Search

This article shows how patterns of suicide and self-harm can manifest a form of structural injustice and violence inflicted on the vulnerable. It introduces the original concept of induced self-violence (ISV) to identify the corresponding moral culpability of the state, employers, and other agents. ISV occurs when an institution inflicts a degrading psychosocial environment on a group when it is foreseeable this will result in heightened rates of suicide or self-harm—whether from mental illness or as a means of escape or protest. A degrading psychosocial environment generates extreme distress and is associated with dependence, objectification, and voicelessness. ISV is explained with reference to immigration detention, drawing on interviews with detainees from Australia's offshore system. In its lethal form, ISV can be seen as wrongful killing. The analysis identifies a distinctive wrong, contributing to debates on the politics of suicide and self-harm and normative debates on structural injustice and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aside from the case of refugees under international law, are non-citizen outsiders morally justified in unlawfully entering another state? Recent answers to this question, based on a purported right of necessity or civil disobedience, exclude many cases of justified border-crossing and fail to account for its distinctive political character. I argue that in certain non-humanitarian cases, unlawful border-crossing involves the exercise of a remedial moral right to resist the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. The case accepts, for the sake of argument, two conventional assumptions among defenders of immigration restrictions: that states have a 'right to exclude' and that migrants have a prima facie duty to respect borders. Nonetheless, where immigration law is racist or otherwise discriminatory, it violates the egalitarian standards at the core of any authority it can plausibly claim over outsiders. In such cases, it may be resisted even where the law is facially non-discriminatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collection of recent works offer a route into rethinking the ethics of borders at a time when the rules and practices of global mobility have been called into question by the coronavirus pandemic. What counts as a legitimate justification for the closure of borders and who gets to decide? Who has responsibility for the protection of refugees? Just how practical is the ideal of 'open borders' and is there a trade-off between justice in immigration and the stability of a liberal political order? While some commentators have claimed that the coronavirus pandemic sounded the death knell for the ideal of open borders, its true import is to highlight our mutual vulnerability and the need for effective global co-ordination of migration and asylum. The four contributions I discuss provide vital moral arguments and conceptual distinctions relevant to thinking about the contours of a post-pandemic regime of global mobility. While they differ on the question of who the liberal state may justifiably exclude, and on the desirability and practicality of cosmopolitan reform, they converge in assigning states a far greater role in protecting the human rights of vulnerable non-citizens and in their condemnation of a cruel and repressive status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review essay, I examine two recent books in critical theory as part of a reflection on the utility, as well as the possible risks and limitations, of liberal rights and citizenship in resisting contemporary forms of power. While Ben Golder's book 'Foucault and the Politics of Rights' offers a compelling reconstruction of Foucault's thought that calls attention to the ambivalent character of rights discourse, Wendy Brown's book 'Undoing the Demos' applies a Foucaudlian mode of analysis to paint a dark vision of how neoliberalism is reconfiguring liberal-democratic institutions and norms according to economic imperatives. In this essay, I unpack the arguments of these two books, situating them within a broader context of critical thought and evaluating some of their central ideas and assumptions. I suggest that Golder is insufficiently critical of the central notion he presents of an anti-foundational 'tactical' conception of rights and propose that we instead see rights as political in the sense of being open, provisional and subject to on-going contestation. I examine the evolution of Brown's thinking on rights in her work and call attention to some of the shortcomings in her analysis of power. Ultimately, I propose, both Foucault (in Golder's reading) and Brown demonstrate that it is possible to maintain a productive scepticism towards rights and other humanistic social categories, while acknowledging their indispensable value in certain contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I engage with the radical critique of human rights moralism. Radical critics argue that: (i) human rights are myopic (they overlook important dimensions of power); (ii) human rights are demobilising (they obscure political conflict); (iii) human rights are paternalistic (they undermine political agency); and (iv) human rights are monopolistic (they displace more radical, collectivist ideologies). I argue that critics offer important insights into the limits of human rights as a language of social justice. However, critics err insofar as they imply that human rights are irredeemably corrupted and they under-estimate the subversive potential of the moral ideas that underpin the discourse. Building on the idea of human rights as claims, I set out the politicising features