Warwick Tie

Extending my long standing interest into what happens when peacemakers fight, my research has, over recent years, merged my study of the politics of conflict resolution with inquiry into the state of academic knowledge production. This direction has been propelled by a growing sense that mainstream inquiry into those politics (for me, around the issues of crime control, public law, human rights law, restorative justice, democratic and political policing) have been dominated by theoretical and methodological approaches which mimic the bio-political mechanisms by which those fields are administered. The ability of such work to engage the normative dimension of academic inquiry thereby suffers, with a kind of pragmatic administrativism coming to stand in for the scholarly consideration of how alternative futures might come into being.

The way in which I intervene with these truncated horizons is to introduce into my substantive inquiries (into law, policing, and so on), analyses of the manner by which ideas are presently operating within the fields. Immanent critique of their dynamics becomes the basis upon which understandings can be generated about the means by which alternative socio-political futures might come into being. The ghosts of Spinoza, Marx, and Lacan
haunt my attempts to do so.
Phone: 064 414 0800 x43477