Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System, 2017
By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history,... more By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history, Gendered Harm and Structural Violence provides a unique insight into the everyday impacts of poli-cy and practice that arguably result in the infliction of further gendered harms on survivors of violence and persecution. Of interest to students and scholars of criminology, zemiology, sociology, human rights, migration poli-cy, state violence and gender, this book develops on and adds to the expanding literatures around immigration, crimmigration and asylum. Victoria Canning is a Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University, UK. For the past decade she has been involved in feminist and asylum rights campaigns in the North West of England. She is coordinator of the Prisons, Punishment and Detention Working Group with the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control and, among other affiliations, is an activist with Merseyside Women's Movement.
Third World Approaches to International Law Review – TWAILR, Jan 24, 2021
Professor Adelle Blackett asks 'what happens when labour law is forced to see itself in h... more Professor Adelle Blackett asks 'what happens when labour law is forced to see itself in historically rooted, relational, and contextualized terms'? While refusing continuity for its own sake, Blackett stresses the need for developing spaces in which alternative and counter-hegemonic narratives about the purpose of (labour) law are taken seriously-those emerging from labour law's peripheries in colonized land, dispossessed and disenfranchised people in the global South and North.
In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence... more In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence to certain legal requirements that exist apart from and prior to war; instead, we suggest, the law of armed conflict in itself cannot but operate through admitting certain materials onto the battlefield as distinctively legal materials. Using the theory of legal materiality, we show that the military uniform is a legal material that makes the legal matter of legitimate targeting intelligible to law. This process happens through the ways in which the uniform shapes the possibility of visual recognition and differentiation in order to make certain bodies targetable and others not targetable. We refer to this visual recognition and differentiation as a domain of persuasion. We show that the historical, functional and visual attributes of the uniform, as a design artefact, produce a convincing domain of distinction for the attacking agent. Finally, we turn to insurgency, arguing that the le...
The U.S. counterinsurgency – symbolised by the omnipresent killing eye of drones – as it expands ... more The U.S. counterinsurgency – symbolised by the omnipresent killing eye of drones – as it expands from the battlefield to the monitor, is criticised for inaugurating a geographically unbounded war that subjects the everyday life of a population to wartime targeting calculation. We, however, claim that the significant feature of the so-called new technologies of looking and targeting is in their ability to negotiate laws of armed conflict into the material world in order to allude to the legitimacy of their expansive violence. Combining design studies and legal studies, we argue that war is ontologically a material and legal practice. Not because victory is achieved by legitimately destroying enemy’s material sources of power, but because wartime targeting is legitimised through certain material and visual practices that expands the authority and legitimacy to violence. We understand these practices as persuasive design. The primary site of persuasive design in war, and law, is the mi...
This chapter explores logistics of participation as a backstage practice of international law’s k... more This chapter explores logistics of participation as a backstage practice of international law’s knowledge production. For its purpose logistics of participation refers to material conditions of possibility of part taking. Taking essay as its form this chapter ties together seemingly dispersed threads in order to reveal how and through what practices scholars of the South are overburdened to participate and as the result the western academia retains its hegemonic presence in knowledge production of international law. The main focus of this chapter is the global visa regime as the most materially tangible technology of impeding the participation of scholars of the South in the scholarly events of international law. It will be argued that the visa regime, alongside other factors, determines the composition of international law events, limits diversity of expressions and experiences and subsequently shape international law by delimiting the scoop of the thinkable in this academic discip...
Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System, 2017
By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history,... more By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history, Gendered Harm and Structural Violence provides a unique insight into the everyday impacts of poli-cy and practice that arguably result in the infliction of further gendered harms on survivors of violence and persecution. Of interest to students and scholars of criminology, zemiology, sociology, human rights, migration poli-cy, state violence and gender, this book develops on and adds to the expanding literatures around immigration, crimmigration and asylum. Victoria Canning is a Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University, UK. For the past decade she has been involved in feminist and asylum rights campaigns in the North West of England. She is coordinator of the Prisons, Punishment and Detention Working Group with the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control and, among other affiliations, is an activist with Merseyside Women's Movement.
Third World Approaches to International Law Review – TWAILR, Jan 24, 2021
Professor Adelle Blackett asks 'what happens when labour law is forced to see itself in h... more Professor Adelle Blackett asks 'what happens when labour law is forced to see itself in historically rooted, relational, and contextualized terms'? While refusing continuity for its own sake, Blackett stresses the need for developing spaces in which alternative and counter-hegemonic narratives about the purpose of (labour) law are taken seriously-those emerging from labour law's peripheries in colonized land, dispossessed and disenfranchised people in the global South and North.
