Towards a Political Theology of Vulnerability Anthropological and Theological Propositions

Abstract

Recent experiences of terror, violence, and catastrophe, such as the terror attacks in Norway in 2011 or the Peshawar School Massacre leaving 132 children and nine staff dead on December 16, 2014, strengthen the sense of the fundamental vulnerability in human existence. In this article, it is argued that political theology, in responding to such experiences, should aim at perceiving and protecting vulnerability as a value. For this purpose, basic propositions for a theological anthropology of vulnerability are put forward. Likewise, propositions for interpreting God as vulnerable are presented, criticizing the traditional theistic concept of God as immutable and hence unable to suffer. The relevance of these propositions for political theology is finally addressed.     

THE MANIFESTO,THE TIMELINE,AND THE MEMORY SITE: THE 22 JULY 2011 ATTACKS IN NORWAY AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF GENRE

In addition to being heinous crimes, acts of terrorism are complex chronopolitical events. Perpetrators, victims, survivors, families, and authorities manage their relationship to the events by engaging with and giving shape to time, or, rather, to a plurality of times. To perform this time work, they avail themselves of different genres, which serve as chronopolitical tools. This article discusses three such genres: the manifesto, the timeline, and the memorial site. These genres belong not only to different phases of the terror attacks but also to different actors. They are used to shape temporal progression in ways that enable specific forms of action, survival, and memory. The article takes the 22 July 2011 attacks in Norway as an example to map and analyze the role of these chronopolitical genres in managing the multiple times of terror.     

Population and Affective Perception: Biopolitics and Anticipatory Action in US Counterinsurgency Doctrine

Abstract: This paper analyses the biopolitical logics of current US counterinsurgency doctrine in the context of the multiple forms of biopower that make up the “war on terror”. It argues that counterinsurgency doctrine aims to prevent spectral networked insurgencies by intervening on the “environment” of insurgent formation—the relations between three different enactments of “population” (species being, logistical life and ways of life) and a fourth—affectively imbued perception. Counterinsurgency is best characterised, then, as an “environmentality” (Foucault M 2008 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége De France, 1978–1979. Translated by G Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan) that redeploys elements from other forms of biopolitics alongside an emphasis on network topologies, future‐orientated action and affective perception.     

A Two‐Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror

Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two‐tiered method: the first level accounts for issue‐specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs. gain frames) and social identity theory (self‐referential vs. other‐referential frames). We discuss the theoretical merits of a two‐tiered approach, arguing that it should yield compound insights greater than the sum of its parts. Applying this method to newspaper coverage of the war on terror, we find a strong trend at the generalizable level: media framing of the war shifted over time from a predominant use of “fear” (self‐referential loss) frames to an increasing use of “charity” (other‐referential gain) frames. Our approach further reveals that the fear frames used in the lead‐up to the Iraq War were not driven by issue‐specific frames related to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction as we might have thought, but rather by frames related to the anticipated threats to U.S. troops. This study sharpens our understanding of how framing of the war evolved, but more broadly it suggests that a two‐tiered approach could be applied both within and across policy issues to advance our understanding of the framing process.     

“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

Geopolitics as palimpsest: Contextual inscriptions of the global war on terror

This article aims to develop the agenda of a grounded, contextual critical geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the interaction between local and hegemonic geopolitics. This is achieved by examining the local reception of the geopolitics of the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) in the context of the establishment of US bases on Romanian territory following the 2004 US Global Posture Review. A close reading of this context reveals a complex and ambiguous relationship, simultaneously assertive and subversive, between the GWOT's sui generis, territorially non-specific geopolitics of transit, and Romania's exceptionalist geopolitics of place, significance, and convergence. Not only did the GWOT geopolitics fail to erase local geopolitics, but it also became muddied, contaminated, and inadvertently destroyed by the ‘old’ local geopolitical knowledge. This suggests an understanding of geopolitics as a palimpsest, the product of serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings-over that produce geopolitical knowledge of, and in different contexts. In broader conceptual terms, this study highlights the heteroglossia of geopolitical knowledge, the resilience of local geopolitics, and the importance of contextual sensitivity in the pursuit of the normative mission of critical geopolitics.     

Between Tragedy and Farce: 9/11 Compensation and the Value of Life and Death

This paper examines how lives have been valued (or not) in the US federal compensation programs set up in the wake of 9/11. The Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), implemented within days of the attacks, provided unlimited funds to the victims. In contrast, many first responders who developed illnesses later have had access to limited support. Only in 2011 was the Zadroga Act signed into place, which extends compensation to these workers and others. This paper compares and contrasts the two programs to make two points. One, the debates around compensation lay bare the differential values that are ascribed to life, and how biopower not only fosters life but abandons some to the point of death. Two, despite the controversies around extending compensation, the Zadroga Act was eventually enacted. Our second point is thus that war is not just destructive, but can be used to reconstitute the social and political in unanticipated ways.     

Legitimacy and the virtual battlefield: putting the first-person shooter on the witness stand

Although much has been written on the abilities of the first-person shooter to advance neo-orientalist themes and US imperial agendas through its aesthetics and narrative, the author argues that by exploiting the porous institutional boundaries between military planners and the video-game industry, the hyperrealist shooter becomes a formidable and formative middle ground not only in reshaping understanding of and access to the nebulous and furtive world of discreet war, but also in filling its legitimacy gap.