“They Paint Sedition on the Walls”: Towards a University of “Immigrants”

While publicly funded institutions in India have provoked the punitive ire of the ruling Hindu Right and systematically invited acts of state terror, a new education policy drafted by the same ruling party advocates a wholesale return to a “liberal arts” curriculum. The essay attempts to demonstrate how the “liberal” has become the cultural logic of a communal-fascist regime, insofar as the regime is harnessing universities to its project of redefining citizenship as exclusionary, with a special rejection of the citizenship claims of Muslims. In this context, how might we rally our forces behind a hijacked “idea” of the university—and what are the possible futures of such a political maneuver? This essay suggests how a practice of imaginative labor at the university might be leveled not toward citizenship, but toward lessons in immigrancy. It will also address how a mass online transition—prompted by policy in the name of a pandemic—reconfigures rights of entry to this imaginative labor.

State terror in Argentina (1975-1983) as a part of a twentieth century’s history

This article explores the history of state terrorism in Argentina during the years 1975-1983, integrating it into a process that covers the entire 20th century. By way of an essay and based on our previous research, as well as on the specific bibliography, the proposal is to explain the conditions of possibility of a paradigmatic case of mass violence including three temporal variables. In the first place, long-term processes are exposed, studying the first decades of the 20th century; then those of the medium term, working on the decades of 1950, 1960 and 1970 and, finally, those of the short term address the conjuncture 1973-1976. Each section deals with a set of analytical elements that we consider essential to understand and explain the process of repressive accumulation that is connected with the massacre of political opponents in the 1970s. In general, we have targeted a series of key actors: the Armed Forces, the Security Forces, constitutional governments, de facto governments, and civil actors linked to the repression. At the same time, we include a set of elements, also decisive: the frameworks of exception, the military doctrine, the dehumanization of the enemy, the legal and illegal methods, and the repressive practices and experiences. We hope to insert state terrorism into a diverse and multi-determined history, in order to better understand and explain a phenomenon of extreme complexity.

Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K’iche’ Maya woman from highland Quiché, Guatemala, is an international advocate for indigenous rights and the winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Born in 1959, she came of age during the country’s brutal and eventually genocidal armed conflict (1960–1996), and has been involved in organizing and advocacy most of her life. As a young woman, Menchú participated in Catholic activism seeking better conditions for people in Guatemala’s rural highlands, mostly indigenous Mayas. She and other Catholic Action catechists led efforts for rights and dignity in the here and now, challenging a traditional Catholic emphasis on rewards for the poor in heaven. The work led to involvement in the Committee for Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina, or CUC), a group uniting campesinos from the region’s many Maya communities and connecting them to Maya and ladino (non-Maya) workers on coastal plantations. CUC was the first organization to achieve such a presence in Guatemala, and it quickly drew the attention of a military state determined to quell social mobilization. In the context of brutal repression in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CUC—like many opposition movements—developed an alliance with the revolutionary Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, or EGP). Violence spiraled, for the country and for the Menchú Tum family specifically. In January 1980, students and CUC activists, including Menchú’s father, occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to state terror. State forces firebombed the building, and the protestors and others burned to death. The army had murdered Menchú’s brother the year before, and tortured, raped, and killed her mother a few months after the embassy massacre. Rigoberta Menchú fled to Mexico in 1981. Personal trauma did not prevent her from becoming a compelling spokesperson for the opposition, and in that capacity she traveled to Europe to raise awareness of the violence in Guatemala. That is where interviews for the famous I, Rigoberta Menchú were recorded, facilitated by the EGP. That testimonio introduced audiences worldwide to repression in Guatemala while arguing for multiethnic resistance to it. Over the years, critics have levied charges that Menchú’s testimonio—with a narrative style blending many people’s lived experiences—misrepresented her life and served the interests of the revolutionary Left. These critiques in turn generated impassioned defenses of her testimonio as an important expression of political voice. Menchú has continued to work on behalf of Mayas and other marginalized people both internationally and within Guatemala.

14. Global criminology 2

This chapter highlights instances of crime and justice that cross national borders. The chapter is therefore concerned with how global economic, social, and political connections facilitate the organisation of crime and the coordination of justice. The chapter begins by outlining the scope of transnational criminology, looking at the theoretical concepts it employs and its defining characteristics. It then explores some of its major areas of research interest: state terror, drug trafficking, people smuggling, the trade in and dumping of toxic waste, and cybercrime. Finally, the chapter addresses two of the most prominent academic debates within and associated with transnational criminology: the extent to which transnational crime is hierarchical and organised, and the means by which the international community might best police it.

