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An international research initiative run by the Development Learning Programme based at the University of Birmingham. See: www.dlprog.org/research/thinking-and-working-politically-community-of-practice.php . 9 By the same token, elites must have super-brains. 10 Since the mid 2000s, there has been a growing number of computer games and software programmes that claim to allow interested parties to experience what it is like to be a refugee or subject to a disaster. The Darfur content on Google Layers, for
Introduction Recent interventions in visual theory claim the camera affords the disenfranchised a form of political participation through the civil space opened up by the medium, a space where creator, subject, and spectator intersect ( Azoulay, 2008 ; de Laat, 2019 ). Beyond merely being a technology for producing pictures, the camera is understood as mediating social relations, and as such is an inherently political medium. Crucial to this formulation is visibility: being seen enables participation in a political community, even if only through a
This book argues for greater openness in the ways we approach human rights and international rights promotion, and in so doing brings some new understanding to old debates. Starting with the realities of abuse rather than the liberal architecture of rights, it casts human rights as a language for probing the political dimensions of suffering. Seen in this context, the predominant Western models of right generate a substantial but also problematic and not always emancipatory array of practices. These models are far from answering the questions about the nature of political community that are raised by the systemic infliction of suffering. Rather than a simple message from ‘us’ to ‘them’, then, rights promotion is a long and difficult conversation about the relationship between political organisations and suffering. Three case studies are explored: the Tiananmen Square massacre, East Timor's violent modern history and the circumstances of indigenous Australians. The purpose of these discussions is not to elaborate on a new theory of rights, but to work towards rights practices that are more responsive to the spectrum of injury that we inflict and endure.
law’s autonomy as an evolutionary process in which the emergence of law is tied to the political community of the citizens. This nexus is not self-evident. In particular, the dynamic nature of evolving legal frameworks in the transnational constellation raises the question of how plausible it still is for a “law in global disorder.”11 171 Postmodern legal theory as critical theory 171 In the era of Westphalian sovereignty, the notion that legal and constitutional processes were bound up with the polity was plausible. A law outside the polity was virtually
, and for that reason accepts that all have equal voice in an inclusive political community. On the other hand, a deliberative ideal seeks the best reasons, and can do so only if some of the reasons citizens offer will have to be revised and even rejected in public discussion. My goal here is to show that this tension can be resolved if toleration becomes reflexive, that is, only if it is an ideal that is itself open to the demands of free and open public deliberation and the qualities of public communication that make that possible. Deliberative toleration is
notions of human rights draw indirectly or directly on some of our most deeply embedded presumptions and reference-points – for those of us in liberal democracies, particularly those cosmologies concerning the nature of the person and of political community. Questions about and concepts of the human as individual, of what is right, the state, justice, freedom, equality, and so on, flicker like a constellation of stars just off the edge of our fields of analysis – fading in and out, holding much, promising or claimed as anchorage, yet elusive and obscure. For many, the
‘universal’ and ‘relative’, and are often called in to support one side or the other. The peculiar intensity of the dichotomy, however, may derive from quite different and more limited roots in particular historical, political and conceptual accretions – shaped in the kind of dense layering that Michel Foucault’s work, most famously, has studied. It is this fundamental imbrication with the dominant constitution of political community that guarantees the argument between the two terms such embedded and knotted obduracy. Here this layered history can only be suggested
guarantees (social rights) by members born into national communities of fate (citizens). Rawls in turn built these assumptions into his theory of justice, which provided a liberal endorsement for social democratic policies. 1 His communitarian critics of the 1980s, 2 while lamenting the decline of family, associational and religious life, did not fundamentally question the nature of the political community itself, or the duties
by the state (or the majority) on the individual’s proper exercise of his or her freedoms and interests. Thus rights protect both the individual from incursions by the state and the individual’s interests in the context of the state. This way of conceptualising human rights has been fundamental to the evolution and the project of the modern free-market liberal democratic state. It has provided a remarkably powerful framework for the characterisation of both the individual and political community and for the identification of abuse. Moreover it has to a significant
aim to historically illustrate both the amplification and spatial expansion of debt as a technology of power during the era of European colonialism and resistance and how this legacy extends to the present day. By starting from the point of view of the powerful—of superior force and violence in the quest for differential accumulation— we want to demonstrate how networks of indebtedness reconfigured political communities for the benefit of creditors and capitalists and how this continued on after formal colonialism started to come to an end in fits and starts after