International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Mar 23, 2023
This paper problematizes the notion of "intent" through the concept of "involuntary resistance". ... more This paper problematizes the notion of "intent" through the concept of "involuntary resistance". Departing from the narratives of employees in nursing homes in Sweden during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that neoliberal norms and a local management that capitalizes on social hierarchies (sex, age, class, etc.) were the context of the strong biopolitical state management that occurred due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The friction between different forms of governing became a seedbed for an involuntary resistance with an unclear intent against the state recommendations. This sheds light upon the need to (re)frame the current dominance of specific types of knowledge that are constructed in the field of resistance. We suggest that new paths of thought are needed-within social sciences-that work towards a wider conceptualizing of resistance, which embraces practices that lie outside the common thought of dissent.
The productivity of the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was legendary... more The productivity of the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was legendary. He has written, co-authored, edited, and co-edited about 60 books. He has also contributed to more than 300 articles on a diverse range of subjects and has written several hundred reviews and comments to a variety of different academic journals. In total, his scholarly writing, which spanned over some five decades, resulted in no less than four million published words. Already in his 20s, Lasswell planned and carried out an “interdisciplinary” research program that emphasized the significance of culture, social structures, and personality in order to understand various political phenomena. In a discipline, at the time still dominated by historical, legal, and philosophical methods, he was an innovator, who developed various methodologies during the course of his work, qualitative as well as quantitative ones, including traditional and non-experimental methods, such as content analysis and in-depth interviews, but also different experimental and clinical methods as well as various statistical techniques.
Max Planck Encylopedia of International Procedural Law, 2020
The Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia was the first international court to give victims a formal v... more The Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia was the first international court to give victims a formal voice in a major atrocities trial. Victims of the Khmer Rouge atrocities committed in Cambodia from 1975-1979 are civil parties to the trial process, participating with many of the same rights as the prosecutors and the defense. They may also request the court to order reparations. In Case 002.1, nearing completion on crimes against humanity charges against the surviving senior leaders of the regime, 3,866 victims have been admitted as civil parties.
Two significant developments-(1) the rapidly changing world order, and (2) significant gaps in cu... more Two significant developments-(1) the rapidly changing world order, and (2) significant gaps in current social science scholarshipcall for a further exploration of resistance theories. In this paper, we identify some of the gaps and inconsistencies within the current bulk of research, and seek to contribute to the understanding of resistance, its applications and complexity. In short, this paper discusses three interacting and supporting forms of resistance, including various overlaps and interlinkages between them, which together constitute what we would like to call the ABC of resistance; that is, avoidance resistance, breaking resistance, and constructive resistance.
From the quotation above, which occurs quite often in scholarly literature today, several conclus... more From the quotation above, which occurs quite often in scholarly literature today, several conclusions could be made. One possible conclusion is simply that resistance matters. Another one is that resistance is an ‘activity’ that is performed in relation to power. To push it even further, it could be argued that power and resistance are entangled in different and intricate ways. A third conclusion that is possible to draw from the quotation, at least indirectly, is that if you are interested in understanding social change, then you have to try and understand the complex web of entanglements between power and resistance as well as, we would like to emphasize, resistance(see further Baaz et al. forthcoming). Moreover, another important dimension, which is elaborated in this editorial, and in the special issue at hand, is resistance at the crossroad of affects and emotions. Conventionally power and the study of power has been associated with and focused on, respectively, the military po...
4 A Structural Overview of the ECCC ...................................... 305 4.1 Jurisdiction a... more 4 A Structural Overview of the ECCC ...................................... 305 4.1 Jurisdiction and Goals of the ECCC .................................... 307 4.2 The Organs of the ECCC ................................................ 308 4.2.1 Co-Prosecutors and Co-Investigating Judges at the ECCC . 308 4.2.2 Judicial Chambers at the ECCC ................................. 309 4.2.3 Other Judicial Offices at the ECCC ............................ 309 4.3 A Summary of the Basic Judicial Process in the ECCC ............. 312 4.4 The Various National and Legal Backgrounds of the ECCC Staff 313 4.5 The ECCC’s Funding ..................................................... 314
The overall aim of this chapter is to make an intervention in the (re)emerging discussion on midd... more The overall aim of this chapter is to make an intervention in the (re)emerging discussion on middle-ground ethics (MGE). This is done by problematizing the principle of the responsibility to protect, understood as a constructive balance between, on the one hand, state sovereignty (order) and, on the other hand, individual human rights (justice) or, in other worlds, between international society and world society, within a legal perspective. As Wheeler (2000: 11) has observed, “Humanitarian intervention exposes the conflict between order and justice at its starkest”. The chapter also more directly contributes to the discussion on MGE by elaborating upon how a working balance between conflicting values might be realized in practice—in this case difficult humanitarian situations within sovereign states. The United Nations (UN) sanctioned multistate intervention in Libya 2011—Operation Unified Protector—is used as an illustration to the theoretical discussion(s) as well as a test case to scrutinize the quest for legitimizing the responsibility to protect by military means. The theoretical points of departure are the English School (ES) of International Relations (IR), especially the idea of an international society, and Scandinavian legal realism (SLR), in particular the method of social welfare.
