In events that have since become known as the Arab Uprisings or Arab Revolutions,
people across the Middle East took to the streets to express their anger and
frustration at political climates, demanding political and economic reform. In a
number of cases, protest movements were repressed, often violently, with
devastating repercussions for human security and peace across the
region.
While a number of scholars have sought to understand how the
protests occurred, this book looks at sovereignty and the relationship between
rulers and ruled to identify and understand both the roots of this anger but
also the mechanisms through which regimes were able to withstand seemingly
existential pressures and maintain power.
chapters, plays a prominent role in times of contestation. 17 The politics of sovereignty and space 17 Space and nomos While politics is inherently about people, space is the theatre within which interactions take place. It is simultaneously a physical environment, a semiotic abstraction, and relational.59 These interactions exist within one another and coexist within power relations and social practices. Each society produces a space of its own nature along with a set of rules that regulate behaviour within space. The concept of space is deeply contested among
sand creation of bare life was a mechanism of sovereign power, designed to ensure order and compliance. Yet in a number of cases, the creation of bare life was an insufficient expression of sovereign power. Instead, we see regimes choosing to exert sovereign power through necropolitics, with war machines emerging as a consequence of widespread fragmentation. In such conditions, localised manifestations of the global nomos, defined by a spatialised exception and underpinned by conditions of modernity have become increasingly contested by the contingency of daily life. Amid
This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
underpins Agamben’s spatialisation of the exception shapes the local manifestations of nomos and while context and contingency create unique peculiarities, there are underlying structural similarities that shape the exception. Although offering a brief genealogy of the establishment of states, this chapter should not be viewed as a complete history of the contemporary Middle East. Instead I seek to offer an account of the interaction between internal and external forces –material and ideational –that facilitated the establishment of states and nomoi, through the
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
-specific contingent factors found in demographics, history, ideology and intended outcome, creating unique nomoi that operate within a global nomos. While a cursory glance at the region sees elections in a number of states, amid various different contexts and to varying degrees of success, it is difficult to conclude that these projects meet the criteria to be considered democratic. Although elections for political positions have been an integral part of political life –understood in different ways with different restrictions –in Lebanon, Bahrain, Turkey, Israel, Iran and
believers, communities and states even before they are placed in the context of political life and parabolic regional currents. Yet much like nomos, Islamic unity proved to be an illusion. Instead, competing interpretations of faith and the ordering of life in accordance with Islamic traditions quickly emerged, in some cases, operating in tension with state projects. One of the most devastating points of tension concerns sectarian difference. Few terms possess such vitriolic connotations as sectarianism which, in recent years, has become imbued with all manner of issues
the Face of the Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Karl Heinz Reif, ‘Ein Ende des “Permissive Consensus”? Zum Wandel europapolitischer Einstellungen in der öffentlichen Meinung in den EG-Mitgliedstaaten’, in: Rudolf Hrbek (ed.), Der Vertrag von Maastricht in der wissenschaftlichen Kontroverse (BadenBaden: Nomos, 1993), pp. 23–33. See for detailed empirical data the Eurobarometer, 53 (Spring 2000). See for recent discussions Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Die Europäisierung nationaler Demokratien: Verschleiß eines europäischen Kulturerbes?’, in: Michael
tragedy of remarriage: letter to M. Cavell about cinema (a remake)” also bears the trace of another influence: Adorno. According to Dienstag, The Philadelphia Story , a commercially successful Hollywood film, is also a deeply ideological one. Dexter and Tracy’s remarriage reaffirms the possibility of reconciling freedom and social order, eros and nomos . Its popularity was