In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist Geographies of Territorialisation

Abstract: This paper applies an anarchist approach to ongoing debates on the politics, nature and function of territory. Recent work in geography has problematised dominant modes of territory, but has stopped short of a systematic critique of how statist spatial imaginations and practices reproduce and perpetuate the dominance of both capitalism and authority in society. In this paper, I deploy anarchist thought and practice to argue that territory must be viewed as a processual and contested product of social relations. This is linked to the notion of prefiguration; a distinctive concept in anarchist thought and practice embedding envisioned future modes of social organisation into the present. Using examples from fieldwork with anarchist‐inspired groups, I explore anarchist prefigurative politics as a means to re‐imagine how practices of territorialisation and bordering might be deployed as part of a broader project of social transformation.     

La Dissuasion nucléaire française: Genèse et actualité

This article reviews three recent books on the history of the late nineteenth-century French anarchist movement—one by the French historian Vivien Bouhey and the other two by American scholars, Alexander McKinley and John Merriman. It replaces these works in the context of a renewed interest in the study of the anarchist movement, as an early example of transnational terrorist organisation, and as a relevant field of application for the historiographic concepts of network and transnationalism. In conclusion, it highlights the differences between French and US approaches to the study of anarchism, and evidences the limits of the ‘transnational turn’ in this particular historical field.     

Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914

This article explores the anarchists' multilayered theoretical and practical engagement with the concepts and performance of nations, nationalism and national belonging, by applying the frameworks of banal nationalism (understood as an ideology) and everyday nationhood (the daily practices in which nation and nationhood are enacted) as analytical categories, to investigate the Italian and French anarchist exile groups in London between 1870 and 1914. Adopting these theoretical categories proves fruitful in probing the anarchists' perception and enactment of the idea of nation and national belonging, contributing to the literature on the relationship between pre-1914 socialist movements and (inter)nationalism and highlighting the specificity of anarchism therein. Using Fox and Miller-Idriss's four categories of everyday nationhood, we show that while the anarchists explicitly subverted the everyday performance of nationhood, redeploying it along internationalist lines, some forms of attachment to the national did endure and were in fact not always contradictory with anarchist internationalism. Looking at the exilic rituals of this intensely diasporic group thus complicates the simplistic but still pervasive view of a monolithic ideological internationalism and rejection of the national on the part of anarchists.     

Common usage,presumption and verisimilitude in sixteenth-century theories of juridical interpretation

The question of how common usage could be constitutive for the meaning of linguistic expressions has been discussed by Renaissance philosophers such as Lorenzo Valla, and it also played an important role in Renaissance theories of juridical interpretation. An aspect of the analysis of common usage in Renaissance theories of juridical interpretation that concerns the role of presumption has not yet found much attention. Renaissance jurists such as Simone de Praetis, Nicolaus Everardus, and Aimone de Cravetta saw that both the usage of Latin by practitioners of law and the vernacular common usage of ordinary people often differed from the technical definition of legal concepts as laid down by ancient jurists or modern legislators. In some cases, they ascribed both to Latin and to vernacular common usage the power of changing the meaning of juridical terms. Still, they were aware of the fact that matters of common usage involve always a degree of uncertainty. The methodological notion of presumption is one of the concepts that figured most prominently in Renaissance approaches to the problem of uncertainty, and, in particular, it was applied in the analysis of meaning-change of legal concepts through common usage.     

THE CRISIS OF THE MOVEMENTS: THE ENABLING STATE AS QUISLING

The basic argument of this paper is that the anti-systemic movements political successes over the last century have turned out to be medium-term cul de sacs at the expense of the real longue duree purposes of the movements. The discovery of the enabling state by radicals towards the end of the nineteenth century has resulted in a Quisling in the anti-systemic ranks. This argument brings to the fore the anarchist critique which never accepted the enabling state as a legitimate part of the radical political repertoire. Nevertheless this essay is not a plea for a return to anarchist roots but rather attempts to reinsert anarchism, and feminism, into a single framework of anti-systemic movements alongside socialism and nationalism. As the state is being shown to be disenabling rather than enabling across the various zones of the world-economy it is argued that anarchist ideas deserve some priority as we revise radical political strategies.     