IN LUNDQUIST, L., STUBBERGAARD, Y. & HALL, P.( …, 2008
... Sålunda kan en och samma person vara exempelvis lundensare, skåning, svensk, skandinav, europ... more ... Sålunda kan en och samma person vara exempelvis lundensare, skåning, svensk, skandinav, europé, västerlänning och världsmedborgare såväl som son, bror, make, pappa, kristen, socialdemokrat, statsvetare och kollega, på en och samma gång. ...
Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Confl... more Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict. By L. Gross Michael. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 321 pp., $27.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-68510-8). Michael L. Gross's new book , Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict , addresses the important question of the morality (as well as legality) of war. Hence, the book is a contribution to the literature on normative theory that has re-emerged over the last two decades in International Relations (see e.g. Brown 1992). Gross's focus is asymmetric warfare, the new face of modern armed conflict (cf. Kaldor 1999). The main argument of this philosophically argumentative book is that asymmetric conflict—for example, when a nation confronts a liberation/terrorist movement or other insurgency that does not observe the laws of war and, more importantly, does not have a structure or employ tactics against which conventional military force is fully effective—is changing the way we practice but also the way we think about war. Today, torture, rendition, assassination, blackmail, extortion, direct attacks on civilians as well as biological and chemical weapons are all finding their way back to the battlefield, despite long-standing international moral condemnation as well as legal prohibition. In answering the baffling question why the United States and some of its allies today blatantly employ unlawful means of warfare and confuse the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and international humanitarian law (IHL), Gross turns to the very nature of modern armed conflict. Torture, assassination, and blackmail rarely appear in conventional war. However, faced with the phenomenon of asymmetric war, scholars and practitioners of law and philosophy are today ready to reconsider deeply held ideas about combatant rights, unnecessary suffering and noncombatant impunity, to lay a foundation for military practices being both necessary as well as, they hope, humane. To be limited in fighting the global war on terror, proxy guerrilla wars, wars of national liberation or wars of humanitarian intervention by conventional …
Following the end of the Cold War, it became a widely held belief that, after more than 70 years ... more Following the end of the Cold War, it became a widely held belief that, after more than 70 years in exile, Russia would finally "return" to Europe-a sphere to which it had belonged since the time of Peter the Great-politically as well as normatively. Quite early on, however, it became clear that the country was choosing its own way, in ideological terms but also, by extension, in its understanding of international law-what the law of nations is for and what it is about. Lauri Mälksoo's, Russian Approaches, is, particularly considering its heuristic value, the most informative, interesting and innovative book written to date regarding (i) what the philosophy of international law in Russia is and how it has evolved over time, and (ii) how international law has been reflected in post-Soviet Russian state practice. The essay presents some of the weaknesses in Mälksoo's answers to these questions, including the disproportionate weight given to some explanatory factors and, by extension, the omission of others. It also argues, inspired by Martti Koskenniemi, for the importance of acknowledging "international law as a political project" in order to enable it to function both as an instrument for advancing various claims and as a relatively autonomous formal technique.
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Mar 23, 2023
This paper problematizes the notion of "intent" through the concept of "involuntary resistance". ... more This paper problematizes the notion of "intent" through the concept of "involuntary resistance". Departing from the narratives of employees in nursing homes in Sweden during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that neoliberal norms and a local management that capitalizes on social hierarchies (sex, age, class, etc.) were the context of the strong biopolitical state management that occurred due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The friction between different forms of governing became a seedbed for an involuntary resistance with an unclear intent against the state recommendations. This sheds light upon the need to (re)frame the current dominance of specific types of knowledge that are constructed in the field of resistance. We suggest that new paths of thought are needed-within social sciences-that work towards a wider conceptualizing of resistance, which embraces practices that lie outside the common thought of dissent.
