Tobias Kelly

Introduction: a double-edged sword: protection and state violence

The Anglo-American led ‘war on terror’ has generated heated debates over the role of the state in protecting its citizen-subjects from internal and external threats. States have taken supposedly exceptional measures against perceived dangers by launching wars, overthrowing regimes and curtailing civil liberties in the name of ‘security’. At the same time, these supposedly exceptional measures have been seen by many people as destabilizing sources of oppression in their own right. While the second war in Iraq was launched in the name of restoring international order and overthrowing an undoubtedly brutal dictator, it has also brought disorder and violence into the lives of many people in the region. Similarly, while immigration controls have been tightened in the name of security, they have also brought discrimination, abuse and harassment. In this context, the measures taken by many regimes in order to protect their citizen-subjects have also created disorder, fear and violence. Recent anthropological work on the relationships between those who speak in the name of the state and their citizen-subjects has explored the ways in which forms of rule are often produced through forceful and violent imposition, rather than straightforward consent (Das and Poole, 2004; Hansen and Stepputat, 2005). Consent to govern is given often as much for reasons of fear as it is freely chosen. Many states are formed through histories of pacification, forced assimilation and exclusion rather than the stabilizing actions of ‘civil society’. This work has made a useful and important contribution by exploring ethnographically how both seemingly ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ states are founded on violence, and depend on fear and coercion to carry out many of their most fundamental tasks (Heyman, 1999). The articles found here join in this project, and were first presented at a workshop held jointly by the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College and the Crisis States Programme of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The participants were asked to examine, among other things, how states use violence in the pursuit of control and legitimacy. In this collection, we explore one aspect of the state and its relationship to violence – the everyday experiences, manifestations and effects of the state as both a source of violence and as a provider of protection from violence – paying attention to the shifting ends of state violence as well as its means. The articles do so through in-depth examination of case studies ranging from Article

The UN Committee Against Torture: Human Rights Monitoring and the Legal Recognition of Cruelty

Focusing on the Committee Against Torture, this article argues that human rights monitoring can hide as much as it reveals. In particular, monitoring should be understood as a “second order” process that displaces the discussion of the causes and consequences of violence in favor of a focus on the systems that are supposed to monitor cruelty. In this process, measurements, monitoring, and prevention are in danger of becoming merged. As such, the ways in which the Committee Against Torture produces and assesses information serves simultaneously to create a depoliticized conception of violence and to reproduce political inequalities between states.

Torture and ill-treatment under perceived human rights documentation and the poor

ABSTRACT:This article addresses the question of how human rights practitioners know about harm. In particular, what forms of torture and ill-treatment are made legible through human rights documentation? We argue human rights documentation techniques can systematically under perceive the extent of torture and ill-treatment among people living in poverty. The article is based on research in Kenya, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and sets out five key predispositions in documentation techniques that result in implicit discrimination.

Citizenship, Cowardice, and Freedom of Conscience: British Pacifists in the Second World War

Freedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of “detached conviction.” Yet evidence of such “detached convictions” always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.

The Clinic and the Court: Law, Medicine and Anthropology

Law and medicine can be caught in a tight embrace. They both play a central role in the politics of harm, making decisions regarding what counts as injury and what might be the most suitable forms of redress or remedy. But where do law and medicine converge and diverge in their responses to, and understandings of, harm and suffering? Using empirical case studies from Europe, the Americas and Africa, The Clinic and the Court brings together leading medical and legal anthropologists to explore this question.

Beyond ethics: Conscience, pacifism, and the political in wartime Britain

The central intervention of this article concerns the contingency of the relationship between ethics and politics. The empirical focus is Second World War Britain, where the refusal to fight was often framed as a conscientious objection. More broadly, one of the central propositions in the anthropology of ethics has been that ethics is ubiquitous. However, ethical practices—such as conscience—are not always prioritized in public life. It is not simply, for example, that we might have different ways of answering “how ought I to live?”, but that the question itself is not always thought to be socially significant. We therefore need to pay attention to how and why the question is posed, and what this means for who can speak and about what issues. As such, the paper argues that the valorization of conscience can reproduce forms of privilege.

Introduction: Whose civility?

This article is an introduction to this special issue on civility. It asks what can anthropological insights contribute to debates about civility? We propose to understand civility as a “worldly concept.” We mean this in two senses. First, it is a concept that has traction in the world: a concern with civility and incivility can be found equally in public debate as in academic work. Second, civility is worldly in a more Arendtian sense. For Hannah Arendt, politics is about what it is between people – to act politically means to construct and enter a space which allows multiple people to be present. Civility is a concept that involves talking about how people relate to each other within non-familial settings and where people are fundamentally different from each other. We use the concept of civility as a lens that allows us to focus on moments where people try to understand what respect and restraint for each other might mean in the face of potential, and maybe radical, disagreement. In this introduction we begin to explore the key theoretical issues associated with civility, in order to examine the ways anthropology can benefit from these debates, as well as contribute to them. In particular, we ask the following questions: When do claims of civility move from a conservative stifling dissent to a radical call for change? When does civility move from being conformist to dissenting, and what are its limits? What are the specific histories that mark the ways in which people are civil or uncivil to one another? What are the cultural codes through which civility is expressed and understood?

The Potential for Civility: Labour and Love Among British Pacifists in the Second World War

Is civility an end in itself, or a means to other ends? The relationship between means and ends marks theoretical debates about the meanings and implications of civility. This article addresses how these tensions played out in the context of the particular forms of civility promoted by pacifists in Second World War Britain. More specifically, it focuses on the experiences of those pacifists who set up community farms as a way to try and merge both means and ends through a form of sociality marked by love, mutual labour and conscience. The paper makes two arguments. First, the attempt to merge means and ends meant that the compromises of the present could be hard to overcome. The distinctly pacifist civility of Second World War Britain tended to reproduce particular middle class and masculine ways of being in the world. Second, it was the very tension between means and ends, however, that gave claims of pacifist civility fraught potency. For many British pacifists, pacifist forms of civility were an attempt to propose an alternative, not despite, but because of the space between their aspiration for cooperation and love, and the disappointments of experience. Pacifist civility was therefore understood as a form of potential. It is also important to note though that potentiality is marked by two possibilities: the potential to do; and the potential not to do. It is on this delicate balance between the inequities of the here and now and the aspired for future that pacifist civility stood.