Alternatives: Global, Local, Political articles from July 2006

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political archives from July 2006

Terrortory.(terrorism)
July 1, 2006... Contemporary usage presents an opposition between states and terrorism, as if to suggest that terrorism is not an instrument of the state but something that is used against it. Yet the two most influential foundational myths of the modern...

"Like a dog!": humiliation and shame in the war on terror.
July 1, 2006... An examination of the disturbing practice of torture and abuse in the "global war on terror," focusing on the methods and motivations of the United States. Proceeding from the imaginary yet all-too-real world of Kafka and the Kafkaesque, it...

The duty of the benevolent master: from sovereignty to suzerainty and the biopolitics of intervention.
July 1, 2006... Recent claims about humanitarian intervention express forms of domination that are both geopolitical and increasingly constructed around a biopolitical duty to relieve the suffering of brutalized peoples. This paper examines this presumed duty...

The Smallest Army Imaginable.
July 1, 2006... This article explores why it is so difficult to imagine a state without an army. It considers Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, conventional accounts of the sovereign state and the right to legitimate violence, Gandhi's concept of...

Disrupting Asian America: South Asian American histories as strategic sites of narration.
July 1, 2006... This article elaborates a critical practice that interrogates the discursive protocols narrating the US nation's histories. It poses South Asian American genealogies as strategic sites from which the racial formation of the United States and...