The productivity of the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was legendary... more The productivity of the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was legendary. He has written, co-authored, edited, and co-edited about 60 books. He has also contributed to more than 300 articles on a diverse range of subjects and has written several hundred reviews and comments to a variety of different academic journals. In total, his scholarly writing, which spanned over some five decades, resulted in no less than four million published words. Already in his 20s, Lasswell planned and carried out an “interdisciplinary” research program that emphasized the significance of culture, social structures, and personality in order to understand various political phenomena. In a discipline, at the time still dominated by historical, legal, and philosophical methods, he was an innovator, who developed various methodologies during the course of his work, qualitative as well as quantitative ones, including traditional and non-experimental methods, such as content analysis and in-depth interviews, but also different experimental and clinical methods as well as various statistical techniques.
Max Planck Encylopedia of International Procedural Law, 2020
The Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia was the first international court to give victims a formal v... more The Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia was the first international court to give victims a formal voice in a major atrocities trial. Victims of the Khmer Rouge atrocities committed in Cambodia from 1975-1979 are civil parties to the trial process, participating with many of the same rights as the prosecutors and the defense. They may also request the court to order reparations. In Case 002.1, nearing completion on crimes against humanity charges against the surviving senior leaders of the regime, 3,866 victims have been admitted as civil parties.
Two significant developments-(1) the rapidly changing world order, and (2) significant gaps in cu... more Two significant developments-(1) the rapidly changing world order, and (2) significant gaps in current social science scholarshipcall for a further exploration of resistance theories. In this paper, we identify some of the gaps and inconsistencies within the current bulk of research, and seek to contribute to the understanding of resistance, its applications and complexity. In short, this paper discusses three interacting and supporting forms of resistance, including various overlaps and interlinkages between them, which together constitute what we would like to call the ABC of resistance; that is, avoidance resistance, breaking resistance, and constructive resistance.
From the quotation above, which occurs quite often in scholarly literature today, several conclus... more From the quotation above, which occurs quite often in scholarly literature today, several conclusions could be made. One possible conclusion is simply that resistance matters. Another one is that resistance is an ‘activity’ that is performed in relation to power. To push it even further, it could be argued that power and resistance are entangled in different and intricate ways. A third conclusion that is possible to draw from the quotation, at least indirectly, is that if you are interested in understanding social change, then you have to try and understand the complex web of entanglements between power and resistance as well as, we would like to emphasize, resistance(see further Baaz et al. forthcoming). Moreover, another important dimension, which is elaborated in this editorial, and in the special issue at hand, is resistance at the crossroad of affects and emotions. Conventionally power and the study of power has been associated with and focused on, respectively, the military po...
4 A Structural Overview of the ECCC ...................................... 305 4.1 Jurisdiction a... more 4 A Structural Overview of the ECCC ...................................... 305 4.1 Jurisdiction and Goals of the ECCC .................................... 307 4.2 The Organs of the ECCC ................................................ 308 4.2.1 Co-Prosecutors and Co-Investigating Judges at the ECCC . 308 4.2.2 Judicial Chambers at the ECCC ................................. 309 4.2.3 Other Judicial Offices at the ECCC ............................ 309 4.3 A Summary of the Basic Judicial Process in the ECCC ............. 312 4.4 The Various National and Legal Backgrounds of the ECCC Staff 313 4.5 The ECCC’s Funding ..................................................... 314
The overall aim of this chapter is to make an intervention in the (re)emerging discussion on midd... more The overall aim of this chapter is to make an intervention in the (re)emerging discussion on middle-ground ethics (MGE). This is done by problematizing the principle of the responsibility to protect, understood as a constructive balance between, on the one hand, state sovereignty (order) and, on the other hand, individual human rights (justice) or, in other worlds, between international society and world society, within a legal perspective. As Wheeler (2000: 11) has observed, “Humanitarian intervention exposes the conflict between order and justice at its starkest”. The chapter also more directly contributes to the discussion on MGE by elaborating upon how a working balance between conflicting values might be realized in practice—in this case difficult humanitarian situations within sovereign states. The United Nations (UN) sanctioned multistate intervention in Libya 2011—Operation Unified Protector—is used as an illustration to the theoretical discussion(s) as well as a test case to scrutinize the quest for legitimizing the responsibility to protect by military means. The theoretical points of departure are the English School (ES) of International Relations (IR), especially the idea of an international society, and Scandinavian legal realism (SLR), in particular the method of social welfare.
