Constituent power : the concept of a crisis -- Virtue and fortune : the machiavellian paradigm -- The Atlantic model and the theory of counterpower -- Political emancipation in the American constitution -- The revolution and the constitution of labor -- Communist desire and the dialectic restored -- The constitution of strength.

The aim of this paper is to theorize insurgent political action on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It reconstructs a Sartrean model of insurgency that prioritizes an insurgent group’s capacity for situated inventions. It argues that, similar to Fanon, Sartre theorized that groups that struggle against oppression and exploitation constantly invent novel conditions that steer society in unforeseeable directions. However, these inventions of insurgent action are never absolutely contingent but always take place in concrete situations which (...) never cease to condition them. This paper analyses two concrete factors which condition the inventions of insurgent action: the seriality from which the group arises and to which it always threatens to return, and the actions of hostile groups. Taken together, this paper claims that Sartre provides a coherent and innovative account of insurgent political action. (shrink)

This article discusses on land, landless and confiscation in Nepal during the Maoist insurgency in Nepal.

uses Bourdieu to analyze the dynamics between state terror and insurgent terrorism.

The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. My strategy will be largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts, and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, I argue that thinking about intrastate wars can help us make progress (...) on important theoretical debates in recent just war theory. Secondly, I consider whether certain kinds of civil wars are subject to a more demanding standard of just cause, compared to interstate wars of national-defence. Finally, I assess the extent to which having popular support is an independent requirement of permissible war, and whether this renders insurgencies harder to justify than wars fought by functioning states. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative research developed with former fighters from the paramilitarism and the extinct FARC guerrilla in Colombia, this article develops, from a feminist perspective, the analytical and political proposition of understanding armed groups as technologies of gender, understanding the production of militarized masculinities. The article conceptualizes the notion of militarized masculinities from a double component: militarization and militarism, while comparing paramilitary and guerrilla masculinities, emphasizing in how insurgent masculinity emerged inside the FARC as a type of militarized masculinity (...) characterized, among other things, by a communal subjectivity. (shrink)

My essay begins by analyzing how Hegel and Honneth’stheory of recognition would seem to lend support to insurgentterrorists’ struggle for the right to self-determination. Insurgentterrorism often looks like a concretization of what Honneth calls themoral protest of the oppressed launched against the dominatingpowers. Insurgent terrorism also bears affinity to the politics ofrecognition in the sense that it challenges the legitimacy and authorityof the forces owned by the state, and seeks to gain public recognitioninstead for the legitimacy of their own cause. (...) Precisely because whatmatters uppermost to terrorists is the gaining of recognition for theircause as just, terrorists are eager to seize the mass media as a meansof spreading their ideas. My essay will end, however, by pointing outmajor differences between insurgent terrorism on the one hand, andHegel and Honneth on the other. (shrink)

Throughout Iran and various countries, the recent calls of the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (in Persian), “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (in Kurdish), or “Woman, Life, Freedom” (in English) movement call for change to acknowledge the importance of women. While these feminist protests and demonstrations have been met with brutality, systematic oppression, and internet blackouts within Iran, they have captured significant social media attention and coverage outside the country, especially among the Iranian diaspora and various international organizations. This article, grounded in feminist urban (...) theories of the Global South, analyzes the digital feminist placemaking movement in Iran. As the first counter‐revolution led by women, the movement utilizes digital art, graffiti, and protest movements to embody women’s solidarity groups and sympathy rallies. Our analysis employs various digital research methods, including social media scrutiny and the study of protest illustrations. Analyzing the digital feminist placemaking in Iran will enable us to compare the commonalities, differences, challenges, and opportunities between the minorities and majorities in the world’s countries. The outcomes of this research can help international organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Agency for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (UN Women), as well as policymakers, institutions, academics, and NGOs, to highlight the various ways in which broader public participation could be encouraged in the process of digital feminist insurgent placemaking. (shrink)

Despite their purported demographic and institutional decline, White evangelical voters were instrumental in the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and even more so in his 2020 loss. The story of Trump’s electoral successes among Christian voters in the last two elections is in large part the story of religious nationalism—and White Christian nationalism in particular—because Trump personifies the convergence of nationalism-infused forms of messianism and apocalypticism intrinsic to White evangelicalism, which culminate in QAnon cultic ideology. However, these same ethnoreligious/nationalist (...) patterns and logics extend much further back than Trump’s insurgent candidacy. This chapter traces the recurring, resurgent patterns of “zombie nationalism” among White evangelical Christians in the United States over the last half century that emerged in response to periods of significant societal change and certain recurring sociopolitical issues. In particular, alongside established elective affinities around ethnicity (whiteness) and religion (Christianity), this chapter makes the case for incorporating gender and sexual politics as key factors in the articulation and legitimation of religious nationalism in the United States. White Christian nationalism tends to reemerge as a salient political force during periods of rapid social change and diversification, driven by racialized religious grievances symptomatic of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, or the paradoxical internalization and reprojection of a person’s or group’s perceived endangerment, victimhood, and/or suffering, in order to gain power. Drawing on examples of marriage equality and reproductive rights, this chapter demonstrates how an understanding of sexual politics is key to both apprehending and breaking the cyclical reanimation of White Christian nationalism. Escaping the nihilistic impulses driving these cycles will require White evangelicals to develop new hermeneutical tools capable of transforming the exclusionary patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that fuel the engine of ressentiment animating zombie nationalism. (shrink)

