Queer(y)ing Hannah Arendt,or what’s Hannah Arendt got to do with intersectionality?

Abstract

This article takes an unlikely approach to thinking about intersectionality theory. Exploring key concepts from the writings of Hannah Arendt, such as plurality, conscious pariah, and statelessness, alongside her embodied interrogation of anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question, it suggests a way to transgress the ordinary boundaries of the concepts of queer, international, and feminist and, conversely, to unbound the ordinary ways Arendt’s theories have been interpreted as less relevant, if not antithetical to, feminist, intersectional, and queer theories and politics.     

Reading Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian genocide of 1915

ABSTRACT

The debate on where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and universally known as the ‘Father of the Turks’, stood in regard to the colossal violence committed against Armenians during the First World War has become a fiercely contested part of the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process, especially within the past few years. Ulgen aims to clear away the clouds of dust surrounding Kemal by delving into his texts and examining his role in the reification of Turkish denial of the destruction of Ottoman Armenians. Based on a textual analysis of his entire corpus, including Nutuk—the Great Speech of 1927 and the master-narrative of modern Turkish history and national identity—her article examines and documents how his charismatic leadership helped to consolidate both the myth of ‘murderous Armenians’ and that of the Turks as an ‘oppressed nation’ (mazlum millet), monumentalizing both in official Turkish historiography. Ulgen argues that Kemal's portrayal of Armenians and the Armenian Question was generally consistent across the years and in various political documents, as well as being consistent with contemporary Turkish representations of the events of 1915. What really tips the balance towards Turkish innocence in Kemal's representation of the conflict is not his framing of the issue per se but the stark difference in the rhetoric he deploys in depicting Armenian and Turkish atrocities and, hence, Armenians and Turks. The undeniable authority of this discursive regime is central to the resilience of Turkish denial today.     

Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?

Abstract

This essay argues that the new global regime of R2P bifurcates the international system between sovereign states whose citizens have political rights, and de facto trusteeship territories whose populations are seen as wards in need of external protection. Under the direction of the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court has become an integral part of the international R2P regime by allowing for the legal normalization of certain types of violence (such as Western counterinsurgency efforts), while arbitrarily criminalizing the violence of other states as ‘genocide’. In place of this unequal global regime, the essay concludes by arguing for an internally-driven process of political reform and legal reconciliation, as pioneered in South Africa.     

Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt’s and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective

We locate Arendt’s and Shklar’s writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new ‘maieutic’ discourse of ‘re-enlightenment’ in the ‘age of the crisis of man’. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar’s After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.     

Framing and reframing R2P—a responsibility to protect humanity from evil

ABSTRACT

This article takes issue with de-politicised and moralistic conceptions of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and, inspired by the political theory of Hannah Arendt, develops a ‘re-politicised’ and ‘de-moralised’ account of R2P. It argues that by relying on a link between a moral responsibility to ‘save strangers’ and practical political action, R2P turns a blind eye to the political interest of powerful actors. And by trying to transform R2P into a ‘blueprint’, ‘roadmap’ or ‘emergency plan’ for political action, many commentators try to render obsolete political deliberation and practical judgement on a case-by-case basis. The present article argues that it is necessary to develop a more realistic view of R2P’s role and potential in world politics. R2P, it is argued, has an important discursive function and considerable potential to influence and guide international decision-making processes. Drawing on Arendt’s conception of ‘evil’ as a crime against humanity itself, this article reframes R2P as a ‘responsibility to protect humanity from evil’. An Arendtian understanding of mass atrocities as crimes against our common humanity (i.e. as evils) facilitates the development of a re-politicised and de-moralised account of R2P: This account recognises its discursive role, it actively seeks to generate political interest for action in the face of harrowing mass atrocities but also acts as a leash on intervention in less severe cases.

Abbreviation R2P: Responsibility to Protect; UN: United Nations; NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; ICISS: International Committee on Intervention and State Sovereignty     

The subversive potential of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘defamiliarisation’: a case study in drawing on the imagination to denounce violence

ABSTRACT

In his later years, Leo Tolstoy wrote numerous books, essays and pamphlets expounding his newly-articulated denunciations of all political violence, whether by dissidents or ostensibly legitimate states. If these writings have inspired many later pacifists and anarchists, it is partly thanks to his masterful deployment of the literary technique of ‘defamiliarisation’ – or looking at the familiar as if new – to shake readers into recognising the absurdity of common justifications of violence, admitting their implicit complicity in it, and noticing the process which numbed them into accepting such complicity. This paper discusses Tolstoy’s use of the imagination to defamiliarise and denounce violence, first by citing several typical examples, then by reflecting on four of its subversive characteristics: its disruption of automated perception, its implicit concession of some recognition, its corrosion of conventional respect for traditional hierarchies, and its encouragement of empathy.     

