The insecurities of weaponised education: a critical discourse analysis of the securitised education discourse in North-West Pakistan

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of the discourse surrounding education, international development and security in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, North-West Pakistan. The article notes the dissonance between a discourse emphasising global security and the experienced insecurity faced by schools and students in North-West Pakistan, under attack from the Pakistani Taliban (the most notable attack being the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in 2012). This analysis examines the impact of securitisation on the discursive production of the political realm, exploring whether securitisation engenders security or insecurity. Three key findings emerge. First, the purpose of securitised education becomes fixed on ‘mindset transformation’ from an extremist mindset to an educated mindset. Second, students are transformed into soldiers fighting against extremism as education becomes weaponised. Third, the discourse blurs the distinction between the uneducated and extremist, and the figure of the ‘threatening, uneducated Other’ emerges. The discursive production of such oppositional subjectivities throws into question whether the international community’s intervention in education in North-West Pakistan, in order to improve security and fight extremism, is not in fact producing greater insecurity.     

Threatening Sanctions When Engagement Would Be More Effective: Attaining Better Human Rights in China

Leaders use both coercion and engagement as leverage against other nations. Recent literature suggests economic sanctions are more effective than deployed sanctions to attain intended foreign policy goals. This paper examines a case of threatened coercion—the threat to remove China's most favored nation (MFN) status following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989—where engagement would have produced better human rights in China. We show that the American threats to sanction China were counterproductive, while cooperative statements and MFN renewal proved to have a more beneficial impact on Beijing's human rights policies. This paper suggests that economic sanction threats are not directly linked to China's human rights behaviors. Instead, China uses accommodations to manipulate diplomatic relations with the U.S. As a result, engagement with China would have been a more productive policy when dealing with human rights issues.     

The Growing Litigiousness of Czech Elections

The 2006 Czech elections produced a record number of lawsuits, more than all previous elections to the Chamber of Deputies combined. This article explains the rise as due primarily to the introduction of a new administrative court with special responsibility for electoral disputes. Although the law makes a successful challenge to a result almost impossible, low-cost litigation is attractive to minor political parties as a form of campaigning. The article focuses on the two aspects of the 2006 election that generated the most complaints, media coverage and disproportionality between seats and votes.     

Beyond Legalism: Towards a Thicker Understanding of Transitional Justice

The field of transitional justice is increasingly characterized by the dominance of legalism to the detriment of both scholarship and practice. The first part of the paper examines what is meant by legalism and its consequences in the field through a number of overlapping themes: 'legalism as seduction', the 'triumph' of human rights, and the tendency towards 'seeing like a state'. The second part considers a number of correctives to such leanings which are analysed as encouraging legal humility, exploring the human rights as development axis, and finally developing a criminology of transitional justice. As law's place at the heart of transition from conflict is now secure, the time is right for a more honest appraisal of the limitations of legalism and a correspondingly greater willingness to countenance the role of other [non-legal] actors and forms of knowledge. 'Letting go of legalism' will both thicken the subject and deliver more effective change on the ground.     

Interrogating absence: the lawyer in science fiction

This article argues that whilst concepts of law and justice can be seen as prominent in much science fiction, the role of lawyer is mostly absent. This article interrogates these absences and asks whether they can be traced back to contemporary concerns around professional ethics. Three potential absences are noted; firstly, justice is considered as immanent. In these fictional futures lawyers have become unnecessary due to the immediacy of the legal system. The second conceptualisation portrays lawyers as intertwined with corporate interests. In these speculative moments lawyers have become culturally indistinguishable from other types of corporate entities. The final science fictive texts highlight a desire for the lawyer-hero. In these texts justice is overwhelmingly absent and shows a continuing need for legal professionals. Each of these cultural moments presents important questions for current understandings of professional ethics and the regulatory systems in which they are based. A removal of lawyers from our shared understandings of the future is indicative of potential problems with perceptions of professional ethics in the present.     

Boycott,Resistance and the Law: Cause Lawyering in Conflict and Authoritarianism

This article examines the role of cause lawyers in conflicted or authoritarian contexts where the chances of legal victory are often minimal. Drawing upon the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, legal consciousness and the sociology of lawyers, the paper examines how cause lawyers challenge and subvert power. The paper first explores the tactics and strategies of cause lawyers who boycott legal proceedings and the relationship between such boycotts and broader political struggles, legitimacy and law. It then examines why and how cause lawyers engage in fairly hopeless legal struggles as acts of instrumental resistance (the ‘sand in the cogs’), transforming courts into sites of symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. The paper argues that boycott of and resistance through the courts can counter the use of law as an instrument of wickedness and a tool of denial and preserves a ‘stubborn optimism’ in the rule of law.     

F#ck Your Family!: The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility

This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalisms law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.