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A conceptually rich, historically informed, and interdisciplinary study of the contentious politics emerging out of decades of authoritarian neoliberal economic reform, The Roots of Revolt examines the contested political economy of Egypt from Nasser to Mubarak, just prior to the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted across rural and urban Egypt, Angela Joya employs an 'on the ground' approach to critical political economy that challenges the interpretations of Egyptian politics put forward by scholars of both democratization and authoritarianism. By critically reassessing the relationship between democracy and capitalist development, Joya demonstrates how renewed authoritarian politics were required to institutionalize neoliberal reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund, presenting the real-world impact of economic policy on the lives of ordinary Egyptians before the Arab Uprisings.

This paper argues that Mohamad Bouazizi's self-immolation was a Pragmatic Act aimed at escaping Biopower formulated by the authoritarian Tunisian regime for the purpose of securitizing Structural Violence. It is a sensational form of suicide that awakens emotions and inspires resistance. Human emotions, not technological innovation, had the power to change regimes. Twitter and Facebook are methods of communication that helped transmit this rage, but did not cause these revolutions. Passions, lit by Bouazizi's flame, diffused naturally by human interface and may have occurred without such technological advances. This paper is divided into three main parts. The first is to theorize the act of self-immolation. The second theorizes about the power human emotion has on the international arena. Lastly, it highlights the discursive power of scholarship. Fundamentally, this paper seeks to illuminate these thoughts on Bouazizi's self-immolation, as well pursue self-reflexivity that exemplifies the subjectivity of intellectuality. It presents a novel argument as it describes what dominant theories of International Relations omit: how ordinary people influence the international politics. The Arab Revolutions were caused not solely by the emergence of social networks or news media, but by emotional diffusion. Raw human anger forms the uniting force that assembles and organizes oppressed populations. By using these concepts and describing this and other cases of self-immolation, one discovers a pattern: self-immolation is an extraordinary method of suicide that persons without agency use to securitize structural violence by means of human emotion. As such, emotions are an integral, but understudied part of International Relations.

This paper argues that Mohamad Bouazizi's self-immolation was a Pragmatic Act aimed at escaping Biopower formulated by the authoritarian Tunisian regime for the purpose of securitizing Structural Violence. It is a sensational form of suicide that awakens emotions and inspires resistance. Human emotions, not technological innovation, had the power to change regimes. Twitter and Facebook are methods of communication that helped transmit this rage, but did not cause these revolutions. Passions, lit by Bouazizi's flame, diffused naturally by human interface and may have occurred without such technological advances. This paper is divided into three main parts. The first is to theorize the act of self-immolation. The second theorizes about the power human emotion has on the international arena. Lastly, it highlights the discursive power of scholarship. Fundamentally, this paper seeks to illuminate these thoughts on Bouazizi's self-immolation, as well pursue self-reflexivity that exemplifies the subjectivity of intellectuality. It presents a novel argument as it describes what dominant theories of International Relations omit: how ordinary people influence the international politics. The Arab Revolutions were caused not solely by the emergence of social networks or news media, but by emotional diffusion. Raw human anger forms the uniting force that assembles and organizes oppressed populations. By using these concepts and describing this and other cases of self-immolation, one discovers a pattern: self-immolation is an extraordinary method of suicide that persons without agency use to securitize structural violence by means of human emotion. As such, emotions are an integral, but understudied part of International Relations.

It is clear that the recent wave of self-immolations and protests taking place in southern Amdo and northern Kham in eastern Tibet is a reflection of an extreme form of defiance in response to an increasingly repressive atmosphere. The atmosphere is epitomized by the intensification of patriotic education campaigns in monasteries and is framed within a broader political context of discriminatory rule by authorities who generally see only variants of assimilation as the solution to the so-called 'Tibet Question.' However, it is less clear why this particular form of protest – self-immolation – is happening in this particular part of Tibet. The explanation is probably not found in differences of governance styles across this eastern Tibetan region, which has been fragmented, absorbed and ruled by the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Additionally, there are large Tibetan areas in these provinces, under similar conditions of rule, where self-immolations have not taken place. Rather, local histories in these Tibetan areas need to be carefully considered, especially with respect to the evolving fusion between religious faith, political dissidence, and rapid dislocating social change.

The years between 1930 and 1933 saw a dramatic rise in anticolonial violence in Bengal. Young women who participated in this violence, caught between competing masculinist discourses of colonial authorities and nationalist communities that deemed them either dupes or martyrs, recognized an incongruity between their revolutionary insurgency and the conditions of possibility for its memorialization. This essay follows Pritilata Waddedar, the first woman to die in the commission of an anticolonial terrorist attack, as she is incarnated into legal, historical, and cultural evidence by colonial authorities and nationalists alike. It responds to Gayatri Spivak's canonical question of whether the subaltern woman's voice can be excavated from the historical archive by suggesting that Waddedar augurs and undermines the future narratives of her death and allegorically calls herself sati as a political strategy of refusal and illegibility. Waddedar's iteration of sati relies on its peculiar status in nineteenth-century colonial law, where it was classified as "voluntary culpable homicide by consent." This legislation inaugurated a new juridical index of female desire that shaped the political conditions of possibility for revolutionary women decades later. Waddedar prophesies the ways in which her death, like that of the immolated widow, will come to be the object of disputed meaning making and insistently jams the gears of systems of evidence that promise an epistemological clarity of the terms by which a woman lives or dies.