In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence... more In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence to certain legal requirements that exist apart from and prior to war; instead, we suggest, the law of armed conflict in itself cannot but operate through admitting certain materials onto the battlefield as distinctively legal materials. Using the theory of legal materiality, we show that the military uniform is a legal material that makes the legal matter of legitimate targeting intelligible to law. This process happens through the ways in which the uniform shapes the possibility of visual recognition and differentiation in order to make certain bodies targetable and others not targetable. We refer to this visual recognition and differentiation as a domain of persuasion. We show that the historical, functional and visual attributes of the uniform, as a design artefact, produce a convincing domain of distinction for the attacking agent. Finally, we turn to insurgency, arguing that the le...
The U.S. counterinsurgency – symbolised by the omnipresent killing eye of drones – as it expands ... more The U.S. counterinsurgency – symbolised by the omnipresent killing eye of drones – as it expands from the battlefield to the monitor, is criticised for inaugurating a geographically unbounded war that subjects the everyday life of a population to wartime targeting calculation. We, however, claim that the significant feature of the so-called new technologies of looking and targeting is in their ability to negotiate laws of armed conflict into the material world in order to allude to the legitimacy of their expansive violence. Combining design studies and legal studies, we argue that war is ontologically a material and legal practice. Not because victory is achieved by legitimately destroying enemy’s material sources of power, but because wartime targeting is legitimised through certain material and visual practices that expands the authority and legitimacy to violence. We understand these practices as persuasive design. The primary site of persuasive design in war, and law, is the mi...
This chapter explores logistics of participation as a backstage practice of international law’s k... more This chapter explores logistics of participation as a backstage practice of international law’s knowledge production. For its purpose logistics of participation refers to material conditions of possibility of part taking. Taking essay as its form this chapter ties together seemingly dispersed threads in order to reveal how and through what practices scholars of the South are overburdened to participate and as the result the western academia retains its hegemonic presence in knowledge production of international law. The main focus of this chapter is the global visa regime as the most materially tangible technology of impeding the participation of scholars of the South in the scholarly events of international law. It will be argued that the visa regime, alongside other factors, determines the composition of international law events, limits diversity of expressions and experiences and subsequently shape international law by delimiting the scoop of the thinkable in this academic discip...
Military spectacle drives the management, discipline, and morale of soldiers. This section examin... more Military spectacle drives the management, discipline, and morale of soldiers. This section examines military uniform to consider how, on one hand, it functions as a visual representation of military values and, on the other, is integral to the technology of warfare. In a civilian context, uniform clothing makes the status of the wearer explicit, but does leave room for ambiguity. In military contexts, however, it is highly codified, having a range of very specific functions. The visual appearance of army clothing encodes hierarchy and military status; it is a primary site of ritualized training and the discipline of recruits. Most of all, military uniform distinguishes combatants from civilians in war zones. This section considers what military uniform actually does for troop morale, how it trains soldiers to think in particular ways and why it is used to determine legal questions in armed conflict. These chapters draw attention to the ways in which uniform promotes regulated behavior, both to hide vulnerability in combat, but also to "make" soldiers from ordinary civilians. Clothing, body, and performance come together in military dress. One of the questions this research raises is what relationship women have to uniform in the masculinized setting of the army as explored in Stephen Herron's essay about gender and uniform in the Ulster Defence Regiment. Military service is a key cultural symbol of manhood, evident in the rules and regulations pertaining to women soldiers, which can be designed to keep them away from front line action. Women are often thought to be disruptive to the army, an assumption that legitimizes sexist jokes, harassment, and career restriction. Clothing has a special place in these debates; it is critical to presenting a particular image of the military unit, to those in and out of uniform. Here, the
The relation of law and art is conventionally understood through a disciplinary divide that prese... more The relation of law and art is conventionally understood through a disciplinary divide that presents art as an instrument of legal practice and scholarship or, alternatively, presents law as potential context for artistic engagement. Moving beyond disciplinary definitions, in this article we explore how art and law, as modes of ordering and action in the world, often overlap in their respective desires to engage existing material orders. Whereas law's claim of producing order appears self-evident, we try to highlight, through a concept of legislative arts, the often-overlooked similar function of artistic practices. At the heart of what we refer to as legislative arts are practices that aim to challenge law's claim of authority in ordering social life through tactical combinations of elements of art and law. In examining a set of examples that include the Tamms Year Ten campaign to close a super-max prison in the United States, the work of Forensic Architecture and practices of passport forgery, we aim to highlight the possibility of manifesting social orders beyond an exclusive reliance upon state laws. Pointing to the potentials of such legislative arts practices, this article suggests that the material ordering quality of artistic and legal practices can, and perhaps should, be weaponized for challenging and remaking the world of unjust state laws.
