Events February - June 2011
Events planned
CISRUL lunchtime seminars
After consultation, we will have our four CISRUL seminars this semester on Wednesdays at 12 - 2 pm in MR310. A sandwich lunch will be provided. The seminars will start in week 2 and take place every 3 weeks. As last semester, two of the seminars are discussion groups preparing for our workshops (the readings are available at cisrul.ning.com) and the other two will be research seminars presented by CISRUL members and focusing on our core topics. Last semester we had an anthropologist (me) and legal theorist (Matyas Bodig), this semester we will have a political scientist (Andrea Teti) and historian (Karin Friedrich). Next year we hope to continue with speakers from the other disciplines, including theology, sociology, education and cultural studies. The idea is to give the Centre a strong core by pursuing a conversation across the disciplines on the issues we defined in the mission statement. Full information on the events is given in the Events section.
Wednesday 9th February: Andrea Teti "'Civil Society' as a Category of Action"
Through the lens of an analysis of the performativity of 'civil society' as a category of action in academic and policy discourse, this paper considers the relations of power which democratisation, understood as a public and as and academic discourse, gives rise to with specific regard to the Middle East. An examination of the dominant understandings of 'civil society' found in the literature highlights a series of apparently paradoxical tensions between an avowedly emancipatory commitment on the one hand, and disciplinary practises on the other. These tensions derive from the particular way in which civil society and democratisation are conceptualised in mainstream academic and policy analyses. The particular conceptualisation of democracy/democratisation adopted by mainstream academic and policy discourse translates into practises which aim to assimilate Middle Eastern societies to an idealised model of Western experience which the West itself does not fulfil, the inability to replicate which then provides legitimisation for disciplinary interventions ranging from preconditions for political dialogue to conditionality, from sanctions to 'regime change'. Thus, 'civil society' and 'democracy' in their currently hegemonic definitions are performative in the sense that they shape political reality while purportedly merely describing it. This discourse, however, does not help bring democratic reality, but significantly undermines it – a paradoxical performativity. Moreover, the ready availability of alternative conceptions of civil society and of democracy both within the 'Western' tradition and beyond it suggests that the continued popularity of these otherwise problematic analytical frameworks should be sought beyond their academic merits. Just as the 'rise of civil society' in the Middle East responds to the problems posed by specific social and political contexts, so these hegemonic constructs provide solutions to particular political problems.
Wednesday 2nd March: Discussion group in preparation for June workshop on "The Category of Violence"
In preparation for our first June workshop (see below) we will have a group discussion that will start with Walter Benjamin's classic 1919 essay "Critique of Violence" which inspired the writings of Arendt, Derrida and Agamben, although we will go beyond the philosophical debates to include empirical cases from around the world. You can download the text from http://cisrul.ning.com (register, then scroll halfway down the main page to "Some readings on citizenship, civil society and rule of law")
Wednesday 23rd March: Discussion group in preparation for June workshop on "What Equality?"
In preparation for our second June workshop (see below) and building on our discussion in November, we will discuss a reading on equality. We will start our discussion with the following two texts, which you can download from http://cisrul.ning.com (register, then scroll halfway down the main page to "Some readings on citizenship, civil society and rule of law"):
Guillermo O'Donnell "Polyarchy and the (Un)rule of Law in Latin America"
In this provocative essay, O'Donnell defends the position that formal equality (treating people equally as individuals despite differences) is relevant even in contexts of socioeconomic inequality such as contemporary Latin America. He focuses on the formal equality in liberal notions of rule of law and citizenship.
Elizabeth Anderson "Egalitarianism: The History of a Concept"
The second part of Anderson's unpublished paper is her entry on Egalitarianism in the Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, and the first part gives a broader historical context for her critique of the post-Rawlsian literature on equality and her alternative notion of relational or democratic equality.
