Finding the Enemy Within

In the past decade, Pakistan has witnessed incidents such as the public lynching of a student on a university campus, a Christian couple being torched alive, attacks on entire neighbourhoods by angry mobs and the assassination of a provincial governor by his own security guard over allegations of blasphemy. Finding the Enemy Within unpacks the meanings and motivations behind accusations of blasphemy and subsequent violence in Pakistan. This is the first ethnographic study of its kind analysing the perspectives of a range of different actors including accusers, religious scholars and lawyers involved in blasphemy-related incidents in Pakistan. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on religion, violence and law, this book reworks prevalent analytical dichotomies of reason/emotion, culture/religion, traditional/Western, state/nonstate and legal/extralegal to extend our understanding of the upsurge of blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan. Through the case study of blasphemy accusations in Pakistan, this book addresses broader questions of difference, individual and collective identities, social and symbolic boundaries, and conflict and violence in modern nation-states

The Enemy Within’: Liminality, Otherness and Neo-Victorian Gypsies

Gypsies, or Romanies, are a collective against whom, for centuries, white Europeans have posited a series of racial prejudices and stereotypes. Qualified alternatively as criminals, child kidnappers, or tricksters, gypsies have long been portrayed in British literature as liminal individuals, positively perceived as linked to nature and the pastoral ancestry of European populations, on the one hand, but contrary to the values of modernity, on the other (Nord 3-4), as well as often linked to Eastern mysticism in their usual representation as fortune-tellers or palm-readers. Nineteenth-century literature exhibited such preoccupations with the figure of the gypsy and its liminality and otherness, as it is illustrated in works such as Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), George Elliot's Silas Marner (1861), Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1891), or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This paper aims at analysing the renewed presence of the gypsy in neo-Victorianism, focusing in part on Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) but especially on Sara Stockbridge's neo-Victorian novel Cross my Palm (2011), in which the central character Rose, a gypsy fortune-teller who entertains high-class Victorian ladies in palm-reading soirées, gets entangled in a plot of murder, treason and deceit evocative of Victorian sensation novels in the 1860s and 1870s. Setting off from the idea that neo-Victorian fiction rearticulates repressed voices from “silenced other Victorians” (Voigts-Virchow 115), this paper will trace how gypsy characters, whose presence in Victorian fiction was peripheral, spectral and at times invisible, are brought to the very centre of the narration in neo-Victorian fiction. Stockbridge’s Cross my Palm (2011) provides a spatialising perspective on gypsiness in Victorian London, using the tension between the Victorian imperial centre and its suburban periphery to illustrate gypsies’ persistent dislocated status, especially applied to Romanies’ stereotypical image as nomadic people and the ensuing difficulty to pinpoint their identity. Additionally, Stockbridge’s novel provides a revision of the usual trope of gypsies associated to child kidnapping, or in Jodie Matthews’ words, “the ‘Gypsy’ child-stealing myth” (Matthews 137) and its relation to (neo)Victorian conceptions of the family. Through a close analysis of the above mentioned texts, and paying particular attention to the topography of Victorian London as well nineteenth-century Europe, I will provide a reading of gypsiness in contemporary neo-Victorian literature using as a backdrop racialised representations of the gypsy collective and their enduring representation as alien figures which keep permeating contemporary European culture and society, as it is attested by events such as the harsh dismantlement of Romani camps in 2010 in France or the pervading accusations of child-kidnapping to gypsies in different legal or criminal cases.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Dignity - The Enemy from Within

The manuscript challenges the use of human dignity as an independent free speech justification. The articulation of free speech in human dignity terms carries unwarranted potential consequences that may result in limiting free speech rather than protecting it. This possible outcome makes human dignity inadequate as a free speech justification. The manuscript also demonstrates why articulations of the rationales behind the “argument from dignity” are either superfluous, since they are aptly covered by the “argument from autonomy,” or simply too broad and speech-restrictive to be considered a free speech justification. As a matter of principle, the nexus between freedom of speech and human dignity should be construed as inherently contentious. The manuscript combines theoretical and comparative analyses to demonstrate why European, and other western democracies are more susceptible to the use of human dignity, both in their constitutional doctrines and as a speech-restrictive term. Current American scholarship regarding dignity as a free speech justification neglects to recognize the harms of such discourse in a non-American setting, as well as in the United States. Thus, unintentionally, advocates of free speech may actually promote a justification that eventually will lead to its restriction. For these reasons, the manuscript warns that inserting human dignity into the realm of free speech justifications may be analogous to inserting a “Trojan Horse,” with human dignity as “the enemy from within.

The 'War on Terrorism'- perspectives from radical Islamic groups

Contrary to both popular and academic belief, the ‘War on Terrorism’ launched by the United States has one very clear enemy: radical Islamism. The varied and complex world of Islamism has been reduced to one unitary enemy, and that enemy is being fought both militarily and ideologically. This paper analyses the impact that the War on Terrorism is having on its target and contends that the ‘simplification’ of the concept of radical Islamism by the US administration, while beneficial for the purely practical purposes of war, is very much detrimental to the understanding of such a phenomenon and leads to policy choices that deepen the fault lines between Islamists and the West. The paper concludes by arguing that the current War on Terrorism is running the risk of causing a ‘return’ of the jihadi Islamist ideology that had been comprehensively defeated within the vast Islamist world and that has been replaced by a much more pragmatic and much more peaceful approach to gaining political inclusion

Alliances in the Shadow of Conflict

Victorious alliances often fight about the spoils of war. This paper presents an experiment on the determinants of whether alliances break up and fight internally after having defeated a joint enemy. First, if peaceful sharing yields an asymmetric rent distribution, this increases the likelihood of fighting. In turn, anticipation of the higher likelihood of internal fight reduces the alliance’s ability to succeed against the outside enemy. Second, the option to make non-binding declarations on non-aggression in the relationship between alliance members does not make peaceful settlement within the alliance more likely. Third, higher differences in the alliance players’ contributions to alliance effort lead to more internal conflict and more intense fighting

The Enemy Within: The Demonization of Poor Women

The denigration and demonization of poor women was central to the effort to repeal Aid to Families with Dependent Children by the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The utilization of negative stereotypes involving race, class and gender effectively marginalized impoverished women and their children, who were blamed for virtually all of the social problems of the United States during the 1990s. Despite the massive concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the wealthiest Americans and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the United States continues to ignore the need for fundamental economic and social reform

The enemy within: the isolated b in bame

BAME is lumbered together under an umbrella of oneness that creates a dichotomy between 'White' and ‘other’, writes Odessa Hamilto