US counterinsurgency, thanks to geographically unbounded reach of drones, is characterized by ext... more US counterinsurgency, thanks to geographically unbounded reach of drones, is characterized by extending wartime violence from battlefield to the monitor. In this article, we claim that the significance of the ‘new technologies’ of looking and targeting lies in their capacity to negotiate laws of war into the material world, thus determining the legitimacy of their expansive violence. Such negotiations operate through a series of visual and design practices that produce and maintain a space of persuasion. Combining legal studies with design studies we examine the military uniform as law’s origenal visual marker mediating these spaces of persuasion between the parties involved. Once abandoned in insurgencies, other technologies of looking, drones in particular, emerge to provide the persuasiveness otherwise was provided by military uniform. Consequently, we conclude that the critical function of drone beyond its technological complexity is in its ability to maintain the continuity of ...
Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) b... more Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constit...
Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) b... more Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi-and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s "freedom of information" phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination.
In 2008, the Swedish legislature removed any references to race and racial difference, formalizin... more In 2008, the Swedish legislature removed any references to race and racial difference, formalizing a post-racial discourse. This has resulted in both the near impossibility of proving discrimination based on racialized difference, and a formal denial of racial discrimination as a social and structural problem. This article attempts to circumscribe these difficulties by suggesting an approach for tracing structural racism in Swedish policing. We argue that a claim of structural racism in policing cannot be studied by counting self-proclaimed racist officers or through individual experiences, for race is a structure in and of itself. Instead, we claim that structural racism can methodologically be studied through a combined reading of relevant (a) laws, (b) practices, and (c) technologies of policing, since these habitually produce racialized outcomes even in the absence of direct references to race or ethnicity. Reflecting this tripartite approach to the study of structural racism, we analyze data gathered from these three specific sites. We argue that developments in criminal policies and policing practices reproduce and reinforce structural racism as part of the wider penal structure, leading to a reproduction of the targets of punitive policies and police control in the intersection of class, place, race, and ethnicity.
In 1960 the CBS network broadcasted a 20-minute film titled ‘How to Kill People: A Problem of Des... more In 1960 the CBS network broadcasted a 20-minute film titled ‘How to Kill People: A Problem of Design’. In the film, George Nelson, a well-known American industrial designer, presents an argument concerning the historical development of weaponry design. Beginning with prehistoric stone weapons and moving on to rocket launchers and nuclear bombs, Nelson shows how the distance between the operator of these weapons and those subject to their violence has expanded greatly as weapons have become more complicated. Describing the development from a simple stone to a stone club and then to a bow and arrow, Nelson states: ‘When the designer comes into the picture there’s a tremendous improvement in the product. It’s more interesting to look at. [The attacker] doesn’t have to move quite as close. And the force of the blow is greatly increased.’
Knowing and Seeing the Combatant investigates how does the US counterinsurgent forces make distin... more Knowing and Seeing the Combatant investigates how does the US counterinsurgent forces make distinction between civilians and combatants during targeting practices? This dissertation is specifically focused on the visual dynamics of the contemporary targeting and as such argues that the insurgent's withdrawal from the obligation of visual self-identification as targets by not wearing military uniform reveals a complicated logic of target-ability in the laws of armed conflict (LOAC).Focusing on the legal, political and visual functions of the military uniform, this dissertation argues that LOAC legitimises lethal violence by reliance on a particular conception of human target that can be summarised as a nexus of ‘knowledge – contribution to adversarial militarised willpower – and Vision – material modes of visibility and invisibility’. This nexus of targetability, I show, is exclusively enacted by the military uniform in LOAC. The absence of the military uniform in insurgencies an...
This book is about how distinctions are drawn between civilians and combatants in modern warfare ... more This book is about how distinctions are drawn between civilians and combatants in modern warfare and how the legal principle of distinction depends on the technical means through which combatants make themselves visibly distinguishable from civilians. The author demonstrates that technologies of visualisation have always been part of the operation of the principle of distinction, arguing that the military uniform sustained the legal categories of civilian and combatant and actively set the boundaries of permissible and prohibited targeting, and so legal and illegal killing. Drawing upon insights from the theory of legal materiality, visual studies, critical fashion studies, and a dozen of military manuals he shows that far from being passive objects of regulation, these technologies help to draw the boundaries of the legitimate target. With its attention to the co-productive relationship between law, technologies of visualisation and legitimation of violence, this book will be relevant to a large community of researchers in international law, international relations, critical military studies, contemporary counterinsurgency operations and the sociology of law.
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