of human rights as they are deployed in a practical context of disagreement, conflict, and imbalances of power. I illustrate this discussion with reference to the contemporary struggles of irregular migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the nature and ethics of nonviolent action as a type of political engagement that is distinct from civil disobedience and other favoured philosophical categories. I offer a justification for the specifically coercive character of non-violent action and identify the legitimate role it has to play not only in authoritarian states but in plausibly democratic societies. I critically interrogate Gandhis influential understanding of nonviolent action - or "satyagraha" - as a method that converts opponents solely through the loving, purifying force of self-suffering and an argument by Vinit Haksar that nonviolent action does not count as coercive so long as its aims are morally justified. I dispute these perspectives and offer a justification for the use of coercive tactics based on democratic, republican grounds as a means to collectively contest certain objectionable forms of political domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds a new perspective to recent debates about the political nature of rights through attention to their distinctive role within social movement practices of moral critique and social struggle. The paper proceeds through a critical examination of the Political Constitutionalist theories of rights politics proposed by Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy. While political constitutionalists are correct to argue that rights are ‘contestable’ and require democratic justification, they construe political activity almost exclusively with reference to voting, parties and parliamentary law-making, neglecting the vital role rights play in political struggle outside and against the official institutions of democratic citizenship. In contrast to the political constitutionalist stress on the patient and reciprocal negotiation of rights within formal electoral processes, this paper locates the political nature of rights in their conflictual logic as ‘claims’ in multiple spheres that function to mobilise oppositional support against powerful adversaries and challenge dominant understandings. An activist citizenship of rights is frequently necessary, it argues, given the structural barriers of power and inequality that distort legislative decision-making and lead to the denial of fundamental moral entitlements to less powerful groups. The paper provides an illustration of activist citizenship taken from a contemporary squatting movement centred around the right to housing, Take Back the Land. In exercising the moral right to housing, for which they demand political recognition, through the occupation of vacant buildings, the practices of Take Back the Land reflect the conflictual dimension of rights as claims in keeping with their historical role in empowering subordinate groups to challenge unjust relations of power and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The republican tradition in political theory offers a distinct approach to thinking about rights that addresses long-standing objections to the depoliticising logic of the discourse through its attention to power relations and the socially embedded nature of moral claims. However, the most systematic republican theories of rights-based citizenship translate these theoretical commitments into a tame set of institutional proposals that largely affirm existing states. In this article, I critique the limits of Philip Pettit's juridical republicanism and Richard Bellamy's parliamentary republicanism and set out an alternative populist account of republican citizenship based on the notion of rights as claims' - a form of speech act that empowers agents with self-respect to mobilise popular support and challenge arbitrary power when political institutions are unresponsive or unavailable. Populist citizenship takes place whenever social groups and classes mobilise directly outside constitutional structures in order to contest the legitimacy of the political regime and lay claim to new rights through direct appeal to the sovereign authority of the people themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the impact of campaigns by the student movement in Great Britain. Problems associated with the anti-tuition fees campaign are identified. An argument is raised over the effect that the Anti Poll-Tax campaign had on Tory government policy. The achievements of the movement are mentioned including the near defeat of the Coalition government, and success in obtaining a pledge to cut tuition fees.

Despite a resurgence in the use of occupations as a political tactic in the UK, there is little agreement on how they contribute to the realisation of a movement's goals. Drawing on the author's experience of occupations at University College London (UCL), this profile argues for an understanding of occupation according to a threefold model of transformational social change: symbiotic, ruptural and interstitial. As the occupations progressed, UCL activists' understanding of the collective action they had undertaken was expanded and transformed, with increasing emphasis placed on the ruptural and interstitial visions. These both reflected and reinforced a broader process of politicisation and radicalisation amongst the student body. The profile concludes by suggesting that no conception of the purpose of an occupation should be regarded as universally valid since an accommodation between competing strategic visions is both required and necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]