From “refugee” to “migrant” in Calais solidarity activism: Re-staging undocumented migration for a future politics of asylum

The framing of issues of migration and clandestine travel in the European Union are tied up with a historically-specific ethos towards the outsider, which, after philosopher Jacques Rancière, I term a “count”. The count shaping the interventions of contemporary advocacy and humanitarian groups derives from conceptions of ethics rooted in political modernity, and – for Rancière – are also responsible for foreclosing disruptive appearances of equality. In practice, postures of compassion towards the refugee convert expressions of vocal dissent into matters for moral sympathy. In this paper I explore the implications of this claim for a future politics of asylum, focussing on moments of interruption to an underlying count. I suggest that the staging of the situation of undocumented migrants in Calais through the figure of the migrant rather than the refugee demonstrates a recasting of activism as a form of political listening rather than political speech – in this sense the interventions of anarchistic network No Borders reflect a call for a continuous “recount” of the situation, over an affirmation of a particular framing of the situation. In some ways this call remains problematic, sometimes reframing the voices of local people and migrants according to an external vision of politics. Nevertheless, I hold that this denaturalisation of compassionate hospitality as the only ethical response to asylum is useful in the broader terrain of political dissent, and points to the importance of embodied habit as a locus for enduring social transformations.     

政治体制改革的动力机制探析

政治体制改革的核心问题依然是解决动力问题,动力机制是政治体制改革的生命之所在。经济体制改革的深入推进及经济的高速发展是政治体制改革的物质推动力;公民社会的发育是政治体制改革的本源推动力;借鉴人类政治文明是政治体制改革的外在推动力;基层民主实践是政治体制改革的直接推动力;迅速普及的互联网是政治体制改革的技术推动力;政治体制改革的制度化是政治体制改革的长效推动力。     

马克思、恩格斯时代思想研究

所谓时代问题,就是对作为一个整体的人类社会一定历史发展阶段、发展态势与发展趋势的认识问题。马克思、恩格斯对人类社会历史发展阶段性的认识,包括两种基本思路、五种社会形态理论与三种社会形态理论。人类社会不断发展变化,要求我们进一步深入研究马克思、恩格斯的时代思想,而研究的基本思路,就是把五种社会形态理论与三种社会形态理论统一起来。     

Caviar matter(s): The material politics of the European caviar grey market

The last quarter of a century saw the international political community make concerted efforts to regulate global caviar trade and prevent illegal harvesting of critically endangered sturgeon. Ironically, the regulations have enabled the emergence of novel forms of illicit trade which intertwine legal and illegal streams of caviar on the international marketplace. This paper foregrounds these licit-illicit interfaces and argues that the international caviar trade constitutes a ‘grey market’ characterized by a host of laundering practices that entangle legal and illegal caviar flows. Drawing on geographical scholarship on political animals and fleshy geopolitics, the paper theorises how the fleshy material properties of caviar, namely its chemical-isotope profile and composite form, directly shape the European caviar grey market. By highlighting how the materiality of caviar creates grey interfaces between legal and illegal caviar economies, the paper unsettles dominant dichotomized representations of illegal caviar trade which tend to foster overwhelmingly securitized policy-enforcement approaches in Europe. In pointing to the hidden ‘fleshy geopolitics’ surrounding EU enforcement strategies, the paper calls for a reshaping of policy and enforcement which better attends to the grey dimensions of the caviar market and provides increased protection for wild sturgeon populations and marginalised communities located at the Eastern borders of Europe.     

Celebrations,Exaltations and Alpha Lands: Everyday geographies of the far-right

There is a gap in research that considers, and spatializes, the everyday geographies of far-right encounters, socialization, recreation and leisure. While much research considers the end-stages of right-wing radicalisation and focuses on the extreme right (e.g., hate groups, fringe political parties, despotic leaders, specific eruptions and episodes of violence or terror, online rhetoric), the daily processes, moments and spatial configurations in-between the mainstream and extreme are sometimes overlooked. These are crucial to understand, in order to develop a more nuanced and effective language in recognizing, responding to, and combatting right-wing radicalisation.This paper thus addresses the geographical blind spot by spatializing the everyday life of the far-right, through a three-pronged taxonomy. Drawing from ethnographic observations and social media and socio-demographic analyses, the paper argues that three geographies in particular emerge as nodes of far-right formation (attached to specific sites and online/offline): a) spaces of recreation and leisure (“Celebrations”); b) spaces of faith and spirituality (“Exaltations”); and c) spaces of the corporeal (“Alpha Lands”). These spaces intersect, extend across urban, peri-urban and rural terrains, and do not necessarily adhere to established political or territorial borders and boundaries, but rather, can be envisioned as multi-scalar spatial fixes, laden with political possibilities.     

Realist Thought and Humanitarian Intervention

This article seeks to test the assumption that realism is completely hostile to the ethical and political notions of humanitarian intervention. The popular understanding of realism states that the national interest and international order will always trump the moral impulse to assist those suffering gross human-rights abuses at the hands of their government. The article makes the argument that this understanding of realism emerged from a particular period of history and under the pens of specific individuals reacting to these conditions. By affording a much deeper historical scope to the term ‘realism’, this article shows how realism cannot be damned uniformly by those writing and thinking about humanitarian intervention in the present period, and the role it holds in contemporary debates on humanitarian intervention.     

Thirty years of science studies: knowledge,society and the political

This article explores the last 30 years of science studies. It presents what the author takes to be some of the main questions raised in this field, the solutions most of its practitioners advocated, and what informed their intellectual and political attitudes. It tries to place the social studies of knowledge in a broader perspective, linking it to parallel changes in anthropology, sociology and history, and it questions its relations to social change on the one hand, and to the political on the other. It closes with a critique of some, often dominant, attitudes in the STS field.     

The intellectual origins of Leninism, 1977

This essay is a general introduction to the special number on recent research on Atlantic history. While the topics here presented are diverse, most focusing on the first French Empire, particularly in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors share several common themes: (1) In Africa and the Americas, they seek to view the question of the Empire as a series of contested, temporary, and uncertain alliances and collaborations, in which negotiation rather than submission was most often the basis of power relations; (2) In the realm of political economy in theory and practice, the authors refuse pre-established notions of an Atlantic “community” of commodities and merchants functioning within an Atlantic “system.” Instead, they focus on closed networks of merchants functioning within the dynamics of merchant capitalism. (3) The authors seek alternatives to traditional approaches focusing on the nation-state and its institutions. Instead, they examine communities and regions in the Atlantic that include social elites, such as, merchants, the nobility, the gentry, and intellectuals, as well as neglected native peoples and forgotten spaces such as Africa.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

La persistance des relations pre-politiques entre agents de l'autorite et classes populaires pendant la revolution francaise (le discours public de l'autorite en situation d'emeute)

This article provides an intellectual history of the status of wage earners as conceptualized within the natural law paradigm by European writers both on the Continent and in Britain. Historians of political discourse have mostly investigated the consequences of such a status for the political rights of labourers. This article shows that the crucial moves were made by different authors analysing the relation of servant to master either in the domestic sphere or in private contracts. The article further contends that that resulting deeply ambiguous analyses implied a far from complete personal freedom for wage earners. This had a decisive impact on different visions of commercial society in early modern times, and left a significant legacy for moderns.