Creating a state: A Kleinian reading of recognition in Zimbabwe’s regional relationships

This article contributes to recent debates about mutual recognition between states, and, more broadly, to discussions of the role of emotion in International Relations. It challenges ‘moral claims’ made in some of the literature that interstate recognition leads to a progressive erosion of difference or a pooling of identity, and underlying assumptions that recognition constitutes a stage in the development of states that have already established internal coherence. Instead, it claims that processes of recognition are fractious and unstable, characterised by aggression and self-assertion, as well as affection and the creation of a ‘we-feeling’, and that such processes are an enduring feature of state identity. Using the case of Zimbabwe — a state that is clearly fractured, with an apparently insecure collective identity — the article explores how recognition both challenges and reinforces state selfhood through dynamics that are bumpy, intense and unstable. It moves on to develop a theoretical interpretation of these dynamics by drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, showing links between individual psychic anxiety and collective need for a state that exists uneasily but inextricably in relation to others. The article concludes that international recognition works as a way both to establish and to challenge state coherence

Building a Terrorist House on Sand: A critical incident analysis of interprofessionality and the Prevent duty in schools in England.

In 2015, a duty came into effect requiring all public bodies, including schools, to engage with the UK government’s Prevent counter-terrorism strategy. This paper presents two case studies from mid-size English cities, exploring the moral prototypes and institutional identities of professional mediators who made schools aware of their duties under Prevent. Mediators in each case included serving and former police, teachers and policy advisers, the majority of whom are now private consultants or operating small 3rd sector agencies. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 14 professionals, the paper details the ways in which participants constructed their relationship to normative, deliberative and legal obligations. The paper focuses on the recurrence of a high profile critical media incident in which a young child was allegedly subject to a referral for writing about living in a ‘terrorist’ (rather than ‘terraced’) house. Reaction to this incident was archetypal of the fear of media moral panic in reconstituting mediators’ identities as Prevent professionals, illustrating how the enframing of events shifts professional moral codes, policy interpretation and implementation

A lei e o corpo Law and the body

Partindo do conceito do arbitrário cultural, no qual se relativiza a categoria de enfermidade e se evidencia a inserção desta no campo da significação, o ensaio discute a problemática da autonomia do organismo e da saúde como constituinte da lei, para estabelecer então as relações entre as categorias de causalidade, desvio e ordem jurídica, que se desdobram na discussão entre corpo e história.<br>Starting from the concept of cultural arbitrariness, where the category of "sickness" is relativized and where its insertion in the realm of meaning is evidenced, this essay discusses the issue of the autonomy of the organism and of health as components of law. It goes on to establish relations between the notions of causality, deviance, and judicial order, leading into a discussion of the body and history