Ararat and the politics of ‘preserving’ denial

ABSTRACT

Daldal analyses Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002) in terms of its ‘truth claims’ and its ostensible critique of the politics of denial of the Turkish authorities. Her essay is not an apologia for Turkish attitudes but claims that, while searching for the ‘truth’ amid denial and deception, the film creates its own ‘official history’, which is presented as the history, mostly based on nostalgia and ‘post-memory’. The Armenian diaspora still relies heavily on the genocide in order to build consciousness and cohesion, and Ararat contributes further to the need for sacred codes, sacred lands and sacred myths. Although the Turkish denial of the genocide is unacceptable, by demonizing the Turks and Turkey, the film contributes to the preservation of that denial, which has been helpful in the creation of diasporic Armenian identity.     

Civil society and the contemporary threat to religious freedom in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Against the international backdrop of rising religious tensions, this article explores contemporary civil society views on religious freedom in Bangladesh. It uses critical frame analysis of the corpus of civil society organizations’ (CSOs) submissions to the United Nations’ third cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR), 2013–18. It provides a timely assessment of Bangladesh’s fulfilment of international obligations on religious freedom, and shows how the politicization of religion and the resultant conflict between ‘secularism’ and ‘extremism’ have been fuelling inter-communal tensions and religious intolerance. In particular, CSOs’ UPR submissions present powerful accounts of the principal human rights pathology affecting the country today, religious-based violence. This is accompanied by a narrative of police malpractice, judicial failings, discrimination, oppression and incitement. A further key finding is ‘situated knowledge’ or first-hand accounts of legal restrictions and government repression of civil society organizations. Consonant with the classical work of liberal theorists, we argue that unprecedented importance now attaches to safeguarding civil society criticality in order to defend religious freedom and uphold human rights in the Republic.     

When a pariah party exploits its demonised status: the 2019 Finnish general election

Abstract

The governing Centre and Conservative parties played the ‘economy’ card – we’ve got Finland ‘back into shape’; the green parties, the Greens and Left Alliance, played the ‘climate change’ card, demanding action to go with the talk; the Social Democrats played the ‘caring’ card and the need for a Finland that cares for the elderly, the low-paid and young persons; the Finns Party in contrast played the ‘no one likes us, we don’t care’ card, seeking to exploit its pariah status for electoral gain. The adoption of a siege mentality strategy, designed to capitalise on its ostracised position, served to mobilise protest support and the Finns Party came within a whisker of beating the Social Democrats into second place. The Social Democrats then turned the clock back and put together the type of left?centre (‘red mud’) coalition that had characterised Finnish governments for half a century from the mid-1930s onwards.     

An ‘anti-utopian age?’: Isaiah Berlin’s England,Hannah Arendt’s America,and utopian thinking in dark times

This essay challenges the influential view that Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt played a central role in inaugurating an ‘anti-utopian age’. While the two thinkers certainly did their share to discredit the radical utopian inclination to portray a political blueprint in the abstract, I show that neither was straightforwardly anti-utopian. On the contrary, both thinkers’ writings display a different kind of utopian thinking, consisting in an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities. Schematically put, Berlin’s utopia was England reconstructed as a quintessential liberal society, whereas Arendt’s utopia was America reconstructed as a quintessential modern free republic. Those two polities differ from each other in important respects, but they share two essential features in common: they are claimed to be exempt from the rise of totalitarianism; and they allegedly give men and women the decent chance to live a fulfilling life. To illustrate Berlin’s and Arendt’s overlapping and yet differing visions, I consider their contrasting responses to the upheaval of 1968 – a possible utopian moment in the late 20th century. While their responses could scarcely be more different, they were informed by their shared desire to imagine an ideal polity in what both regarded as the darkest century in human history.     

Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda: Popular Challenges to the Official Discourse of Post-Genocide National Unity

Reconciliation is among the most contested terms in current peacebuilding and transitional justice debates. Critics often view reconciliation as romantic—expecting immediate harmony after enormous harm—or imposed on victims by religious groups or governments that prefer the language of ‘moving on’ to addressing systemic causes of conflict. This essay reconsiders the concept of ‘reconciliation’ by drawing on community-level experiences in post-genocide Rwanda. This context highlights nuanced interpretations of reconciliation that, in key respects, respond to critics' concerns and call for reappraisal of reconciliation as a central objective after mass violence. In particular, many Rwandans' participation in the gacaca community courts—which, between 2002 and 2012, prosecuted 400,000 genocide suspects in around 1 million cases in 11,000 jurisdictions overseen by locally elected lay judges—represents a form of negotiated reconciliation. This version emphasizes long-term formal and informal negotiations between antagonistic parties during gacaca hearings but crucially long after trials have ended. In contrast, the transactional reconciliation advocated by the Rwandan government through its discourse of ‘national unity’ views reconciliation as immediate and elite-imposed—a perspective that rightly raises the ire of critics but to which negotiated reconciliation offers an important riposte. This essay is based on more than 650 interviews between 2003 and 2014 with Rwandan genocide suspects, convicted perpetrators, survivors, gacaca judges and policymakers as well as observations of 105 gacaca hearings in 13 communities across Rwanda.     

