Beyond Blood and Coercion

Beyond Blood and Coercion PDF Author: Yves Winter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Rhetoric
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
This dissertation investigates and criticizes two common assumptions about violence in contemporary political theory and philosophy: that violence is mute and that it is instrumental. Through close readings of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, I argue that political violence has a semiotic character, that it involves the production of signs and meanings. These signs and meanings are not peripheral but central to the operations of political violence, because the political effectiveness of violence is partially determined by its representation. Practices of representation regulate how political violence is received and understood by an audience, which is why political violence cannot be explained by reference to institutions alone. Rather, it must be interpreted in the context of these practices of representation. It calls, therefore, for a critical hermeneutic attentive to how meanings and signs circulate beyond violence's narrowly functional and instrumental dimensions and beyond the control of violence's wielders. My readings offer a model for such an interpretive approach, for a critical hermeneutic that accounts for the semiotic aspects inherent in practices of political violence. My textual analyses ask how modes of representation and visibility organize particular formations of violence and produce political effects. By tracing the disseminations and dispersals of violence in Machiavelli's and Marx's texts, I challenge the conventionla classification that separates political from non-political violence, and I raise the question of what makes violence recognizable as political.

Beyond Blood and Coercion

Beyond Blood and Coercion PDF Author: Yves Winter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Rhetoric
Languages : en
Pages : 692

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation investigates and criticizes two common assumptions about violence in contemporary political theory and philosophy: that violence is mute and that it is instrumental. Through close readings of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, I argue that political violence has a semiotic character, that it involves the production of signs and meanings. These signs and meanings are not peripheral but central to the operations of political violence, because the political effectiveness of violence is partially determined by its representation. Practices of representation regulate how political violence is received and understood by an audience, which is why political violence cannot be explained by reference to institutions alone. Rather, it must be interpreted in the context of these practices of representation. It calls, therefore, for a critical hermeneutic attentive to how meanings and signs circulate beyond violence's narrowly functional and instrumental dimensions and beyond the control of violence's wielders. My readings offer a model for such an interpretive approach, for a critical hermeneutic that accounts for the semiotic aspects inherent in practices of political violence. My textual analyses ask how modes of representation and visibility organize particular formations of violence and produce political effects. By tracing the disseminations and dispersals of violence in Machiavelli's and Marx's texts, I challenge the conventionla classification that separates political from non-political violence, and I raise the question of what makes violence recognizable as political.

Beyond Blood Oil

Beyond Blood Oil PDF Author: Leif Wenar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538112116
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Leif Wenar’s 2016 book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World argues that much of the conflict, suffering, and injustice in the world is driven by an archaic rule in global trade that forces consumers to fund oppression and corruption. This oil curse is a major threat to global peace and stability. Wenar sets out Clean Trade policies to lift the oil curse through national legislation that affirms democratic principles. In Beyond Blood Oil, Wenar summarizes and extends his views, setting the stage for five essays from first-class critics from the fields of political theory, philosophy, and energy politics. Wenar replies vigorously and frankly to the critics, making the volume the scene of a highly energetic debate that will benefit all scholars, students, and global citizens interested in global justice, international security, oil politics, fair trade, climate change, and progressive reforms.

Bombing to Win

Bombing to Win PDF Author: Robert A. Pape
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471508
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that the key to success is attacking the enemy's military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders. Coercive air power can succeed, but not as cheaply as air enthusiasts would like to believe.Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus Egypt, providing details of bombing and governmental decision making. His detailed narratives of the strategic effectiveness of bombing range from the classical cases of World War II to an extraordinary reconstruction of airpower use in the Gulf War, based on recently declassified documents. In this now-classic work of the theory and practice of airpower and its political effects, Robert A. Pape helps military strategists and policy makers judge the purpose of various air strategies, and helps general readers understand the policy debates.

Coerced

Coerced PDF Author: Erin Hatton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520973402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers. Coerced explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of "employment" reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power, far beyond the ability to hire and fire. Because such arrangements are common across the economy, Hatton argues that coercion—as well as precarity—is a defining feature of work in America today. Theoretically forceful yet vivid and gripping to read, Coerced compels the reader to reevaluate contemporary dynamics of work, pushing beyond concepts like "career" and "gig work." Through this bold analysis, Hatton offers a trenchant window into this world of work from the perspective of those who toil within it—and who are developing the tools needed to push back against it.

Birthing Justice

Birthing Justice PDF Author: Julia Chinyere Oparah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317277201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.

The Prestige of Violence

The Prestige of Violence PDF Author: Sally Bachner
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820341355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Instead, she argues, both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence. Examining such works as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad. The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachner's readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time.

Beyond Power and Resistance

Beyond Power and Resistance PDF Author: Peter Bloom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783487550
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Has political resistance has lost its ability to confront political and economic power and achieve social change? Despite its best intentions, resistance has often become incorporated and neutered before it achieves its aims, as new forms of power absorb it and turn it towards their own ends. Since the Enlightenment, the opposing forces of power and resistance have framed our view of society and politics. Exploring that development, this book shows how resistance can, ironically, reinforce existing status quos and fundamentally strengthen capitalist and colonial desires for “sovereignty” and “domination”. It highlights, therefore, the urgent need for new critical perspectives that breaks free from this imprisoning modern history. In this spirit, this book seeks to theorize the radical potential for a post-resistance existence and politics. One that exchanges a permanent revolution against authority with the discovery of novel forms of agency, social relations and the self that are currently lacking. That aims to construct economic and social systems based not on the possibility of freedom but enlarging the freedom of possibility. In the 21st century can we move beyond power and resistance to a politics at the radical limits that eternally expands what is socially possible?

Coercive Control

Coercive Control PDF Author: Evan Stark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195384040
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.

Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico PDF Author: Wil G. Pansters
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784477
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Mexico is currently undergoing a crisis of violence and insecurity that poses serious threats to democratic transition and rule of law. This is the first book to put these developments in the context of post-revolutionary state-making in Mexico and to show that violence in Mexico is not the result of state failure, but of state-making. While most accounts of politics and the state in recent decades have emphasized processes of transition, institutional conflict resolution, and neo-liberal reform, this volume lays out the increasingly important role of violence and coercion by a range of state and non-state armed actors. Moreover, by going beyond the immediate concerns of contemporary Mexico, this volume pushes us to rethink longterm processes of state-making and recast influential interpretations of the so-called golden years of PRI rule. Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico demonstrates that received wisdom has long prevented the concerted and systematic study of violence and coercion in state-making, not only during the last decades, but throughout the post-revolutionary period. The Mexican state was built much more on violence and coercion than has been acknowledged—until now.

Power/Knowledge

Power/Knowledge PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 039473954X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.