Wednesday 4th May: Karin Friedrich "Notions of Citizenship and the Rule of Law in East Central Europe: the cases of Poland-Lithuania and Brandenburg-Prussia"
Enlightened absolutism has been credited with law reform, the abolition of torture (in civilian cases) and a new understanding of 'Rechtsstaat'. Historiographical traditions since the 19th century, particularly in Germany, have celebrated these developments in eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia as major achievements of 'Prusso-German civilisation', culminating in the Preussische Landrecht of 1794. In contrast, the partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-95), and Germany's interest in keeping this country partitioned, overshadowed the understanding of active citizenship and the legal framework limiting monarchy that the Polish form mixta government achieved under the leadership of its noble elites. The seminar intends briefly to introduce the legal structures and conditions of these two examples. Although the monarchs initiated legislation in both cases, in Prussia the king was the sole legislator, while the Polish monarchy needed the estates' consent in the Diet (Sejm), before law could be enacted. An issue which so far has generated little research is the comparison of the two judiciary systems – one strictly subject to the ruler who nominated judges (Prussia), the other based on (decentralised) elected noble tribunals. Here are some of the questions that could be addressed:
- If modernisation could emanate from a society of estates, what consequences does this have for our image of citizenship in the early modern period?
- In both cases, law was seen as a guarantor against arbitrary power. What, however, does 'rule of the law' mean both in theory and practice? How can these two case studies contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the notion of 'rule of law', and to what extent is citizenship a condition attached to the existence of 'rule of law'?
- Another open question concerns the normative power of the ruler/diet who sets the law: in systems where monarchy is strictly controlled by the law civil society acts to define its own goals (and that of the commonweal) and naturally distrusts the authority of kings, whereas under absolute monarchy (always an ideal-type!) the opposite is true. Yet in both cases justification and legitimation of power is constantly required (through appeal to privileges, history, rank etc). How do these differences impact on the notion of citizenship itself and on the reality of the rule of law?
CISRUL workshops in June
Please do come and participate in our two June workshops, whether by offering a paper or from the floor.
23-24 June: The Category of Violence (with Inter-Disciplinary Approaches to Violence research group)
We are used to thinking of 'violence' as violence and, indeed, as something more real than almost anything else. As something that defies categorization; that just is. In thisworkshop we propose to suspend our belief that there is such a thing called violence, and instead focus on how we and others use 'violence' as a category of action, whether in designing government policy, passing judgement in court, producing films, writing newspaper articles or political theory, diagnosing patients, or simply chatting about other people. Our intention is not to define violence or even to offer alternative definitions, but instead to think how violence gets defined and with what consequences. How, why and with what consequences do people deploy the category of violence? How do they distinguish between 'violent' and 'non-violent', and to what effect? For example, how is the line drawn between 'violent' and 'peaceful' protest and between 'tough' and 'brutal' policing of protests, and what rides on those distinctions? More broadly, what are the effects of scholars marking off as 'violent' whole areas of human life, as in the pathology of 'violent' tendencies, or of labeling whole regions of world as 'violent'? Or of art taking 'violence´ self-consciously as its object, as in Clockwork Orange? Law generally avoids the term 'violence' in favour of more 'neutral' terms such as coercion – but with what results? With what consequences does violence get linked to categories such as religion and sex, often considered 'sources of violence'? And what are the effects of disputing the boundaries of violence, for example when we label as 'symbolic violence' actions that are not normally described as 'violent'? Speakers are likely to include Daniel Goldstein, Vivienne Jabri, Fiona Sampson and Hent de Vries.
28-29 June: What Equality? (followed by PhD summer school on 30 June-1 July at The Burn)
Equality, slogan of choice in heady moments such as the 1790s and the 1960s, recedes into the background at other times like our present. All the more reason to ask, now, what ideas of equality there are, and whether there are equalities in practice. Ideas and practices of equality have, no doubt, been around for ever. Hunter-gatherers are often said to be egalitarian. Being equal in the eyes of God has for long been important to Judaeo-Christian traditions. But the workshop will focus on the ideas of equality associated with citizenship, with civil society and with rule of law. Citizenship, civil society and rule of law all include notions of equality, but it is far from clear what notions of equality, how they relate to each other, and what they do in practice. There are, to begin with, many notions of equality. For example, citizenship and rule of law share a notion of being equal as individuals in spite of other differences. One votes as a citizen rather than as a women, indigenous person or aristocrat, and one faces judgement as a legal subject equal to other legal subjects. But we will discuss, among other things, how the equality of citizens and equality before the law relate to each other, and how they stand in relation to other kinds of equality and inequality, such as the substantive distribution of rights, the socioeconomic disparities that concerned T.H. Marshall, access to the justice system, and cultural recognition. We will also ask how equality plays out in civil society, which has been accused of being unrepresentative and elitist yet often invokes some kind of equality as its objective. Speakers include James Collins, Pilar Domingo, Hilary Homans, Ajay Gudavarthy and Sasha Roseneil.
Trevor Stack
05 February 2011