Memory and rightlessness

"In this conversation, I wish to trace with you some connections between memory and power.

The War on Terror and the War of Terror : Nomadic Multitudes, Aggressive Incumbents, and the New International Law: Prefactory Remarks on Two Wars

This article contrasts and compares the war on terror and the war of terror in the wake of, and before, 11 September 2001. The philosophical underpinnings involved in defining terrorism are analyzed in the context of the United States\u27 war on terrorism and related wars of terrorism, such as the 1998 World Islamic Council\u27s fatwa. Both wars fall within the wording of recent United Nations\u27 Resolutions that address the adverse impact of terrorism on Human Rights. The understanding of the meaning of terrorism by those promoting the war on terrorism provides a powerful political tool, notwithstanding effects on Human Rights that are similar to the effects that result from the war of terrorism. These two wars signify a patterned break from the classical comity between nation-states with respect to acts of aggression, and the values being promoted in this context serve the emerging American Empire and the resistance to it. The result, framed by those promoting the war on terrorism, is that-either being for or against terrorism-potential for non-violent solutions are lessened. Since September 11, the war on terror has installed a new rule of preemptive self-defence, grounded in suspicion, and with no recent precedent in international law

The War on Terror and the War of Terror : Nomadic Multitudes, Aggressive Incumbents, and the New International Law: Prefactory Remarks on Two Wars

This article contrasts and compares the war on terror and the war of terror in the wake of, and before, 11 September 2001. The philosophical underpinnings involved in defining terrorism are analyzed in the context of the United States\u27 war on terrorism and related wars of terrorism, such as the 1998 World Islamic Council\u27s fatwa. Both wars fall within the wording of recent United Nations\u27 Resolutions that address the adverse impact of terrorism on Human Rights. The understanding of the meaning of terrorism by those promoting the war on terrorism provides a powerful political tool, notwithstanding effects on Human Rights that are similar to the effects that result from the war of terrorism. These two wars signify a patterned break from the classical comity between nation-states with respect to acts of aggression, and the values being promoted in this context serve the emerging American Empire and the resistance to it. The result, framed by those promoting the war on terrorism, is that-either being for or against terrorism-potential for non-violent solutions are lessened. Since September 11, the war on terror has installed a new rule of preemptive self-defence, grounded in suspicion, and with no recent precedent in international law

Human Rights in ‘Controlling and Combating Corruption’: The ‘Uselessness of Good Ideas?’-- Synoptic Remarks

No abstrac

Globalisation:

Summaries This article shows the intimate links between human?rights discourses today and globalisation. It highlights how rights discourses have contributed greatly to the radical critique of developmentalism, reconfiguring the notion of development by placing the human person, not the state, as the central subject and beneficiary. The article warns, however, of two contemporary processes of regression in rights discourses. The first is the emergent episteme that discredits thoughts that dare imagine alternatives to global capitalism and strays beyond the languages of economic rationalism. The second is the replacement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights paradigm with a trade?related, market?friendly human rights (TRMF/HR) paradigm that promotes and protects the collective rights of global capital. In the latter the rights to entrepreneurship, innovation and economic progress are said to create the essential conditions for better realisation of social and human rights

The Third Message of Islam?

Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im makes a spirited call for reformation of the Shari’a human rights, democracy, and constitutional compliance. He does so not as the problem of any metaphysical framework, or everydayness of the “fatigue of the Sharia,” but as accentuating a moral duty of non-humiliation itself as a human right to live with dignity as the core of Islam and all other religions. He crafts Islamic traditions of dialogue in a world that increasingly only knows the demagogic soliloquies of power. An-Na’im follows the “moderate revolutionary” Ustadh Mohamad Taha, who offered the Second Message of Islam, espousing the Mecca school over the Medina school in, at the least, ameliorating practices of discrimination against women and non-coreligionists. But An-Na’im is best understood as offering a Third Message, showing how the traditions of pious interpretation can be further deployed creatively in making religious thought and practices compliant with the ideas of democracy, contemporary pious interpretation, and classical liberal constitutionalism. His favorite strategy for this is “dialogue,” defying the world of power and propaganda relentlessly pursuing monologues. Indeed, “dialogue” glides into accommodation, mediation, and institutionalization. However, it never embraces theocratic state formations. This Essay generally explores: (1) the multifaceted aspects of spiritual and reformist legacies of An-Na’im; (2) the role of theopolitics in promoting cross-cultural dialogue concerning Shari’a, constitutional secularism, and human rights (non-hegemonic human rights thought and practice); (3) the role of “civic reason;” and, very briefly, (4) the tasks ahead