The Philippine government has been relentless in its counterinsurgency campaigns. From the colonial wars that vilified as insurgents and bandits the honored heroes of today, up to the anti-communist and anti-secessionist civil and military efforts of the postcolonial regimes, these campaigns have not only rolled out large state resources but also cost lives of innocent civilians. Patterned after the United States (US) of America’s principle of low-intensity conflict aimed at countering Marxist and anti-imperialist movements (Reed 1986), counterinsurgency campaigns have unleashed (...) a warfare that indiscriminately target its supposed opponents, including unarmed activists. In 2007, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston examined the horrible political situation of the Philippines – characterized by political killings, abductions, and tortures – and identified how state elements, under the blanket protection of waging a counterinsurgency campaign, were responsible for the political repressions then (Sales 2009). Today, under the murderous Duterte regime, the counterinsurgency campaign has reached an unprecedented level of ferocity as it is waged through a militarist whole-ofnation approach composed by multi-level government and multi-agency responses. -/- Being greatly influenced by the US, counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines follow the paranoiac and hysterical communist witch-hunt of McCarthyism (Hutchins-Viroux 2008). The hysteria’s contemporary and local expression is the phenomenon called red- or terror-tagging.1 Terror-tagging is the systematic process of maliciously naming or identifying an individual or group as a communist and/or terrorist by its association with a supposed communist and/or terrorist group. Being a systematic process, it is initiated and sustained by state elements with the view of maligning or defaming political activists. Terror-tagging is aimed against activists, dissenters, and even the political opposition. The social activist Rhoda Dalang (2014) has noted how terror-tagging has been deployed by the Philippine state in its counterinsurgency efforts, from the Marcos up to the then Aquino regime. And until the previous Duterte regime, yet with increased intensity and fatality, terror-tagging continued to defame and liquidate activists. As terror-tagging has not received enough academic attention, this chapter aims to fill this gap by providing a preliminary analysis of it. The chapter will be doing a critical discourse analysis. It will take off from a revealing study done by Don Kevin Hapal and Raisa Serafica of Rappler, a media outlet in the Philippines. Through a separate discourse analysis of Facebook posts of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTFELCAC),2 the chapter will also identify aspects of terror-tagging. The discussion will further be theorized using the Marxist analysis of the State and informed by interviews of Atty. Maria Sol Taule and Cristina Palabay. They are both human rights workers who have worked with terror-tagged activists and are themselves subjected to terror-tagging. (shrink)

Some collateral harms affecting enemy civilians during a war are agentially mediated – for example, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 sparked an insurgency which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. I call these ‘collaterally enabled harms.’ Intuitively, we ought to discount the weight that these harms receive in the ‘costs’ column of our ad bellum proportionality calculation. But I argue that an occupying military force with de facto political authority has a special obligation to provide minimal protection to the (...) civilian population. As a result, when an occupying military force collaterally enables a harm affecting the civilian population, the weight that the harm ought to receive in the ad bellum proportionality calculation is unaffected by the fact that the harm is agentially mediated – it ought to be weighed at least as heavily as those harms that the occupying force collaterally commits directly. As a result, satisfying the ad bellum proportionality constraint in wars of territorial occupation is more difficult than it has been thought. (shrink)

This article discusses the rights enjoyed by irregular combatants in detention, that is, members of organized groups (who may be fighting an insurgency or engaging in terror attacks) who fail to qualify for POW status. The paradigmatic example of such a detainee would be an al-Qaeda agent.