Part I. The Framework: 1. Political self-sacrifice / 33. - 2. Agency / 55. - 3. Body and emotion / 78. - Part II. The Historical Cases: 4. Hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, 1980-1981 / 107. - 5. Martyrdom in Poland, 1984 / 134. - 6. Self-immolation in Vietnam, 1963 / 160. - Part III. Comparisons and Conclusions: 7. Martyrdom in the contemporary Middle East and north Africa / 193. - 8. The public diplomacy of suffering / 228

Politics and Suicide argues that whilst the historical lineage of suicidal politics is recognised, the fundamental significance of autodestruction to the political remains under examined. It contends that practices like suicide-bombing do not simply embody a strange or abnormal suicidal articulation of the political, but rather, that the existence of suicidal politics tells us something fundamental about the political as such and thinking about political violence more broadly. Recent world events have emphatically shown our need for tools with which to develop better understandings of the politics of suicide. Through the exploration of several arresting case-studies, including the Kamikaze bombers of World War Two, Jan Palach's self-immolation in 1969, Cold War nuclear deterrence, and the suicide-terrorist attacks of 9/11 Michelsen asks how we might talk of a political suicide in any of these contexts. The book charts how political processes go suicidal, and asks how we might still consider them to be political in such a case. It investigates how suicide can function as politics. A strong contribution to the fields of philosophy and international relations theory, this work will also be of interest to students and scholars of political theory and terrorism and political violence.--

Based on interviews with failed suicide bombers, officials of Pakistani law enforcement agencies involved in interrogating high-profile self-immolation attacks, and content analysis of Jihadi publications produced in local languages, this book offers the first empirically grounded analysis of suicide terrorism in Pakistan.

The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface between faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of colonial governance of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual transmutation of an idea or a word: consent, the widow's consent to burning alive. The early colonial state formally institutionalised the widow's consent as the basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventuated, over a long stretch of time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of female entitlements and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone. This was a development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists had actually intended.

Introduction -- On Suicide Archives and Political Resonances / Suman Gupta -- The Irresistible Rise and Fall of Posthumous Bouazizi / Suman Gupta -- Austerity Annuls the Individual : Dimitris Christoulas and the Greek Financial Crisis / Theodoros A. Spyros and Mike Hajimichael -- Self-Immolations in Bulgaria : A Quietly Accumulating Record / Milena Katsarska -- Self-Effacing Suicides and Troubled Talk / Suman Gupta.

On 8 September 1968, Ryszard Siwiec set fi re to himself during a harvest festival in the 10th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. Through his self-immolation, he sought to protest against Communist rule in general and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in particular. However, his death did not gain wider attention. Further protests 'by fi re' took place in the subsequent months and years in East Central Europe. Among them was the self-immolation by the Czech student Jan Palach in Prague. In contrast to Siwiec, this young man was immediately recognized as a martyr in Czechoslovakia as well as on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It was only after 1989 that Ryszard Siwiec's story became increasingly well-known. Today, his act still remains in the shadow of Palach's, however. This article deals with the marginal position of Siwiec in the Polish national pantheon. By reflecting on the various constraints on creating martyrs in state and post-socialism, it focuses on one particular aspect of Polish and Czech – or rather Polish-Czech – memory politics. As for the 'Polish Palach' Ryszard Siwiec, the paper demonstrates that Czechs have played a crucial role in popularizing him. ; p. 295-313 ; On 8 September 1968, Ryszard Siwiec set fi re to himself during a harvest festival in the 10th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. Through his self-immolation, he sought to protest against Communist rule in general and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in particular. However, his death did not gain wider attention. Further protests 'by fi re' took place in the subsequent months and years in East Central Europe. Among them was the self-immolation by the Czech student Jan Palach in Prague. In contrast to Siwiec, this young man was immediately recognized as a martyr in Czechoslovakia as well as on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It was only after 1989 that Ryszard Siwiec's story became increasingly well-known. Today, his act still remains in the shadow of Palach's, however. This article deals with the marginal position of Siwiec in the Polish national pantheon. By reflecting on the various constraints on creating martyrs in state and post-socialism, it focuses on one particular aspect of Polish and Czech – or rather Polish-Czech – memory politics. As for the 'Polish Palach' Ryszard Siwiec, the paper demonstrates that Czechs have played a crucial role in popularizing him. ; s. 295-313

The first image that the question of violence in the Middle East conjures up, especially in the West, is that of the suicide bomber. This association, etched into the political imaginary particularly over the course of the last two decades, is due neither to the number of victims suicide bombing creates (more conventional weapons of war can claim as many or more victims), nor to the identity of its victims (conventional weapons are also often directed at civilians). Rather, the potency of the image of the suicide bomber is connected to the simultaneously self-destructive and other-directed form that this act of violence takes. If the Orientalist impulse that has raised the image of the suicide bomber to iconic status is deeply problematic, it nonetheless constitutes an involuted acknowledgement of a reality: the significant rise in self-destructive violence (and not just in the Middle East). I have in mind practices such as hunger striking, self-immolation, and fatal self-mutilation, which constitute an emergent repertoire of struggle that has come to mark a certain current of radical politics around the globe. Those modalities of self-destructive violence that are not directed at others are overshadowed by suicide bombing.