling to resist the current social order.

Historical Significance of Das Leben Jesu

2020 ◽  
pp. 6-13
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
The State ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Famous Book

The aim of this chapter is to determine the historical significance of Strauß’s most famous book, Das Leben Jesu, which was first published in 1835. The book had a major religious and political significance. Its religious significance lay in undermining faith in the historical testimony behind the New Testament, which had been the chief reason for belief in the Bible in orthodox Protestantism. Its political significance came from undermining the belief in Christian revelation, which had been the main rationale for the authority of the state. Strauß also formulated the famous distinction between right- and left-wing Hegelianism, which became the main focus of political debate in the 1830s and 1840s.

Terrorism in Spain

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Diego Muro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Terrorist Group ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Collective Security ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
Violence Against Civilians

Spain has experienced four waves of terrorism during the twentieth century: anarchist, nationalist, left-wing, and religious. This chapter examines the variety and intensity of terrorist incidents of the last two waves, as well as the counter-terrorist efforts since 1975. The argument is structured as follows: First, the chapter accounts for the longevity of the main campaigns of indiscriminate violence against civilians. Second, it evaluates the interaction between the security and intelligence services and the various clandestine groups, and argues that the process of democratization increased the effectiveness of counterterrorism, particularly against ETA. The section further argues that collective security is a relational act that brings two self-interested actors—the state and the terrorist group—into conflict with each other, and that it is not possible to study campaigns of political violence in isolation. Third, the chapter critically assesses the security threat posed by Salafi jihadist cells, which were responsible for the attacks on Madrid (2004) and Barcelona (2017), and examines the ongoing agenda of countering and preventing violent extremism in Spain.

scholarly journals From corporatism to the “foundation of labour”: notes on political cultures across Fascist and Republican Italy

Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-255
Author(s):  
Laura Cerasi
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Institutional Architecture ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract: Until the mid-1930s, corporatism represented the main vehicle of self-representation that fascism gave to its own resolution of the crisis of the modern state; the investment in corporatism involved not only the attempt to build a new institutional architecture that regulated the relations between the State, the individual and society, but also the legal, economic and political debate. However, while the importance of corporatism decreased in the last years of the regime, the labour issue to which it was genetically linked found new impetus. After Liberation Day, the labour issue was not abandoned along with corporatism, but it was laid down in Article 1 of the Constitution. The aim of this paper is to acknowledge the political cultures that in interwar years faced the above-mentioned processes, with particular reference to the fascist “left”, the reformist socialists and, above all, Catholics of different orientations, in order to examine some features of the relationship between the labour issue and statehood across the 20th century.

States and state systems: democratic, Westphalian or both?

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
CORNELIA NAVARI
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Transition ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
Transition Theory ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English School ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State

AbstractTwo rival accounts have come to dominate discussion of the origins and character of the contemporary international system. One, closely associated with the English School and the traditional account, places its origins with the appearance, and acceptance, of the centralised authority of the modern state. We might call this ‘the Westphalia version’. In this account, the modern state system is often represented in terms of what it is not. It is not a feudal regnum with a multiplicity of functionally distinct authorities. It is not a theocratic imperium where one power aimed at ‘the control and protection of Christendom’. It is a society of sovereigns, of de jure equals, each of whom accorded the others’ right to exist, and whose common ideological quantum is low. The rival is located within democratic transition theory. It postulates the modern state system as an extension of the liberal democratic state. The liberal state is not sovereign in the Westphalian sense: liberal authority is diffuse. Moreover, the liberal state produces its own, distinctive, international impulses that distance it in significant ways from the Westphalian pattern. Both see the state system as ‘produced’ by the state, as an immanent effect of stateness, but the account of the state’s trajectory differs radically.

scholarly journals BEYOND THE VIRUS: There cannot be a pandemic without the State

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Toniol
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Political Debate

Abstract Abstract: This paper starts with the acknowledgment of the importance of the State as an order-ing principle for the experience of the pandemic. Such a statement implies two complementary movements - although these will not be exhausted in the following pages. Firstly, it means that the notion of pandemic itself has a genealogy. It means that its emergence is the result of a histor-ical process and of specific political configurations, which are strongly associated with the con-solidation of the modern State. Second, if the treatment of the notion of a pandemic needs to be considered on the basis of its relationship with the state, an analysis of “pandemic” processes is undoubtedly a political debate. I finish by suggesting benefits of a possible approximation be-tween the notion of environmental justice and the critical principles for the analysis of the pan-demic that we are facing.

Is economic inequality a universal evil?

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rostislav I. Kapeliushnikov
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
The State ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
A Current

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of “statistical cacophony”. Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of “fair play”. The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of “struggle against inequality” has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.

From the “Judicialization of Politics” to the “Politicization of Justice” in the UK and Switzerland

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Lucia Della Torre
Keyword(s):  
General Rule ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Field ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
Judicialization Of Politics ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Migration Law

Not very long ago, scholars saw it fit to name a new and quite widespread phenomenon they had observed developing over the years as the “judicialization” of politics, meaning by it the expanding control of the judiciary at the expenses of the other powers of the State. Things seem yet to have begun to change, especially in Migration Law. Generally quite a marginal branch of the State's corpus iuris, this latter has already lent itself to different forms of experimentations which then, spilling over into other legislative disciplines, end up by becoming the new general rule. The new interaction between the judiciary and the executive in this specific field as it is unfolding in such countries as the UK and Switzerland may prove to be yet another example of these dynamics.

THE IMAGE OF AN ACTIVE WOMAN IN THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE OF EASTERN THINKERS

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-105
Author(s):  
Feruza Davronova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Active Woman ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The Family

The purpose of this article is to study the image of socio-political activity of women, their role and importance in the life of the state and society.In this, we referred to the unique books of orientalists and studied their opinions and views on this topic. The article considers the socio-political activity of women, their role in the state and society, the role of the mother in the family and raising a child, oriental culture, national and spiritual values, traditions and social significance of women

Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Criminal Law Bill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Penal State ◽  
State 1

Part III of Dual Penal State uses dual penal state analysis to generate a comparative-historical account of American penality. With comparative glimpses at Germany and, to a lesser extent, England, it distinguishes between two responses to the shared challenge of legitimating state penal power in a modern liberal democratic state: (1) the failure to appreciate the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power in particular (United States) and of modern state power in general (England); and (2) the failure to address the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power as an ongoing existential threat to the legitimacy of the state (Germany). Chapter 6 undertakes a critical analysis of Jefferson’s 1779 draft of a criminal law bill for the State of Virginia, concluding that it fell well short of a criminal code that reflected the ideals of the American legal-political project as spelled out, for instance, in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of 1776.

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