Terrorism,counter‐terrorism and democracy: The assessment of national security threats

The development of radical Islamist strategic thinking and the impact of post-modern, Western styles of thought upon the ideology that informs that strategy is often overlooked in conventional discussions of homegrown threats from jihadist militants. The propensity to discount the ideology informing both al-Qaeda and nominally non-violent Islamist movements with an analogous political philosophy like Hizb ut-Tahrir neglects the influence that critical Western modes of thought exercise upon their strategic thinking especially in the context of homegrown radicalization. Drawing selectively on non-liberal tendencies in the Western ideological canon has, in fact, endowed Khilaafaism (caliphism) with both a distinctive theoretical style and strategic practice. In particular, it derives intellectual sustenance from a post-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical thinking that in combination with an “English” School of international relations idealism holds that epistemological claims are socially determined, subjective, and serve the interests of dominant power relations. This critical, normative, and constructivist approach to international relations seeks not only to explain the historical emergence of the global order, but also to transcend it. This transformative agenda bears comparison with radical Islamist critiques of Western ontology and is of interest to Islamism's political and strategic thinking. In this regard, the relativist and critical approaches that have come to dominate the academic social sciences since the 1990s not only reflect a loss of faith in Western values in a way that undermines the prospects for a liberal and pluralist polity, but also, through a critical process facilitated by much international relations orthodoxy, promotes the strategic and ideological agenda of radical Islam. It is this curious strategic and ideological evolution that this paper explores.     

The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.     

论虚假诉讼的刑法规制——基于对虚假诉讼发生与司法实践状况的实证研究

近年来,虚假诉讼案件在我国频繁发生且呈现出逐年增多的趋势,但我国刑事立法中缺乏恰当的罪名对虚假诉讼行为进行定罪,无法对其进行全面评价。虽然各地出台了大量司法性文件以识别和预防虚假诉讼,但这些司法性文件并无法改变刑法存在漏洞的事实,相反,其对虚假诉讼的罪名设定存在争议,部分规定甚至存在侵犯当事人诉讼权利的嫌疑。因此,通过确立虚假诉讼罪来规制虚假诉讼至关重要。     

Mental discipline,punishment and recidivism: reading Foucault against de-radicalisation programmes in the War on Terror

This article uses Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to examine how de-radicalisation programmes in the War on Terror transform power–knowledge relations, mental discipline and punishment by attempting to instil self-governance through non-violence. Foucault’s theories on the evolution of discipline and punishment can be applied to de-radicalisation programmes, but only after considerable revision. By asking questions on the nature of knowledge, practice, state involvement and recidivism of de-radicalisation, I contend that many programmes may be ultimately limited by a disproportionate focus on religious rehabilitation rather than political dialogue regarding the motivations for such violence.     

Podcast as assessment: entanglement and affect in the law school

ABSTRACT

This article documents the “Orders in Decay” project, in which students taking the Law and Disorder module at the University of Warwick were required to produce a podcast as part of their assessment. The article situates the pedagogic benefits of student podcasting through the fields of legal storytelling, law and literature, and digital storytelling. It uses these to theorise three key moments in the podcasting process: the interview with an expert as an affective encounter with the ideas, the production of a complex and layered podcast that excites an affective response, and publication of the best of the podcasts to shift the students’ horizons of communication. Ultimately, the article suggests that the undergraduate is uniquely positioned between worlds – neither an expert nor a member of the public. As such, they are perfectly placed to mediate ideas and discussion in an affecting manner.     

Screening terror: Hollywood,the United States and the construction of danger

This paper is concerned with how and with what consequences Hollywood studios have approached the issue of terrorism. By drawing on the literatures of critical terrorism studies and critical geopolitics, a number of films are analysed for the purpose of considering the nature and motivation of terrorists, the objects of their assaults, the geographical location of the actual dramas, and the responses deemed necessary in the face of such apparent dangers. Finally, the paper briefly considers how one segment of film audiences, namely, participants (usually avid fans) who engage via online forums such as the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb), engage and contest the movies themselves. The movie Rendition (2007) provides a brief example of how fans respond to a film explicitly concerned with terrorism and torture. This is important for considering how people make sense of films above and beyond their role as a highly successful form of entertainment.     

Daily life and family in an Ottoman urban context: Historiographical stakes and new research perspectives

The Ottoman history of the family and of everyday life is presently experiencing deep theoretical and methodological renewals. Following the discovery of new archival resources, and the application of new questionings to previously known resources, the field is the object of an intense research investment. The horizon of expectation has enlarged, as renewed interpretations on tradition, Islam and their influence on everyday life, family, communal, urban and gender relations are the object of intense speculations in the contemporary intellectual panorama. The object of this article, conceived as an introduction to a thematic issue of the journal guest-edited by the authors, is first to draw a panorama of the existing literature on everyday life in an Ottoman context, with an attention to the successive methodological approaches and theoretical elaborations of which the field has been the support of, and then to identify the main stakes for today's research. The authors also argue that, in the present international panorama of research on those themes, not only is the Ottoman Empire an interesting application field for innovative methods, but might also be at the heart of a deep renewal, with at stake the discussion of the heritage of culturalist visions of history and of paradigms such as center/periphery relations and modernization.     

Insurgent capitalism: Island,bricolage and the re-making of finance

Abstract

Drawing on recent discussions of the material cultures of markets and of financial innovation as bricolage, this paper explores the development of Island, a new share-trading venue set up in 1995. We examine Island's roots in a very specific conflict in the US financial markets and in the information libertarianism of ‘hacker culture’, and examine the material bricolage involved in Island's construction. The paper also outlines the processes that led to a dramatic ‘Latourian’ change of scale: Island was originally a ‘micro’ development on the fringes of US markets, but within little more than a decade key features of Island became close to compulsory, as the nature of North American and Western European share trading changed utterly.