Violence, space and the political

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Derek Gregory

News of a wonderful conference at the National University of Ireland, Galway on 7-9 June 2018 featuring Mustafa Dikeç (for his new book, see here):

In this, multi-disciplinary, conference we wish to think through the imbrications of violence, space, and the political. Given that our present conjuncture is one constituted by innumerable sites of apartheid, exclusion, oppression, and indeed, resistance(s), such an interrogation is both crucial and potentially productive in re-thinking questions of power and radical politics. In this zeitgeist the contingency of hitherto relatively stable configurations of power have been rendered visible through the failing allure of liberal democratic politics and the dislocation conjured by, among other things, its attendant ‘spectral dance of capital’ (Žižek, 2008). A void has been rift from which a plurality of discourses have proliferated that seek to address this moment of crises by either caging/bounding or expanding the social. That is, at stake in many contemporary political projects currently gaining traction is the redrawing of frontiers, the very bounds of inclusion and exclusion – from international borders and multilevel governance, to the remaking of frontiers within existing polities. Violence/antagonism, in various iterations, is central to the (re)inscription of these frontiers (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Not only evident in ostensibly bellicose projects that seek to uphold, contest, or expand regimes of power through violent struggle, violence is imbricated in an other, perhaps more foundational or ‘originary’ sense (Arendt, 1963; Derrida, 1990). The redrawing of boundaries reconfigures differential relationships of power and propriety, which designate who has the right to speak sovereignly in a given space, who is a worthy and noble victim, and who is not, who is differentially exposed to systemic, symbolic and subjective forms of violence, whose life is ‘grievable’ and whose is not (Butler, 2009). By keeping the question of the spatial in view, both its making and breaking, we keep a focus not only the concrete practices of disruption, the democratic potentialities of space (Dikeç, 2015), new forms of liberation, domination, and property, but also the various spatio-political imaginaries that guide them.

The Power, Conflict and Ideologies Research Cluster at National University of Ireland, Galway invite potential participants from across the disciplinary spectrum to submit papers of 20 minutes duration. This conference may be of interest to those scholars working within, among others, the disciplines of: Social Theory, Political Theory, Feminist and Queer Theory, Philosophy, Sociology, Political Geography, Political Violence, War Studies, Anthropology, and Cultural Studies.

Please submit abstracts (approx. 250 words) to violenceandspace@gmail.com by 9 February 2018. The abstract should be submitted as a word/pdf attachment, and contain the authors name, institutional affiliation, and a summary of the proposed paper.

For more info and registration details and fees see: violencespaceandthepolitical.com

Potential themes that speakers may seek to address:

Spaces of Democracy, Emancipation(s), and Resistance

Political Violence and Space

Vulnerability\Resistance and Spaces of the Political

Rethinking Territoriality

(De)Coloniality, Violence, and the Political

The Spatial Reproduction of the Collective Subject

Lost and New Spatio-Political Imaginaries

Precarity and the State

Rethinking Sovereignty

Histories/Genealogies of Spatial Violence

Race, Space and, the Political

Communities in Revolt

Security and Space

Border Politics

Property, Violence, and Propriety

Technologies, Space, and Power

Geographies of Rage

Spaces of Populism

Queering Space

Old and New Colonialisms

Rebel Spaces

Urban Rage

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Derek Gregory

Mustafa Dikeç‘s new book, coming in January from Yale:

A timely and incisive examination of contemporary urban unrest that explains why riots will continue until citizens are equally treated and politically included.

In the past few decades, urban riots have erupted in democracies across the world. While high profile politicians often react by condemning protestors’ actions and passing crackdown measures, urban studies professor Mustafa Dikeç shows how these revolts are in fact rooted in exclusions and genuine grievances which our democracies are failing to address. In this eye-opening study, he argues that global revolts may be sparked by a particular police or government action but nonetheless are expressions of much longer and deep seated rage accumulated through hardship and injustices that have become routine.

Increasingly recognized as an expert on urban unrest, Dikeç examines urban revolts in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey and, in a sweeping and engaging account, makes it clear that change is only possible if we address the failures of democratic systems and rethink the established practices of policing and political decision-making.

Here is Mike Davis on Urban Rage:

These comparative case-studies, richly detailed and attentive to local conditions, overthrow the hoary stereotype of the irrational mob. Read carefully and you’ll begin to understand the rationality of urban revolts – perhaps even their necessity in our gilded world.

And Ananya Roy:

Brilliantly cutting across the North Atlantic, Mustafa Dikeç repositions the cities of the West within the long histories of colonialism and imperialism and reminds us that these wars are not over. Urban Rage thus raises profoundly important questions about the urgent aspirations of our time: emancipation, justice, and humanity. A beautiful book.

Divided societies and connected spaces

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Derek Gregory

Following my last post, Mustafa Dikeç has sent me a link to his brilliant reflections on ‘Hate’ at the Society & Space website here. Written from Paris, it takes us to the heart of modern French society and its divided spaces:

… if we are troubled about what has happened, troubled enough to take a hard look at, rather than falling in love with, ourselves, then it is important to inquire about the conditions that made such a mobilisation of hate possible. In the highly emotional aftermath of the incidents, it is hard not to feel moved by the extraordinary mobilisation of citizens. Newspapers are full of comments about how proud we should be as French citizens, how a united and solidaristic people we are, how the spirit of May 1968 continues despite the attack on its inheritors, how we value equality and freedom of expression, and so on. If all were nice and dandy, then what made such radicalisation of these three French-born and raised citizens possible? Why, a decade ago, did 300 cities go up in flames for two weeks, and what has been done since? How is it that the extreme right has become the second major political force in this land of freedom, equality and fraternity? …

This is not at all to suggest that the murderers’ actions can be justified by the circumstances. But to warn that despite the timely and admirable display of unity under an alleged one and indivisible republic, the French society is deeply divided, owing to its long history of discrimination and the increasing hostility towards immigrants – a poisonous mix of xenophobia and Islamophobia that several French politicians, endowed with the authority of the state, have unashamedly mobilised for their political ends. Muslims are the most stigmatised group of this divided society, spared neither by satire nor political discourse and action.

Mustafa’s essay begins not with the murders in Paris but with a bomb explosion in Yemen, and a second e-mail from Tim Raeymaekers has alerted me to his equally indispensable post ‘”Us” against “Them”‘ over at Liminal Geographies here. Tim moves in the opposite direction to Mustafa, zooming out above the arc of that explosion to provide a contrapuntal geography that reads the murders in Paris in concert with the global violence of contemporary wars, most of them fought under the tattered banners of counter-terrorism, undeclared in their particulars and less than covert in their killing. He ends with this reminder from Teju Cole‘s incandescent essay on ‘Unmournable bodies’ at the New Yorker:

France is in sorrow today, and will be for many weeks to come. We mourn with France. We ought to.

But it is also true that violence from “our” side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many more “young men of military age” and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go by, many of these people will be innocent of wrongdoing. Their deaths will be considered as natural and incontestable as deaths like Menocchio’s, under the Inquisition. Those of us who are writers will not consider our pencils broken by such killings. But that incontestability, that unmournability, just as much as the massacre in Paris, is the clear and present danger to our collective liberté.