Category Archives: Violence

Boundaries, Sovereignty, Necropolitics

Mbembe, Achille. 2000. “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa.” Public Culture 12(1): 259-284. ———. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. In these two articles, Achille Mbembe explores changing territorial arrangements and configurations of sovereignty. … Continue reading

Posted in Boundaries, Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The Body, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

State of Exception

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben explores how the state of exception, building from Schmitt as the suspension of law for the preservation of the juridical order, produces and is indeed predicated on the … Continue reading

Posted in Boundaries, Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Law, Power, Sovereignty, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Nomos of the Earth

Schmitt, Carl. 2006. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press Publishing. Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth could be called legal genealogy of the territorial spatial ordering of the … Continue reading

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The Sea, The State, Violence | 3 Comments

Territorialization of State Power

Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 1995. “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.” Theory and Society 24: 385-426. Vandergeest and Peluso’s landmark article concerns the way in which state power is territorialized within the borders of a politically defined space … Continue reading

Posted in Forests, Historical-Geographies, Law, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Guha: Dominance Without Hegemony?

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro & Ch. 1] Intuitively, it’s odd that the Subaltern Studies crowd has drawn so heavily on Gramsci, since he had surprisingly little to … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Critique, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Suffering for Territory

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Hollow Land and the Politics of ‘Archupation’

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. All military occupations are spatial operations and strategies. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and government have managed to make space the continuation of war by other means. New … Continue reading

Posted in City, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Place, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Discipline, Punish & Illegalities

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. “‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole … Continue reading

Posted in Governmentality, Illegality, Law, Michel Foucault, Power, Spatiality, Violence | 4 Comments

Security, Territory, Population

Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. Foucault says he’s following the genesis of a political knowledge that put “population” at the center of its concerns. He uses “government” as the guiding thread of … Continue reading

Posted in City, Governmentality, Michel Foucault, Political Economy, Power, Spatiality, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Society Must Be Defended

Foucault, Michel. 1997. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 He starts the lectures defining “subjugated knowledges,” as those that have been both written out of history and submerged in it in a masked form. He … Continue reading

Posted in Michel Foucault, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Violence | 5 Comments