Papers by Derek Denman
This dissertation considers how geographic scale shapes the theory and practice of politics. It d... more This dissertation considers how geographic scale shapes the theory and practice of politics. It develops a dynamic, relational approach to scale that finds folds and overlaps between micro- and macro-processes. The project asks how subjects negotiate non-concentric political domains: bodies, localities, cities, nations, the globe, and the planet. In contrast to hierarchically nested models of belonging, it emphasizes transnational, transversal, and eccentric forms of ethical and political interconnectedness. Attending to the elaborate interactions between the embodied, local, urban, global, and planetary complicates state-centric images of politics as well as those that present a flattened, reductive approach to globalization. By tracking an undercurrent in political theory through readings of Machiavelli, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, David Harvey, and Manuel De Landa, the project renders explicit a theory of scale that has remained at the margins of work on each o...
Human Remains and Violence, 2022
This article sets forth a theoretical framework that first argues that necropolitical power and s... more This article sets forth a theoretical framework that first argues that necropolitical power and sovereignty should be understood as existing on a spectrum that ultimately produces the phenomenon of surplus death – such as pandemic deaths or those disappeared by the state. We then expound this framework by juxtaposing the necropolitical negligence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the violence of forced disappearances to argue that the surplus dead have the unique capacity to create political change and reckonings, due to their embodied power and agency. Victims of political killings and disappearance may not seem to have much in common with victims of disease, yet focusing on the mistreatment of the dead in both instances reveals uncanny patterns and similarities. We demonstrate that this overlap, which aligns in key ways that are particularly open to use by social actors, provides an entry to comprehend the agency of the dead to incite political reckonings with the violence of state ac...
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 2022
This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pa... more This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated already existing inequalities and fuelled anti-democratic desires for national and individual fortification. In a world where political emergencies like the pandemic are becoming more prevalent due to climatic and ecological destabilizations, there is an urgent need to promote new countervailing democratic forces. Together, these two insights motivate a third lesson: In order to address the ecological and political challenges of the so-called Anthropocene, democratic activism and political organizing must itself become more like the virus, more viral. Inspired by swarming behaviour in complex systems, a democratic politics of transformative change must give up illusions of simple solutions and central control, and instead rely on dispersed multi-sited actions happening at many scales at once, while working towards the improbable but necessary goal that these actions might, eventually, come together and bring about change at a planetary scale.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020
Images of police armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore have been influential in a public con... more Images of police armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore have been influential in a public conversation about the militarization of the police. However, recent critical and abolitionist work on policing rejects the concept of “militarization” for obscuring the longstanding histories and institutional connections between military and police apparatuses. By following the transfers of armored vehicles to police, this article illuminates the logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing, adding an account of the material composition of police power to the historical work of critical and abolitionist thinkers. The article proceeds through a critical reading of records of the Defense Logistics Agency, tracking the transfer of surplus armored vehicles to the police. Designated as “high-visibility property” by the Defense Logistics Agency, these vehicles testify to the materiality of police power. The article then tracks the visibility and materiality of these v...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020
Images of police armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore have been influential in a public con... more Images of police armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore have been influential in a public conversation about the militarization of the police. However, recent critical and abolitionist work on policing rejects the concept of “militarization” for obscuring the longstanding histories and institutional connections between military and police apparatuses. By following the transfers of armored vehicles to police, this article illuminates the logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing, adding an account of the material composition of police power to the historical work of critical and abolitionist thinkers. The article proceeds through a critical reading of records of the Defense Logistics Agency, tracking the transfer of surplus armored vehicles to the police. Designated as “high-visibility property” by the Defense Logistics Agency, these vehicles testify to the materiality of police power. The article then tracks the visibility and materiality of these vehicles as they are deployed in urban and suburban spaces and considers their unique capacity to suppress the democratic energies of crowds. Tracking the armored vehicle provides a way to ask how the rigid lines of fortified urban space are organized into mobile vectors and where ongoing processes of colonization enter these spatial processes.
Security Dialogue, 2019
Fortification calls to mind images of high walls establishing clear lines between inside and outs... more Fortification calls to mind images of high walls establishing clear lines between inside and outside and immobilizing enemies. However, even the most seemingly inert fortifications rely on subtle forms of mobility and more elaborate spatial relations. This article examines fortification as a technique of power in which warfare, the design of the built environment, and the organization of space are intertwined. Where research on fortification tends to emphasize the symbolic, sovereign aspirations of wall-building, the approach advanced here focuses on the spatial technologies and infrastructural projects of military architecture and engineering that remake space through martial means. The article follows the trajectory within military architecture by which linear fortifications became defense in depth and asks how transformations of ‘depth’ in contemporary warfare have come to integrate more complex, non-linear notions of space and time. By tracing the ways in which the curtain wall of Vauban’s bastion fortress transformed into the radar curtain, I argue that fortification constitutes a ‘becoming war’ in which ‘defensive’ war intensifies organized violence. As such, the concept of fortification proves indispensable for understanding the reinforced boundaries and delineated pathways cutting across the global space of contemporary warfare.
