Joan Cocks

Revisiting Johan Galtung's Concept of Structural Violence

This symposium is organized around a common concern: if we, as political scientists, limit ourselves to an analytics of violence that points solely to agents and intentions, we are sure to miss the pervasive forms of violence that are “built into” structures, institutions, ideologies, and histories. Through an engagement with the concept of “structural violence,” a term coined by Johan Galtung in his path-breaking 1969 article, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” each of the authors collected here reflect on and extend Galtung’s work to confront ways in which violence shapes and reshapes our experiences that cannot be accounted for by liability-based models of agency and force. They do so with the shared belief

JEWISH NATIONALISM AND THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE

This essay seeks to answer the following two questions. What fears and psychological defenses fuel the various refusals of recognition of Palestinians by Jewish society and the Israeli state? What form of polity can transcend the conditions that gave rise to those fears and defenses, and hence offer hope for a just and lasting solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? The essay examines the persecution anxieties that have animated Jewish ethnonationalism, using as its case study the metamorphosis of the Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi from a champion of anti-colonial national liberation to a champion of Zionism. It considers the form of polity that might transcend the objective conditions that gave rise to those persecution anxieties by exploring Edward Saids intimations of a new form of political society that combines the opposite ‘moments of truth’ of the age of empire and the age of the nation-state. Multinational empires were characterized not only by the hierarchical authoritarian rule of ‘high peoples’ over ‘lower’ but also by the political unity of heterogeneous ethnicities and nationalities. The nation-states that replaced them have exhibited not only popular self-rule and citizen equality but also the impulse to eradicate collective differences via cultural homogenization and/or the persecution of minorities. Saids proposal for a bi-national state for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in a cosmopolitan Middle East can be seen as an attempt to solve the problem of beleaguered minorities in the modern nation-state by fusing the principle of heterogeneity with the principle of democratic equality and self-rule. While Said thereby offers directions to an exit for humanity from the endless loop of received persecution, nationalist reaction and active persecution, he leaves unsolved the problem of how to overcome the biggest obstacles in front of that exit: collective identities already congealed and hardened by nationalist politics.

Dignity and the Limits of Liberal Individualism

This article accords with recent liberal defenses of the political significance of dignity and the value in distinguishing between assaults on dignity and assaults on the body aimed at causing physical pain. However, it breaks with liberal individualist approaches in three ways. It shifts its focus of attention from the state to social groups as key sources of dignity injuries; from abstract individuals to collective identities as key targets and sufferers of dignity injuries; and from public points of contact between political regimes and their citizens to interior, intimate, and informal social spaces – some impenetrable by and/or unsuitable for legal intervention – as important theaters in which insults to dignity and struggles against those insults are played out.

The Death of Politics as a Liberal Art

This paper argues that the study of politics as a liberal art is under assault today, both from outside pressures on liberal arts education and from the discipline’s vision of the study of politics as a narrow “political science.”

Sovereignty, Identity, and Insecurity: A Commentary on Patchen Markells's Bound by Recognition

Patchen Markell has written a fine book—rigorous, meticulous, perceptive— with an especially elegant interplay between political theory and historical illustration in his chapter on nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation. Markell challenges the politics of recognition, not for its cry for social justice, with which he is entirely sympathetic, but rather for its starting assumptions and internal logic, which together ensnare its protagonists in a set of self-undermining errors. First, the politics of recognition misrecognizes social injustice as, at root, an identity injustice that is set into motion by the refusal of some group to recognize some other group for what it feels it really is, with its most deforming effects reserved for the psyches of those at the receiving end of that refusal. Second, the politics of recognition mistakenly presumes that identity precedes and determines action, which leads it to think that since who one is is a function of what one is, all unpredictable and unpleasant encounters between the whos can be prevented if all the whats can be persuaded to recognize and respect one another equally. Third, in its attempt to control the outcome of human interaction by enforcing the reciprocal recognition of all identities, as if those identities were fixed in advance of that interaction, the politics of recognition unwittingly recapitulates the logic of the politics of sovereignty it initially arose to challenge, both in the theory of liberal individualism and in the practice of various overweening groups. Following both Hegel and Arendt, Markell condemns the politics of sovereignty as the pursuit of self-determination, an unrealizable goal that can only be sought via the tyrannical attempt to determine everything outside the self. Dominant groups enjoy the semblance of mastery and independence by forcing

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. By Virginia Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 220p.

A New Cosmopolitanism? V.S. Naipaul and Edward Said

45. In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism, utilitarianism, liberal contract theory, and virtue theory. She proposes that care is, compared with justice, the more basic value, on the grounds that society can exist without the latter but not without the former. She recommends that men and women participate equally in care activities; that care infuse citizen as well as familial relations; and that society beat back the imperializing thrust of the market ethos and the conflict-mongering thrust of the militarized state to improve the well-being of children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the community, culture, the environment, and deprived regions of the world.