As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuze’s virtuality within the terrain of “differential becoming,” conjugating “pure saliences” so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theory’s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to (...) other objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautman’s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Citti’s dynamic a priori vis-à-vis Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilson’s work on the “greediness of scales” and Deleuze’s “scales of reality”, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-à-vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding. (shrink)

Recently, there has been an insurgence of corporations that bioprospect in Third World countries (going into these areas in hopes of utilizing traditional knowledge about local natural resources so as to eventually develop a synthetic alternative that they can then market). Although this type of bioprospecting does not encounter the problem of depleting environmental resources, other problems arise. Two primary problems are: (1) determining who has legal ownership of these resources, and (2) who should share in the profits that were (...) derived, in part, from these resources. Despite the attention that these problems have received, there has been little attention focused on the issue that I believe underlies these problems -- the differing views of nature between corporations (who consider nature to be an individually owned resource) and Third World communities (many of whom consider nature to be a communally owned resource). In this paper, I present what I believe is an additional useful tool for policy makers in resolving the current problems regarding bioprospecting in Third World countries. The tool I have in mind is a set of method components that can be used as guidelines as well as a test for inclusiveness. To arrive at these components, I will look to James D. Proctor's methodological proposal for resolving conflicts between those with differing views of nature. Because he presents this methodology in a limited context (as a means of resolving the Ancient Forest debate), I will clarify and expand his methodology so as to arrive at a set of methods that I believe can be helpful in arriving at a fair global policy regarding bioprospecting in Third World countries. (shrink)

This article traces a logical and political thread leading from the theory of revolt in Furio Jesi's 1969 Spartakus to his later work on festivity and the “mythological machine model.” It opens by arguing that the humanist model that frames Jesi's early efforts to disarm the allure of insurgent violence, sacrificial mythology, and Manichaean politics generates insoluble aporias that spur the development of a radically different approach to the study of myth and human nature. Next, it shows how Jesi's studies (...) on festivity from the 1970s redound upon and transform the theory of revolt in Spartakus, bringing this theory more in line with current epochal conditions. In doing so, they presage and lay the groundwork for the theory of destituent power developed in recent decades by Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Intellectual historians have tended to focus either on shifts in sensibility or, more analytically, on the substance and structure of thought. They might usefully, however, examine both, as well as the reciprocal action of the one upon the other. This applies equally to political and religious ideas. In early twentieth-century Ireland, it was the relationship between religion and politics that stirred controversy. How would the institutions of church and state function, respectively, under Home Rule and the Union. Opposing camps (...) advanced competing prognostications. This contest forces us to rethink the claim that revolutionary insurgency in Ireland was a species of ‘political religion’. The evidence points to a more complex picture while at the same time highlighting the persistence of sectarian attitudes in the historiography of the period. (shrink)

The movement of people from one country to another in search of greener pasture, peaceful settlement and so on, has become very rampant in the world today. These same reasons have triggered internal migrations as well. Lives have been lost in the bid to circumvent immigration laws of countries by immigrants. The current spate of wars, political crises, natural disasters and hunger has led to increase in illegal migration in the world. Nigeria is not left out. We hear of boundary (...) clashes and insurgencies, which have resulted in illegal emigration to other countries basically in search of job opportunities and better living conditions. Nigerians have severally been repatriated from foreign lands. Recently, over five thousand Nigerians were repatriated from Libya. Nigeria has also played host to migrants from neighbouring countries, and has experienced internal migration in several parts of the country. The frequently asked questions are: “what role can religion play in curbing the spate of illegal migration and refugee crises in Cross River State, Nigeria? The research discovered that religion can be a veritable partner to government in resolving this ever-increasing menace that has become an embarrassment to the state and nation. This work adopted qualitative or explorative research method. It employed the content analysis approach in examining available printed materials on the subject matter. In view of its peculiarity, oral interviews were conducted on specific groups and individuals. This work proposes the involvement of religious organisations in preaching and teaching on the dangers of illegal migration, the provision of vocational training for our teaming youth population to reduce emigration, and the provision of counselling and resettlement programmes for the repatriated and those in refugee camps across the country. The work also encourages the government to evolve modalities to curb the spate of violence and bloodshed that has fuelled refugee crises in Cross River State and Nigeria in general. (shrink)

Democracy is a government form based on the general consent, is seen to becoming common in global nations; and that if the tenet is followed it facilitates national development. This study used the content analysis method to examine democracy in Nigeria and national development. It was found that some pre-colonial administrations in Nigeria had embraced democratic tenets before the colonials master came; the difference, however, border on structural arrangements. It was found that the version of western democracy has not adapted (...) the Nigeria environment making its practice difficult and also difficult to attain national development. It was also found that the phase Nigeria democracy passed, especially, during the military regimes has not provided opportunities for development. The ethnic diversity of Nigeria and inabilities of leadership to manage it was found to pose legislative influence on democracy and national development. It was found that Nigeria environment lacks the absorptive capacity to accommodate liberal democracy considering the death of institutions and the skewed electoral process. It was found that absence of effective democracy in Nigeria disarticulated the pre-colonial democratic structure, and the exclusivist approach to liberal democracy and the rule of the game, manifest in incessant agitations, militancy, insurgency, banditry, and general underdevelopment. It was also suggested that a change in leadership approach is necessary, more importantly, to allow a breath of democratic participation in policy-making for national development. It was also recommended that all forms of discriminations are addressed and that constitutionalism should be upheld. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to promote a debate around Plato's work Republic, aiming to situate and establish: 1) the author's arguments in favor of an ideal pólis model; 2) the characteristics of Archon's political making as dominant and effective behavior among the leaders of the pólis government, insurgent against the desire for improper possession (pleonexia) on the part of the men who held the ring of Gyges and were invisible, which would believe, of those who are around him, (...) they may revert in their favor any kind of leadership, especially the sovereign one, and then embody for Plato the metaphor of the unjust man in this writing; 3) Finally, we will elaborate the definition of justice, as well as the individual conscience in totum of the citizens who compose the pólis and act in order to achieve the common good and full functioning of the city, discerning them according to the difference of skill and hierarchical position in the city in relation to their others, producing what we may call the tripartite social and political structure of both the pólis and the soul, both in full harmony in platonic theory. -/- . (shrink)

