Kantei diplomacy? Japan's hybrid leadership in foreign and security policy

This article operationalizes Japanese leadership in foreign and security policy, specifically the Abe administrations’ consistent China balancing. It will do so to dispel instances of Premier-centered diplomacy and posit that Abe's diplomatic agenda has rested on a ‘hybrid’ policy-making authority, where the leverage enjoyed by the Prime Minister's office (the Kantei) rested on little-appreciated politicized personnel appointments and demotions within the bureaucratic apparatus, specifically the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Moreover, successful Japanese leadership has functioned especially when operating within the scope of the US strategic framework towards East Asia. While structural constraints, such as the ever-present influence of the USA and bureaucratic coordination, may constrain options, effective leadership in foreign policy-making can indeed make a difference within those boundaries.     

Review of Paul J. Thibault,Re-reading Saussure

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyer's White , the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White , whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.     

Identity in Question: A Grammatology of DNA and Forensic Genetics

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Necroethics of Terrorism

This essay is an attempt to begin to think through the complex interlacing of Levinasian ethics, violence, terror and war. The question driving this essay is: in the midst of the harrowing debris of body parts that followed the synchronised explosions of bombs in a number of London train carriages and a bus, what can possibly remain of the ethical? This question will be examined in the context of what remains unspeakable in the face of such acts of violence. Framed by the authorising rubric of declarations of law—as ‘that which speaks in the language of legislation and promises certainty in the anxious aftermath of the loss of certainty’, and the attendant concerns with the question of the ‘enemy’ (as clandestine operative of terror and as object of fantasies)—this essay seeks to examine the ‘unspeakable remainder’ of declarations of law, as that which unsettles (legislated) promises of certainty in the anxious aftermath of a terrorist explosion and its ongoing trauma. In the course of this essay, I proceed to think through the contentious relation between violence and ethics in the context of a Levinasian framework, arguing for a Levinas that challenges and unsettles pietistic views of his ethical philosophy. In deploying the neologism necroethics, I attempt to examine anachronic and necrological violence and its relation to the ethical injunction to own responsibility for the dead.