Proceedings of the 2018 ZiF Workshop “Studying Migration Policies at the Interface between Empirical Research and Normative Analysis”, 2019
This paper comments on "The Microphysics of Deportation," a talk given by William Walters at the ... more This paper comments on "The Microphysics of Deportation," a talk given by William Walters at the 2018 ZiF Workshop “Studying Migration Policies at the Interface Between Empirical Research and Normative Analysis”, September 2018, in Bielefeld. Walters’ paper is available under doi: 10.17879/95189425134.
Political Theory, 2019
This article examines Machiavelli’s writings on fortresses as a new starting point for a genealog... more This article examines Machiavelli’s writings on fortresses as a new starting point for a genealogy of urban fortification. In contrast to theorists of Machiavelli who approach fortresses as defensive structures that preserve the present political order, this article considers fortresses as weapons to privatize civic life. It explores the significance of fortresses for democratic readings of Machiavelli, suggesting that Machiavelli offers a careful analysis of the spatial organization of power and its implications for popular self-government. This reconsideration of fortresses in Machiavelli brings his political thought into conversation with contemporary urban theorists critical of the enclosure of public space. The article argues that Machiavelli seeks to resignify notions of fortification and replace the construction of fortresses with practices of fortifying publics. Such practices find ways to strengthen public spaces and envision durable democracy.
Teaching Documents by Derek Denman
Accusations of "Machiavellianism" abound. The term is a forceful condemnation of a political oppo... more Accusations of "Machiavellianism" abound. The term is a forceful condemnation of a political opponent, suggesting unparalleled deceit and inevitable treachery. Despite this association, politicians ranging from Emmanuel Macron to Steven Bannon still refer to their knowledge of Machiavelli to imply political skillfulness. While Machiavelli has become an integral part of our everyday political vocabulary, we lack a sense of what he said and how it has been interpreted. Machiavelli has been called many things: master of statecraft, teacher of evil, quintessential republican, and radical democrat. These many Machiavelli's often tell us as much about the thinker engaging with the work of Machiavelli as they tell us about the Renaissance Florentine himself. This course reads Machiavelli's core political texts alongside debates that have unfolded through his work. We will follow the ways his thought has informed conversations about the role of the people in the polity, ideas of morality and politics, the nature of political knowledge, and the relationship between war, power, and authority, among other issues. Revisiting the debates around Machiavelli's political thought alongside the original text provides us not only with a chance to dispute earlier interpretations but also offers a map of major concepts in political theory. Drawing on the interventions of his many interpreters, we will consider how Machiavelli might speak to our contemporary political moment. Where do love and fear arise in our political life? How do we build a polity that can endure? Who is the new Prince, and what would it mean to apply this concept today?
The COVID-19 pandemic has revitalized interest in the concept of biopolitics. Discussions of cont... more The COVID-19 pandemic has revitalized interest in the concept of biopolitics. Discussions of contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, and quarantine focus attention not on our role as citizens but on our existence as biological beings. These terms, integral to fields of public health and virology, now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. Yet, the discussion of biopolitics began long before COVID-19. Michel Foucault coined the terms to name a form of power that takes the life of a population as its object. Foucault's formulation has had wideranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human. The course returns to Foucault's formative texts on the topic and examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics. How did life come to be understood as the object of government, and how has this intensified the operations of power in the modern era? In addition to answering conceptual and historical questions, the course also seeks to expand our understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions. From understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare, biopolitics is a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment.
How did methods of identification first used in colonialism become routine state practices of cou... more How did methods of identification first used in colonialism become routine state practices of counting and registering citizens? How do forms of surveillance, detention, and policing employed in imperial warfare return to the metropole? How do international hierarchies first defined under colonialism endure in today’s global order? This course will ask how colonial legacies and forms of colonial governance persist today. It does so by examining debates within anticolonial and postcolonial theory about the aftermath of colonialism. In particular, we will consider how postcolonial thought articulates conceptions of freedom, justice, the state, and democracy and how these challenge liberal and republican ideas. Moreover, the course considers how postcolonial and anticolonial thought have influenced the formation of other critical traditions including abolitionist thought, post-structuralism, surveillance studies, and critical border studies. In doing so, critical reflections on colonialism and empire offer new ways to think about the power of the state and capital, subjectivity, political violence, borders, and migration.
Political philosophers and their writings since the 16th century. Attention given to the conflict... more Political philosophers and their writings since the 16th century. Attention given to the conflict of ideologies in the 20th century. Prerequisite: POSC 101 or consent of instructor.
This course examines the unique role that cities play in shaping global politics. The disciplines... more This course examines the unique role that cities play in shaping global politics. The disciplines of Political Science and International Relations focus primarily on states in the study of global politics thereby relegating the city to a passive site in which the politics of states unfolds. This course explores accounts of urban space that emphasize its active and vital role in political life. In particular the course examines how power operates through the concepts and practices of organizing urban space in order to reinforce existing configurations of sovereignty. Students will consider how urbanization has affected and been affected by globalization, war, and the environment. Readings will examine practices of citizenship enabled by dwelling in cities and contrast these with military practices committed to regulating, dividing, and periodically destroying cities.
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Papers by Derek Denman
Teaching Documents by Derek Denman