Sometimes constitutions fail. The unprecedented election of Donald Trump, a populist insurgent who lacks the prior political experience or military service of all presidents before him, is such a sharp break in American historical experience that it raises questions as to whether something is deeply amiss with the constitutional order. Constitutional failure is not uncommon. A path-breaking global study of national constitutions shows that on average, they last only nineteen years. The U.S. Constitution is an uncommon outlier and, as such, (...) is accounted by many a long-running success story. But could a bell be tolling for American constitutionalism? In this Essay, I assess the meaning of Trump’s shocking rise for the future of our constitutional order. The shock, of course, was not the election of a Republican president. There have been many Republican presidents since Lincoln, each making their own distinctive contribution to the American tradition. Yet, there are good reasons to think this time around is different. The efficacy and, perhaps, stability of our constitutional order are in question, and we should try to understand why. (shrink)

The book provides a theoretical explanation of the major outcomes of Ethiopia’s social revolution, namely, the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and the implementation of a far-reaching Marxist-Leninist revolution by a military committee (the Derg) and its collapse in 1991. The book extensively discusses the question of knowing whether existing theories of revolution throw light on the eruption of a radical revolution in Ethiopia and, most of all, whether they can accommodate the major anomaly of a socialist revolution (...) being executed by a military committee that radicalized after the removal of the imperial regime. Hence the central thesis of the book: both the overthrow of the monarchical order and the radicalization of the Derg must be tied to social conditions that exasperated elite conflicts for scarce resources, with the consequence that the espousal of radical ideologies (socialism and ethnonationalism) became the sole avenue for the exclusive control of state power. Moreover, the book shows how the struggle of exclusive elites for the control of the state explains the Derg’s need to put its fate in the hands of a providential leader, to wit, Mengistu Haile Mariam. In light of the theoretical debate over the role of charismatic leaders in history, the book establishes how Mengistu’s narcissism led him to become the sole owner of the revolution and how his dictatorial rule brought about his own demise and that of the Derg, following the military defeat of the Ethiopian army in the hands of ethnonationalist insurgents. Another fundamental contribution of the book is a theoretical articulation of political conflicts and ideology that critically intervenes in the divisive issue of the primary cause of revolutions. Granted that ideology is more of a justification than a drive, the Ethiopian case illustrates how conflicts between mutually exclusive elites favor the path of political outbidding mobilizing utopian projects so as to galvanize the support of the masses. The perceived transcendence of utopia from partisan politics gives the proof that ideology is a predatory form of thinking in that it hijacks values belonging to different cognitive and affective realms for the purpose of empowering exclusionary interests. -/- . (shrink)

War as intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or para groups, such as mercenaries, insurgents, etc is not old fashion but continues to be the vibrant and violet of society (ies). Many literatures relating to the war, Just war and just war theories pay attention mainly at the conflicts as a main cause of war but pass by about the cause of conflicts leading to the war. The objective of this paper is thus, to assess sources of conflicts leading (...) to the war, and come up with recommendation to narrow situations provoking conflicts leading to the war. Research approach employed was qualitative to qualify ideas and opinions of scholars, who conducted researches on war, just war and just war theories; books, journals and internet sources dedicated to the cause and consequences of war and sources concerned with the Jus Ad Bellum, Jus in Bello and Jus post Bellum have been reviewed. It was found that ambitions of humans to realize their unlimited natural rights, such as economic rights, political rights and extreme desire to un equitable utilization of such rights cause a war of “all against all”. The study recommends that authority better to avoid or reduce extent of conflict among humans, and humans to learn limit their unlimited natural rights for the sake of peace and security of the business. Key words: war, Just war theories, Jus Ad Bellum, Jus in Bello, Jus post bellum. -/- . (shrink)