Reanimating Anarchist Geographies: A New Burst of Colour

Abstract: The late nineteenth century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus. Yet despite the vigorous intellectual debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not until the 1970s that anarchism was once again given serious consideration by academic geographers who, in laying the groundwork for what is today known as “radical geography”, attempted to reintroduce anarchism as a legitimate political philosophy. Unfortunately, quiet followed once more, and although numerous contemporary radical geographers employ a sense of theory and practice that shares many affinities with anarchism, direct engagement with anarchist ideas among academic geographers have been limited. As contemporary global challenges push anarchist theory and practice back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline.     

Phases in the postwar German reception of the "Euthanasia Program" (1939-1945) involving the killing of the mentally disabled and its exploitation by neuroscientists

The killing of disabled patients with mental diseases during 1939-1945 is regarded as the precursor to the Holocaust. Although known at least since the Nuremberg Doctors Trial (1946-1947), the reception accorded these crimes against humanity varied (and evolved through time) depending on the parties: the old establishment, the younger generation, the different political interests, and the jurists, the theologians, the historians, the medical authorities. I attempt to distinguish five phases in the debate in light of the political background between 1945 until the present.     

Ulama in Islamic Law‐Making and Adjudication in Contemporary Egypt

The article examines the legislative and judicial tasks of Islamic jurists and how they carried it out in constitutional or general legal structure. While the Pakistani experiment was inspired by the Iranian model of jurists' involvement in legislatures, Egypt took a different path by not recognizing any official role for Islamic jurists with ambiguous recognition of Islamic jurisprudence. The legislative role could take the form of incorporating Islamic jurists into the legislature, establishing a committee partially made up of Islamic jurists, or handing over some legislative task to an Islamic jurisprudential institution. Despite the fact that Islamization was intended to respond to the people's requests, it employed autocratic and authoritarian mechanisms. The project attempted to replace the typical class of socially recognized jurists with appointed committees entrusted with Islamic codification. The experiment was challenged for its operation and its Islamicity but never introduced Shari'a courts or Islamic clerical legislation.     

Emotion at the Center of Radical Politics: On the Affective Structures of Rebellion and Control

Abstract: Through an examination of anarchist organizing and policing and security tactics at the 2008 Republican National Convention, this paper argues that the emotional connections between radical activists have become the targets of both social movement strategies for growth and police strategies for social control. As such, the emotions of activists are a site of intense political contestation. I introduce the concept of affective structures to develop an account of the relations between affect, emotion, and radical politics, and present these structures as both the means and the ends of contemporary anarchist organizing and state strategies for social control.     

The nation against the State: The Irish question and Britain‐based anarchists in the Age of Empire

This paper discusses the relationship between early anarchism and republican/nationalist ideas. We will focus on the case of British‐based activists grouped around the journal Freedom and their engagement with Irish nationalism during the Age of the Empire. Freedom, founded in 1886, was the most important anarchist journal of the English‐speaking anarchist–communist networks at the time and was the main editorial reference for the worldwide community of anarchist activists, mostly exiled, who resided in London at that time. Extending current interdisciplinary literature on transnational anarchism, we argue that anarchist views of nations, while rejecting the novel notion of the nation‐state, were associated with anti‐colonial struggles and with republican anti‐monarchical and egalitarian notions. Based on primary sources, we discuss the intersections between these Britain‐based anarchists and anti‐colonial Irish radicals, by engaging both with their writings and their international networks of solidarity, thus exploring the complex intermingling of anarchism, anti‐colonialism, and republicanism.     

