Beyond binaries: analysing violent state actors in Critical Studies

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the importance of including the voices of violent state actors in critical research about security and terrorism. Critical Studies tend to avoid narrative research about such actors or to give them “face” and place. However, to understand violence, scholars should listen to, and explore, the narratives of those who are committing violence. The article seeks ways to produce emancipatory knowledge and to be critical without being exclusionary. It discusses the difficulties in deciding who merits the researchers’ listening and research focus, and who does not. These issues are explored and contested by presenting an analysis of women combatants’ experiences.     

“A river is not a boundary”: interplays of national and linguistic citizenship in Pulaar language activism

This article examines the interplay of linguistic citizenship and national citizenship within a trans-border language movement. Since the late 1950s, language activists from among the Haalpulaar’en of Senegal and Mauritania have practiced forms of literacy teaching, literary production, theater and journalism in promoting their language, known as Pulaar. These activists’ trans-border collaborations and their emergence from two distinct national contexts – where, in both cases, Pulaar is spoken by a minority of the population – must be understood in relation to one another. Tracing the biographical itineraries of several key activists, this article illustrates how Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar militants have collaborated when it comes to language promotion yet frame their grievances within their respective national political arenas. More than a form of local resistance based on trans-border linguistic and cultural ties, Pulaar language activism has emerged thanks to opportunities presented by forms of post-colonial state-building, including the creation of national radio.     

Public Service Motivation in Ghanaian Civil Service: A Case Study of Ejisu-Juabeng Municipality

Civil servants are perceived to possess altruistic motive known as Civil Service Motivation (PSM) which promotes public interest as confirmed in some developed countries. Using the Ejisu-Juabeng Municipality as a case study, this article assesses the existence of PSM in the Ghanaian public sector and finds that PSM exists in the public service but its existence does not ensure maximum output. The workers professed having motives such as sense of social justice, compassion, commitment to public interest, self-sacrifice, and sense of civic duty but indicated their unwillingness to commit their future to the public sector because of poor working conditions.     

Do consultancies compromise academic research and ethics? A case study of Burma/Myanmar*

This paper contributes to ongoing debates about interactions between the political science discipline and policymaking communities by analysing the role played by scholars who work as consultants for governments, non-governmental organizations, and international aid agencies in conflict-affected and post-conflict societies. It argues that although consultancies permit scholars to engage with policy communities and provide convenient access for data collection, they also present methodological constraints and can complicate and compromise research ethics due to the inherent tensions linking the two different realms with their differing norms, agendas, and goals. The findings are based on the author’s decades of field experience in Myanmar, a country which has recently received much attention from the international community, on interviews with nine PhD candidates or PhD holders who have been employed as consultants for aid agencies in Myanmar and Southeast Asia, and analysis of secondary sources on countries with similar situations.     

Away From Home: Somali Women's Mediated Entry Into the United Kingdom

Based on in-depth interviews with 26 Somali women refugees, this article discusses structural arrangements around their settlement in the United Kingdom (UK). Their “male-centered” migration can be viewed as a specific form of patriarchal institution where men control women's trajectories. Based on Bourdieu's concept of social capital, I introduce a new category of knowledge capital—supplementary capital—to discuss sociocultural/political stratifications that affect integration of my informants in the UK. I show how a lack of familiarity with the dominant language became central to their integration difficulties. These underexamined problems are key factors in immigration processes.     

Social Ties,Collective Efficacy,and Crime-Specific Fear in Seattle Neighborhoods

While research suggests that individuals’ interactions with their communities—such as their social integration into the community and perceptions of collective efficacy—impact their perceived risk of victimization, only a handful of studies have examined the influence of these characteristics on crime-specific, emotional fear. Using the Seattle Neighborhoods and Crime Survey, we conduct multilevel models to examine whether social ties and collective efficacy are associated with perceived risk and emotional fear of violence and burglary. The results show that individuals’ social ties to the community are negatively associated with perceived risk, but not emotional fear of violence or burglary, while perceived collective efficacy is negatively related to both cognitive and emotional fear. Moreover, the results suggest that individuals’ social integration into the community functions through perceptions of collective efficacy to predict perceived risk; however, this process does not extend to emotional fear of either violence or burglary.     

Chōra/Chōros: Samuel R. Delany and the masculine semiotic in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012)

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic chōra continues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction in La revolution du langage poétique – the fate of the chōra was left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusively prohibitive conception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal law generates certain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of the chora with the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding the chōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semiotic chōra does indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by adding chōros, the masculine form of chōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.     

The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives

The essay discusses one characteristic of colonial archives – how the ruling state plunders/loots the colonized’ archives and treasures and controls them in its colonial archives - erasing them from the public sphere by repressive means, censors and restricts their exposure and use, alters their original identity, regulates their contents and subjugates them to colonizer’s laws, rules and terminology. It focuses on two archives plundered by Israel in Beirut in 1980s: the Palestine Research Center and archive of Palestinian films. The essay continues my earlier research on Palestinian visual (and other) archives taken as booty or looted by pre-state Jewish military organizations and soldiers or civilians in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe, 1948), and later by Israel’s military bodies. It analyzes the plunder itself while focusing on the power relations reflected toward the hybrid gazes of the colonizer and the colonized and discusses colonial features of military archives holding and controlling seized materials. While colonial museums have been largely discussed, and also archives holding colonial history, this is one of the first essays to discuss features of colonial archives holding plundered archives/material.     

Temporal trends in US counterterrorism sting operations, 1989–2014

How has the US government’s use of counterterrorism sting operations changed over the past quarter-century? Have major terrorist attacks led to more frequent sting operations and/or more frequent entrapment – and if so, have such changes been temporary or long-lasting? Have different types of terrorism provoked different reactions? This study answers these questions using a database of US terrorism prosecutions occurring between 1989 and 2014, each coded for 20 indicators of entrapment. We analyse temporal trends, and in particular, compare the government’s responses to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terror attacks. Results indicate that after the Oklahoma City bombing, the number of sting operations against right-wing extremists doubled, while the average number of entrapment indicators dropped. This suggests that authorities in the 1990s responded to the growing threat of right-wing terrorism appropriately: conducting more investigations while avoiding entrapment. After 9/11, sting operations against suspected jihadi terrorists rapidly increased, but in this case, they featured high numbers of entrapment indicators through the end of the study period, suggesting widespread and persistent entrapment. Reasons for this difference, and for the government’s failure to reduce entrapment in response to widespread criticism over the past decade, are analysed.     

The Evolution of Public Service Provision by the Third Sector in France

Public services have been externalised, in part, to the non‐profit sector in France and in the United Kingdom. This article begins by reviewing relations between the public and non‐profit sector in France before 2008, and its evolution since. This has been characterised by the slow reduction of public funding, the adaptation of non‐profit associations and organisations, and their clearer positioning within a wider ‘social and solidarity economy’, which was consolidated by a framework Law in 2014. The article then examines the current sharing of responsibilities between the public and non‐profit sectors in education, health and social services, pointing to the diverse historical and political conditions which have led to this shared organisation.