Illicit Crop Frontiers

Today, many zones of cultivation for plants like coca, khat, kratom, and cannabis are thriving, in some cases despite protracted, violent, and lethal attempts at containment through state re-territorialization -- and often, state terror. These plants straddle the borders of legality in many places where they are grown, participating in the cultivation of agriculture frontiers characterized by uncertain and unpredictable openings and closings, and changing distributions of harms among plants and human communities. Scholars and activists question the ideology and efficacy of transnational and state programs to eradicate crops and criminalize farmers, bringing new attention to these commodities and the impacts of their contested legal status. There is also a rising appreciation of indigenous and traditional cultivation and of the importance of decolonizing uses of plants, against backdrops of botanical speculation, piracy, colonization, and trauma. Finally, these illicit agricultural frontiers stand to be dramatically reconfigured by changes potential to drug law regimes. For this essay, we invited three scholars to comment on the frontiers of coca, khat, and kratom where they have long been embedded in research: Asmin Fransiska (hereafter AF) in Indonesia, Lisa Gezon (hereafter LG) in Madagascar, and Kristina Lyon (hereafter KL) in Colombia. We, the authors, edited these comments, and put them into a conversation exploring illicit crop frontiers today, and what is shared and distinct among these frontiers, the frictions and countermovements within them, and their actual or potential connections to broader agrarian movements. As we relay the commentaries, we offer a few contours of what (il)licit crops frontiers bring to our understanding of uneven and unequal histories of capitalism and the unending drive for crop commodities in marginal landscapes. We offer a brief typology of these frontiers to punctuate the conversation, and some directions for ongoing study.

State Terror in the Western Ukrainian Lands as a Method of Establishment of Soviet Power

The course of historical events is studied with regard to the reunification of Western Ukraine with Soviet Ukraine. The formation of the foundations of the new state-political and territorial system with the formation of new regions of Western Ukraine is shown. The characteristics of the most important regulations on the formation of law enforcement agencies of the Soviet government and their repressive actions on the territory of the region are given. The first repressive actions were directed against the Polish servicemen and the members of counter-revolutionary, espionage organizations, the former landowners, the manufacturers, the Polish officers, the officials, and the defectors, who were at the prisons in the western regions of Ukraine. The activities of Ukrainian political parties were banned. The activity of «Prosvita», Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society was stopped and the work of cultural and educational institutions, theaters, philharmonics, museums was reorganized. The policy of forced collectivization, nationalization of the industrial enterprises, the banks was tracked on the basis of the research materials. There were four waves of deportations during the 1939–1940 years, when not only the Polish settlers and Polish civil servants of local self-government but also a group of Ukrainian foresters, members of public, political, nationalist organizations, entrepreneurs, merchants, wealthy peasants were deported. The priests of various denominations, members of the OUN underground did not escape deportation and repression. It is stated that the victorious conclusion of the war with Germany promoted realization of administrative measures to restore the Soviet power in the western Ukrainian lands. The edge of mass repression is directed against the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists. The mass inspections were introduced under the guise of registration and population censuses. The repressive politics aims to fight the Greek Catholic clergy of the region. Strengthening the struggle against politically unreliable intelligentsia, students, Western Ukrainian literary and artistic elite, and members of Lviv organization of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine is substantiated. Repressive bodies had a special attention to the assessment of the political views of the scientific and pedagogical workers of Lviv universities and the pupils of M. Hrushevskyi.

Graduating political crisis and violence in the discourse of history: The role of Spanish suffixes

This article offers an analysis of the Spanish derivative morphology potential for graduating attitudinal meanings regarding the expression of political crisis and of contested meanings of human rights violations in the discourse of recent Chilean History. This study is framed in the typological principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics and in the appraisal system, particularly in the sub-system of graduation. The analysis demonstrates on one hand the productive role of the suffixes -ada and -azo when graduating attitudinal meanings regarding the expression of social and political crisis in the discourse of history. These suffixes can graduate at the rank of the morpheme, word and group and also be involved in an inter-stratal tension that is functioning as an experiential grammatical metaphor that works in combination with a lexical metaphor intensifying time and events in an incongruent manner. On the other hand, the analysis shows that when dealing with traumatic and argued meanings of state terror, extreme degree suffixes -ísimo/a/s play a critical role in the intensification of qualities and in the quantification as amount and extent in a congruent manner. Spanish suffixes can graduate by sub-modification in the lower rank of a word structure instead of at the group structure contributing to the building of constellation of patterns of evoked and inscribed interpersonal meanings in the discourse.