Race,Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In this article, Lewicki revisits both ‘peaks’ via an examination of numerical evidence for verbal and physical racist violence in the former East and West of Germany. Rather than conceiving of racism as ‘cyclical’ or a specific legacy of the Communist dictatorship, her analysis suggests that political projects in Germany’s past and present have retained distinct structural incarnations of race. Far-right activists could thus successfully channel animosities resulting from the terms of unification into nationalist and racist resentment: momentarily more so in the East, but increasingly also in the West. The politics of citizenship, Lewicki argues, has provided a key means of perpetuating, reaffirming and cementing racialized hierarchies in the two post-war German states, but also in reunified Germany.     

On Public Action

Abstract

This essay explores Hannah Arendt’s contribution to our understanding of the rhetorical as opposed to the aesthetic quality of public speech, with an emphasis upon her conception of opinion and glory. Arendt’s focus on the revelatory quality of public action in speech is widely understood to preclude or seriously limit its communicative aspect. I argue that this is a misunderstanding, and that accepting it would reduce speech not merely to the discussion of a sharply limited set of topics, but to no topics at all. Public action is speech that reveals the speaker as “answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done.” Such revelatory speech is most appropriately judged by the standard of the glorious and the inglorious. Because such speech must inform as well as reveals, so does glorious or great speech rise to the level of greatness in part because of what is said, to whom, where, and how. Arendt’s understanding of this is shown to have significant parallels to the ordinary language philosophy of Stanley Cavell.     

Stopping lies about the holocaust—the use of consumer protection legislation

An Australian ‘civil liberties’ booklet, which included Holocaust denial material, was effectively banned through the application of consumer protection law.     

Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler

Abstract

Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced völkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the ‘Jewish question’ as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of ‘the Jew’ (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although German-Jewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and ‘Germans’.     

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: perverse effects,protectionism and Gemeinschaft

Abstract

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great Transformation is Gemeinschaft, understood dynamically. It examines the two central mechanisms by which, in Polanyi's understanding, Gesellschaft broke down in the mid-twentieth century: the ‘clash between democracy and capitalism’ and the ‘perverse effects’ whereby political intervention in markets impairs profitability and saps the vitality of the market system.     

The Pivot to Asia,Air-Sea Battle and contested commons in the Asia Pacific region

Abstract

The Pivot towards the Asia Pacific has been a key component of the grand strategy of the Obama administration. Militarily, the main challenge is represented by the Chinese capacity to erode the American ‘command of the commons’.

The United States have been developing a new operational concept, labelled ‘Air-Sea Battle’ (ASB) aimed at maintaining the capacity to project military power even if adversaries are able to deploy a sophisticated anti-access area denial strategy.

The implementation of ASB is likely induce Beijing to respond with a further acceleration of the process ofmodernisation of its armed forces.     

The image of the Jews in Hungarian public opinion

ABSTRACT

Nowhere has the debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ been as fierce and relevant as in France. In recent years this country has witnessed high recorded levels of antisemitism, prompting many commentators to claim the existence of an anti-sémitisme nouveau. Something has indeed changed, at least in terms of the nature, frequency and perpetrators of antisemitic violence in France. Previously connected exclusively to the extreme right, it has now also become associated with a group that is itself a victim of discrimination: ethnic minority youths living in the poor suburbs (banlieues). Peace first discusses and explains the statistics produced by the French watchdog on racism and antisemitism as well as the effects of the Middle East conflict. He then traces the debate on this ‘new antisemitism’ in the French context, contrasting the views of the label's promoters and opponents. He argues that, while antisemitism has undoubtedly evolved, the ‘new’ label is effectively erroneous as it fuses supposedly leftist and ‘Muslim’ antisemitism into one entity when they are not necessarily linked. In addition, he offers vital clarification of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism along with suggestions for further research.     

Governing peacekeeping: the role of authority and expertise in the case of sexual violence and trauma

Abstract

The surprising authority of gender expertise on sexual violence within post-Cold War peacekeeping can be understood by tracing how sexual violence became linked with political torture and combat violence in peacekeeping security rationality. The linkage emerged from the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) theory within anti-Vietnam war activism, which gained international authority during the 1980s. Post-Cold War narratives of ‘multi-dimensional’ peacekeeping as the policing and rehabilitation of perpetrators and victims for self-government drew on PTSD expertise on ‘integrity violations’, thus problematizing sexual violence. However, gender expertise should not be dismissed as providing ideological cover for imperialist projects: the contingent authority gender expertise has claimed has disrupted the peacekeeping narrative by representing peacekeeping operations as fostering flourishing sex industries in which integrity violations are a norm.     

Reply to critics

Abstract

This article provides a response to the contributors of this symposium. Notably, I respond to challenges pertaining to whether my account can: accommodate collective goods and collective choice and the complexities pertaining to intergenerational justice; be reconciled with the insights of relational egalitarianism and non-ideal theory; meet the requirement that it provides political action guidance instead of being practically irrelevant; be grounded in Rawls’ considerations about luck and justice; avoid implausible implications regarding ‘concern monsters’ and offensive preferences.