Imperialism

It has been over a decade since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri’s widely read Empire, a book that claimed humanity had entered a qualitatively new era in the organization of power. How do critical sociological studies that also theorize global capitalism depart from or share affinities with Hardt and Negri’s Foucauldian-inspired notion of empire? The two most important shared insights is the notion of a new epoch in the history of world capitalism and the conceptualization of a global system that moves beyond the idea of U.S. imperialism solely as behind its fundamental structure. However, overpowering Hardt and Negri’s framework are some fundamental problems: the vague and nondialectical idea of multitude, the lack of the role of the state, their confusing and contradictory idea of constitutionalism, and a misapprehension of immaterial labor.

"Giorgio Agamben’s work has been at the forefront of modern debates surrounding sovereign exceptionalism and emergency powers. His theory of the state of exception and engagements with Michel Foucault appear to focus upon sovereign power’s ability to remove legal protections from life with impunity, described by the figure of homo sacer. Much secondary scholarship concentrates upon this engagement. This thesis contends that this approach is too narrow and assimilates Agamben’s work into Foucault’s own thought.

Through his engagement with Foucault, Agamben’s thought is argued to be immanent and directed toward questions of fundamental ontology. Agamben contends that the human being, and all social structures, including law, are defined negatively through being held in relation to an ineffable transcendent ground. This negativity is transmitted through the exception. In challenging foundational mythologemes, Agamben questions received conceptualisations of sovereignty, arguing that sovereignty is a mythologeme used to legitimate and justify governmental praxis.

Agamben’s immanent thought seeks to philosophically justify a messianic politics and form-of-life no longer grounded in negative foundations. This form-of-life Agamben terms “whatever-being”, a life lived beyond relationality.

This thesis transposes Agamben’s thought on exception, sovereignty, the human and power into the realm of legal reasoning. A form of ethical decision-making and precedent charitable to Agamben’s thought is constructed, constituting a unique contribution to jurisprudence. This ethical decision focuses on whatever-being’s singularity.

However, Agamben’s eschewing of relationality means this ethical decision-making is aporetic, still reliant upon a derivate form of relationality. This thesis illustrates how Agamben’s thought is constructed through a misreading of Heideggerian hermeneutics and a failure to acknowledge its debt owed to Levinasian ethics. Agamben remains trapped within two critiques of his non-relationality, one drawn from Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle of Being, the other drawn from Levinas’s ethics of the Other. Ultimately, Agamben’s philosophical conclusions are contended to be unsustainable."

The international political sociology (IPS) of risk is generally concerned with understanding the governance of uncertainty. As economists Bodie and Merton (1999) have classically described it, risk is uncertainty that matters. Risk is a rationality of governing the uncertain that affects the ways in which individuals and collectivities live, organize themselves, and exercise power. However, there is no single rationality of risk, and, as illustrated in this essay, rationalities of risk change as a function of the knowledge that informs them. A major concern of the IPS of risk is the ways in which uncertainty has become a central problem for governance. The ways in which risks are assessed and managed are taken as problematic spaces from which to question the roles of states, societies, economic actors, and individuals in coping with uncertainty. International Relations (IR) as a discipline has slowly begun to incorporate theoretical developments in risk theory arising from sociology, economics, and anthropology. This is a recent development that begins mainly with the end of the Cold War, although there are traces of risk theory having been applied to security analysis prior to this period. This essay contextualizes the introduction of risk as a problem for analysis within IR and explores three main approaches: the risk society thesis, the governmentality ...

"Summary:

Insurance is a central, if until now ignored, instrument of war in the modern period. Ever since the eighteenth century, interaction between governments and insurers in Western countries has materialised in the form of war risk schemes that have contributed to the waging of war and the preservation of peace. The operation of those schemes has given rise to a curious, if not innocent, association between practices of statehood and practices of risk, which are theorised here under the label of ‘insurantial sovereignty’.

The book draws on the British experience of using maritime insurance as an instrument of war during the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, and the early twenty-first century. It asks, what happens, when, under conditions of war, the sovereign adopts insurantial imaginaries and practices into its rationalities of government? In doing so the book makes a novel contribution to the understanding of liberal security and liberal governance which is central to the theory of Political Science and International Relations, the understanding of international political sociology, and international political economy.

The book follows Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk as the second of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world."

"Summary

Insurance is the world's largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is know about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance.

This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from the continuous interaction of an 'entrepreneurial form of power', and traditional forms of sovereign security. Through rich empirical cases and a unique theorization, the book breaks apart the traditional division between security studies, political economy and political theory. The author explores this theory in relation to specific issues such as the use of life insurance in the molecular age, the use of insurance to securitize against environmental catastrophic risk, specialist products such as kidnap and ransom insurance, as well as the use of insurance to counter maritime piracy in the twenty-first century.