IN LUNDQUIST, L., STUBBERGAARD, Y. & HALL, P.( …, 2008
... Sålunda kan en och samma person vara exempelvis lundensare, skåning, svensk, skandinav, europ... more ... Sålunda kan en och samma person vara exempelvis lundensare, skåning, svensk, skandinav, europé, västerlänning och världsmedborgare såväl som son, bror, make, pappa, kristen, socialdemokrat, statsvetare och kollega, på en och samma gång. ...
Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Confl... more Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict. By L. Gross Michael. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 321 pp., $27.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-68510-8). Michael L. Gross's new book , Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict , addresses the important question of the morality (as well as legality) of war. Hence, the book is a contribution to the literature on normative theory that has re-emerged over the last two decades in International Relations (see e.g. Brown 1992). Gross's focus is asymmetric warfare, the new face of modern armed conflict (cf. Kaldor 1999). The main argument of this philosophically argumentative book is that asymmetric conflict—for example, when a nation confronts a liberation/terrorist movement or other insurgency that does not observe the laws of war and, more importantly, does not have a structure or employ tactics against which conventional military force is fully effective—is changing the way we practice but also the way we think about war. Today, torture, rendition, assassination, blackmail, extortion, direct attacks on civilians as well as biological and chemical weapons are all finding their way back to the battlefield, despite long-standing international moral condemnation as well as legal prohibition. In answering the baffling question why the United States and some of its allies today blatantly employ unlawful means of warfare and confuse the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and international humanitarian law (IHL), Gross turns to the very nature of modern armed conflict. Torture, assassination, and blackmail rarely appear in conventional war. However, faced with the phenomenon of asymmetric war, scholars and practitioners of law and philosophy are today ready to reconsider deeply held ideas about combatant rights, unnecessary suffering and noncombatant impunity, to lay a foundation for military practices being both necessary as well as, they hope, humane. To be limited in fighting the global war on terror, proxy guerrilla wars, wars of national liberation or wars of humanitarian intervention by conventional …
Following the end of the Cold War, it became a widely held belief that, after more than 70 years ... more Following the end of the Cold War, it became a widely held belief that, after more than 70 years in exile, Russia would finally "return" to Europe-a sphere to which it had belonged since the time of Peter the Great-politically as well as normatively. Quite early on, however, it became clear that the country was choosing its own way, in ideological terms but also, by extension, in its understanding of international law-what the law of nations is for and what it is about. Lauri Mälksoo's, Russian Approaches, is, particularly considering its heuristic value, the most informative, interesting and innovative book written to date regarding (i) what the philosophy of international law in Russia is and how it has evolved over time, and (ii) how international law has been reflected in post-Soviet Russian state practice. The essay presents some of the weaknesses in Mälksoo's answers to these questions, including the disproportionate weight given to some explanatory factors and, by extension, the omission of others. It also argues, inspired by Martti Koskenniemi, for the importance of acknowledging "international law as a political project" in order to enable it to function both as an instrument for advancing various claims and as a relatively autonomous formal technique.
This paper examines how Case 002/01 in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia emerg... more This paper examines how Case 002/01 in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia emerges as a space within which the roles of history and international justice are contested. It focuses on how the criminal trial appear to fortify the hegemony of some contested historical narrative over others in dealing with the past. The paper introduces, discusses, and analyzes the 'strategy of rupture' as coined by Jacques Vergès, and the ways in which this legal defense has been applied in practice not only to resist the Tribunal in itself, but also historical knowledge-making in the Cambodian transitional justice process.
Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exp... more Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resistance activities. In this paper, these entanglements are analysed by taking into consideration the connections between articulations of resistance and technologies of power. Empirical observations from Cambodia are theorized in order to provide better theoretical tools for searching and investigating the inter linkage between different resistance forms that contribute to social change. In addition, it is argued that modalities of power and its related resistance must be understood, or theorized, in relation to the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘selfreflexivity’ and ‘techniques of the self’.
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Papers by mikael baaz