Féminisme,anarchisme et fédéralisme. L’exemple de l’organisation Alternative libertaire entre 2006 et 2012

Abstract

This article examines the spatial, and especially scalar, dimension of feminism in a contemporary French anarchist organisation. This perspective is contextualised by a reminder of the role of feminism in the political history of anarchism and of the role of the spatial dimention through the question of anarchist federalism. The empirical study is based on research conducted through participant observation within the organisation Alternative Libertaire between 2006 and 2012. The problem to be addressed is the question of whether anarchist women succeed as well as they claim in bringing into question, in their promotion of feminism both inside the organisation and outside, the centrality of Paris in favour of an anarchist federalism. For this reason two scales or levels are studied: the national level and the local level of the city. The city of Paris is treated as both the national capital and as a locality.     

Sociopolitics

Sociopolitics refer to ways in which politics and relations of power are constituted through an authoritative discourse on the social. This concept echoes Foucault's biopolitics. “Society” and the “social” are devices, as well as categorical foundations, for the political. As with “bio” in biopolitics, “socio” gives a particular form to power that it articulates and constitutes. This review essay uses this concept to discuss recent work of James Scott and David Graeber, and the English-language translation of a 1980 collection of essays by Pierre Clastres. I argue that this anarchist anthropology articulates a clear break within anarchist theory. This break is in the ways the social and the political are related as means and ends in ethnography and in conceptualization of anarchist practice.     

Engaging the Non-Flat World: Anarchism and the Promise of a Post-Capitalist Collaborative Commons

This paper challenges the use of a geographically site-centred, flat ontology to justify contemporary anarchists’ predisposition to espouse exclusively prefigurative forms of action. By considering the anarchist, post-capitalist potential of a technologically enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement, the case is made for the need to acknowledge and engage the higher-order (emergent) nexuses between state apparatuses and capitalist flows. Doing so, it is argued, makes envisioning the process of creating anarchist oriented, post-capitalist futures significantly more tangible and convincing.     

Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Me?nikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian‐speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.     

Johann August Philipp Gesner (1738-1801). A review of his essay "The language amnesia" in the bicentennial anniversary of his death

On the 200th anniversary of Johann August Philipp Gesner's death, this paper summarizes and discusses a paper on language amnesia published in 1770. The author had clear knowledge of selective mental impairments resulting from brain diseases, and of separate mental representations for words and their underlying concepts. However, to explain the language impairment, Gesner suggested that it would not be caused by focal damage to a specific anatomic and functional unit of the mind, but is the consequence of a general sluggishness of the mental processes.     

The Anarchism of the Occupy Movement

Occupy has been criticised for a lack of organisation and ideological direction, its persistent failure to articulate practical reforms and its anarchism. Occupy's extensive influence calls for scholarly analysis of its underlying ideas and its praxis. This article develops a conceptual understanding of the movement and argues that the criticisms above overlook both how the movement's participants rationalise its praxis and the consistently anarchist forms of this praxis. The article draws on recent scholarship that distinguishes between ideological anarchism and anarchical forms of praxis inspired by anarchist principles. It argues that Occupy's praxis is anarchical. Though not ideologically anarchist, Occupy expresses a commitment to anarchist ideals. The article develops a particular conception of anarchism and in this context, discusses Occupy's anti-capitalist position, reflected in its catchcry ‘we are the 99 per cent’. It concludes by explicating the anarchical elements of Occupy's praxis.

占领运动被批评缺少组织和思想方向,总是提不出实际改革的诉求,再就是无政府主义。占领运动的广泛影响需要对其背后的思想和实践进行学术分析。本文作者从观念上对占领运动有所理解,认为那些批评忽视了运动的参与者其实是在使其实践,使其无政府形态的实践理性化。本文根据近年的学术研究,对思想上的无政府主义和无政府主义原则所启发的无政府式实践做了区分。作者认为占领运动的实践是无政府的,思想上却不是无政府的。但尽管思想上不是无政府,占领运动却表达了无政府的理想。本文提出了一种独特的无政府主义概念,并藉此讨论了占领运动反资本主义的立场,反思了“我们是百分之九十九”的口号。本文最后阐述了占领运动实践的无政府主义元素。     