Providing an important and original contribution to the study of the biopolitics of security, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of security studies, international relations and international political economy."

Michel Foucault addresses the institution and practice of the police, throughout his entire career, as an important element of his political-historical philosophy. The first part of my essay proves how the police play a fundamental role in his history of the prison and the analytics of disciplinary power. The second part of my essay addresses the methodological questions raised by the recent publication of Foucault’s College de France lectures. Foucault unearths a “secret history” of the police and I argue that the role it plays in his narrative of bio-politics complicates the traditional interpretations of Foucault’s analysis of power. The third part of my essay provides a new interpretation of Foucault’s divergent masks of power, specifically as it relates to the police. The police is best understood as a type of governmental reason (Governmentality), rather than a specific institution of the State. I argue that Foucault’s account of the police in terms of the neo-liberal economic theory described by Gary Becker breaks down when compared to the expansive privatization of security apparatuses after Foucault’s death. This disjunction illustrates the importance of Foucault’s philosophy of the police in terms of contemporary political science.

As a re-occupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972, demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992, Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper, we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.

Panamanian archaeology has had a tumultuous past. Foremost, sixteenth-century Spanish documents have been instrumental in interpreting the archaeological record; however, as with many early chroniclers in Latin America, those in Panama were heavily biased in their observations and interpretations and reflect the mistreating of indigenous populations. Although several major institutional projects occurred, the majority of archaeology conducted in Panama up to the 1970s was carried out under the auspices of the Panamanian Archaeology Association—more or less, a professional looting club based in the U.S.A. Canal Zone. Additionally, some archaeologists working in South and Central America (including Panama) have been accused of using archaeology as a front for conducting espionage. This paper will examine how archaeology in Panama has been shaped by suspect excavations and unethical practices while illustrating how recent investigators are dealing with these past relationships and forging new inroads.

"Abstract: The paper analyses the potential of a theoretical comparison between communism and colonialism, focusing on the cultural dimension of the Stalinization process in Eastern Europe. The paper applies this theoretical perspective to late 1940searly 1950s Romanian culture in relation with the appropriation of culture by the communist regime within the late 1940s political and ideological shift in Eastern Europe. The approach uses as a background for its argumentation a theoretical debate which started
2001 and has continued until today (Moore 2001, Kovačević 2008), also reinterpreting on a series of theories developed during as well as at the end of the Cold War (Kulski 1959, Kolarz 1964, Horvath 1972, Katsenelinboigen 1990). The paper uses a series of conceptual tools such cultural transfer, cultural dependences, cultural identity, cultural export, which are applied for the first time to the Romanian culture.

Keywords: colonialism, imperialism, cultural colonialism, sovietising, cultural transfer, cultural dependences, cultural identity, cultural export"

""Abstract: The paper analyses the potential of a theoretical comparison between communism and colonialism, focusing on the cultural dimension of the Stalinization process in Eastern Europe. The paper applies this theoretical perspective to late 1940searly 1950s Romanian culture in relation with the appropriation of culture by the communist regime within the late 1940s political and ideological shift in Eastern Europe. The approach uses as a background for its argumentation a theoretical debate which started
2001 and has continued until today (Moore 2001, Kovačević 2008), also reinterpreting on a series of theories developed during as well as at the end of the Cold War (Kulski 1959, Kolarz 1964, Horvath 1972, Katsenelinboigen 1990). The paper uses a series of conceptual tools such cultural transfer, cultural dependences, cultural identity, cultural export, which are applied for the first time to the Romanian culture.

Keywords: colonialism, imperialism, cultural colonialism, sovietising, cultural transfer, cultural dependences, cultural identity, cultural export""

British propaganda was an important alternative source of information for the German public. To what extent did it contain information about the persecution and extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime? This essay reconstructs the coverage of the Holocaust in the German-language broadcasts of the BBC and in leaflets dropped by the Royal Air Force over German territory from the “Reichskristallnacht” of November 1938 until the collapse of the Third Reich in Mai 1945. Furthermore it examines the factors, political and other, that influenced reports about the Jews. Although British propaganda reported regularly about the treatment of the Jews by the Nazi regime, in retrospect it is clear that the reporting on the Holocaust was too infrequent and failed to do justice to the scope of the Jewish tragedy. This failure can in part be explained with the general purpose of the British propaganda campaign: the broadcasts and leaflets were not so much intended to inform the German public about the Nazi crimes committed against European Jewry, but to help the Allies achieve military victory. The study is based on contemporary documents of the BBC German Service and of the British govern-ment institutions engaged in foreign policy and propaganda.