Suchergebnisse

This paper separates Wollstonecraft's critical concept of "machiavelian" power and the capacity for domination, from a neutral concept of politics as the complex processes surrounding the power to govern, from her normative account of popular sovereignty which emphasizes collective political power to ensure the discharge of natural duty by way of civil and political rights and duties. Wollstonecraft's voice as political judge—which is audible throughout her work, but particularly clearly in her book on the French Revolution—articulates the ways that political power can be abused and misused, and can also be effective. Her theory is political in several ways: she interrogates the nature of political power and its explanatory importance; she consistently articulates political judgment about matters both conventionally political and social; she offers a theoretical justification for the expansion of the scope of politics to cover relations that hitherto were thought to be outside its domain; and finally her work itself constitutes a political intervention.

This paper considers how magic power – as a political resource, and as a metaphor for political power – is implicated in current and past thought about sovereignty and domination. Shakespeare's treatments of politics, magic, sovereignty and domination are an illuminating source, relating as they do to the Machiavellian tradition, and to later treatments of the themes by Hobbes and Weber. The question is raised how articulated scepticism about political power relates to scepticism about alleged magic; and how the conduct of Shakespeare's magicians casts light on their conduct qua political actors.

The naming of violence in feminist political campaigns and in the context of feminist theory has rhetorical and political effects. Feminist contention about the scope and meaning of 'violence against women' and 'sex and gender-based violence', and about the concepts of gender and of violence itself, are fundamentally debates about the politics of feminist contestation, and the goals, strategies and tactics of feminist organisation, campaigns, and action. This paper examines the propulsion since the late twentieth century of the problems of VAW and SGBV on to global and national political agendas. The feminist theory that underpins the uptake of this new agenda is contested by opponents of feminism. More significantly for the paper it is also contested within feminism, in disputes about how feminist political aims should be furthered, through what institutions, and with what strategic goals in view. The paper aims to show that theoretical and philosophical controversy about the concepts of violence, and sex and gender, are always political, both in the sense that they are an aspect of feminist competition about how feminist politics should proceed, and in the sense that the political implications of concepts and theory must always be a significant factor in their salience for feminist action.

This article analyses how early twenty-first century political activists in Italy construct the frontier between politics and violence. It puts these constructions into the context of more conventionally theoretical accounts of violence and politics. Analysis of internet discourse published by left/anarchist bloggers and group members focusses on how activists criticize the conventional view that electoral politics is non-violent, and endorse the view that violence is politics' main means. This means that the role of violence in oppositional politics then has to be negotiated. Discourse analysis shows how ideas of resistance, and anti-state force, are articulated in such a way as to draw distinctions between us and them, and their politics and ours. The article discusses the significance of these articulations of the politics-violence distinction for the construction of political agency, and for the justification of forms of political action, seeking to show that boundary work is fundamental to political agency.

The question of violence is invariably a matter of controversy and dispute for anarchists.[Pauli 2015: 142; Gelderloos 2007, 2015; Graeber 2009:222-228; Miller 1984: 109-123] Anarchist means should prefigure their political and ethical ends - and anarchy will be non-coercive. [Miller 1984:109; Graeber 2009:222] Reception of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) often focused on his aversion to violent revolution, appropriating him into the category of 'utopian' thinkers, in contrast to Marxist realism. Tolstoy's theory of state coercion can be traced to Proudhon [Rivett 1988: 31; Bartlett 2013: 143]. Subsequently there have been engagements between anarchism and pacifism in the thought and practice of Mohandas Gandhi [1869-1948], who was significantly influenced by Tolstoy. But practices of non-violence have recently become contentious among anarchists.[Pauli 2015: 142-3; Gelderloos 2007, 2015]

The acute sensitivity of feminism to violence, in its many different forms and contexts, makes it a particularly interesting case for the examination of the relationship between politics and violence in theory and practice. Our purpose in this paper is not to adjudicate the normative question of whether feminism implies a commitment to pacifism or to the use of non-violence. Rather, we are interested in examining how the relation between feminist politics and violence is construed as feminists struggle to develop a politics in which opposition to patriarchal violence is central. We begin with the feminist critique of violence, and move to examine how particular articulations of that critique shape and are shaped by practices of feminist political agency in specific contestation over the goals and strategies of feminism. We use the well-known case of feminist debates over the Greenham Common Peace Camp in the UK in the 1980s to demonstrate how negotiating women's political agency in relation to opposition to male violence poses problems, both for feminists who embrace non-violence and prioritize the opposition to war, and for feminists who are suspicious of non-violence and of the association of feminism with peace activism. In both cases, the debates over Greenham demonstrate the fundamentally political character of the ways in which the relation and distinction between violence and politics are conceptually and practically negotiated.