Anarchist Anti-Imperialism: Guy Aldred and the Indian Revolutionary Movement, 1909–14

This article examines the British anarchist Guy Aldred’s involvement in the Indian revolutionary movement from 1909 to 1914 in order to reflect on solidarities and antagonisms between anarchism and anti-colonial movements in the early twentieth century. Drawing on Aldred’s writings, court material and intelligence reports, it explores, first, his decision to print the suppressed Indian nationalist periodical The Indian Sociologist in August 1909 and, second, his involvement in Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s disputed arrest and deportation, which was brought to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in October 1910. In spite of recent attempts by historians to bring the Indian revolutionary movement into much closer conjunction with anarchism than previously assumed, Aldred’s engagement with the Indian freedom struggle has escaped sustained historical attention. Addressing this silence, the article argues that Aldred’s anti-imperialism was rooted in his anarchist visions of freedom, including freedom of the press, and reveals a more unusual concern with the question of colonialism than shown by almost any other British anarchist in the early twentieth century. At the same time, it cautions that Aldred was blind to the problems of Indian nationalism, especially the Hindu variety espoused by Savarkar, which leaves his anarchist anti-imperialism much compromised.     

Identity,Gender Relations and Community Life in the History of the Migration of Italian Anarchists to Brazil (1890–1922)

This article investigates how women within the anarchist movement participated in the great migratory wave which saw millions of Italians leave Italy to emigrate to Brazil between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyses how this participation developed in the country of arrival, and in particular whether the ideals of freedom and emancipation relating to the so-called ‘women's question’ supported by the anarchists were realised in the context of the migration project. It focuses on the comparison between the experience of women of the first generation, who were an integral part of a family migration project that left little room for individual growth, and young women of the second generation, raised in Brazil within anarchist communities and on the basis of the ideals that inspired them. It was the opportunity to grow in a context culturally inspired by the principles of freedom and autonomy that allowed some of these younger women to determine themselves, despite the generally conservative reality even within anarchist communities. This article seeks to reassess and deepen themes that previous historiography has only partially assessed due to a difficult and fragmented source based on female migration, which has often led scholars to fall back on the unfounded statement that there had only been low female participation in anarchist migration to Brazil.     

Practice What You Teach: Facilitating Anarchism In and Out of the Classroom

Abstract: In recent years, human geographers have criticized the increasing corporatization, commodification, and objectification of knowledge production, and have looked to critical pedagogical frameworks that seek to counteract these forces. Anarchism, as a body of theories and practices, has a long history of engagement with radical pedagogical experimentation. Anarchism and geography have much to contribute to one another: anarchism, through its support for creative, non‐coercive, practical learning spaces, and geography, for its critical examination of the spaces of education. In this paper, I evaluate the prospects for anarchist‐geographic pedagogies theoretically, as well as through my own experiences teaching and learning about anarchism over the past decade in a liberal arts, higher education US environment. I argue for a combined critical anarchist‐geographic pedagogical approach that appreciates the challenges of building alternative learning models within existing neoliberalizing institutions, provides the necessary tools for finding uniquely situated opportunities for educational change, and emplaces a grounded, liberating, student‐led critical pedagogy.     

Beyond Revolution,Beyond the Law: Christian Anarchism in Conversation with Giorgio Agamben

ABSTRACT

The Christian anarchist tradition and the work of Giorgio Agamben fit within a subversive trajectory of political theology that critiques the state paradigm, while also operating at a distance from it in their creation of a newly imagined political community. This research asks what it could look like to conceive of a political community beyond the state, imagined from the subject position of the marginalized. It also seeks a mutually informed path towards the practical formation of such communities, as elaborated through a case study of the Anabaptist tradition. Agamben’s concepts provide a renovation of the political themes of Christian anarchism, including the ideas of moving beyond revolution, voluntary exile through the abdication of rights, and messianic vocation. As the space for political praxis within Agamben’s work continues to evolve, the Anabaptist tradition provides helpful practices to imagine a withdrawal from the governmental machine as a community of voluntary exiles.