• Periodizing our Current Moment: Work-Well-Fare As a New Mode of Social Regulation
  (view paper)
  Matthew Lymburner, Political Economy
• From Disabled to Dispossessed: CPP Disability Benefits and the Decline of Social Citizenship Rights in Canada
  (view paper)
  Mary Rita Holland, Public Policy
• Gazing Back Into the Closet: Theorizing about Queer Women in the Workplace
  (view abstract)
  Lesley Vaage, Canadian Studies
• Resisting and Reinforcing the ‘Entrepreneurial City’: Labour’s Contradictory Role in the Upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver
  (view abstract)
  Mathew Nelson, Political Science
• Discussant: Berrak Kabasakal, Political Economy

Transcript: Commentary from the Discussant

None Available.

• Reading Global Genders: Mapping gender-based struggles in the global geographies of local marginality
  (view abstract)
  Michael A. Lithgow, Mass Communication
• Travelling third class: regulating the transport of farm animals in Canada
  (view abstract)
  Michelle Barrett, Political Economy
• National Identity Examined: A Study of the Quebec Nation
  (view abstract | view paper)
  Rachel Ariey-Jouglard, Political Science
• A Prosperous Uncertainty: The Canada Border Services Agency, risk management, and the not-so new political imagination of spatially-bound identity
  (view abstract)
  Christopher Alderson, Political Economy
• Discussant: Benjamin Christensen, Sociology

Transcript: Comments from the Discussant.

What unifies these papers-in my opinion, is that they each are describing competing discourse over a particular issue.

Each paper is describing some type of discursive battle that attempts to gain the power and authority to describe a particular phenomenon. Each paper describes a series of tensions and contradictions which produce struggles and resistance to established relations and practices.

When I use the word “discourse”, I am trying to depict discourse as being illustrative of series of social practices. By “social practices”, I mean a continuous series of interconnected networks of economic, political and cultural activities. These social practices belong to a dialectical relationship with meaning-making (or semiosis). In other words, different social groups will use different symbols (language, text) to portray their position as somehow being morally or rationally superior to their opposition. Example: Leaders of the livestock transportation industy basing their position on “sound” science.

I find it useful to conceptualize discursive battles as an arena of competing arguments. Those discourses which become the most salient and dominant in any given social environment, can be understood as reflecting the success of one social group over another, in terms of establishing their paradigmatic views as being more legitimate than the views of their opposition.

For a discourse which holds a position of domination over others, it is important that they continuously reproduce lines of argument which attempt to maintain their position of domination. As different lines of opposition develop, so must the arguments of those in a position of power. It is an ever-ending process of reformulating new forms of meaning-making. Example: the changing meaning of Quebec Nationalism or national security.

Furthermore, each discourse/position will attempt to base their argument in conceptions of common sense. And to conceal, ignore, and romanticize various facts which support their position. Example: Quebec romantizing their history.

Presentations

What these papers have done, to a certain extent, is ask what groups/institutions are producing a particular line of discourse and why-and what oppositional voices are they trying to silence? And why?

It is only by examining these tensions, contradictions and struggles that we can begin to understand how societies are transformed. To quote Wally Clement on the topic of political economy: “Establishments seek to conceal the powers and assumptions that keep them in place. Political economy’s task is to analytically reveal these” (2001: 406). So applaud the presenters for their attempts to deconstruct these various discursive webs.

Questions

I want to apologize first, since my questions for the presenters encompass larger epistemological questions about political economy in general. But hopefully these will ignite some more specific questions from the audience.

Upon demystifying particular lines of discourse and exposing a set of conflicting forces, using what criteria does the graduate student take a position?

Are we always supposed to take the position of the “oppressed”? Whether it be the welfare of livestock, or pools of vulnerable female labourers. Furthermore, by taking a particular position, are we in anyway transforming the processes of conflict embodied in our realm of analysis? Or, by taking a position (of the “little guy”), are we simply attempting to redistribute power from those in a position of power to those without power?

Or perhaps, is it more the job of the grad student to demystify and unravel opposing forces which are seemingly natural and based in rational ideals of common sense.

Whatever the case, I would ask the presenters to be more reflective as to why they are taking the position they are, and to be more reflective in illuminating their assumptions and exploring how their ontological lens influences they way in which they present their findings. Doing so will only give your research more power and veracity.

• The Internationalization/Transnationalization of the State and its Relation to Low-Intensity Democracy: The Case of Haiti
  (view abstract)
  Ray Silvius & Neil Burron, Political Science
• Networks of Power: The World Water Council in Global and Local Contexts
  (view abstract)
  Emma Lui, Political Economy
• Spatial Strategies in the Policing of Protest: The Liberal Democratic State and the Contestation of Public Space
  (view paper)
  Andrew Crosby, Political Science
• Imagining the Diasporic Link: The Franco-Algerian Media Dialogues on the 2005 Emeutes in France
  (view paper | view abstract)
  Irina Mihalache, School of Journalism and Communication
• Discussant: Daniel Tubb, Political Economy

Transcript: Commentary from the Discussant

None available.

• An inquiry into factors influencing Canadian policies related to pharmaceutical patents
  (view abstract)
  Jason Wenczler, Political Economy
• Noise Annoys: Pirate Radio and the Distribution of Music in the Digital Age
  (view abstract)
  Jim Dooley, Political Economy
• Marxxxist Alienation: Sexual Anthropomorphism of Realdolls™ and Construction of Man
  (view paper)
  Elizabeth Record, Political Economy
• North American Integration and Copyright Policy: The Case of Canada
  (view abstract)
  Blayne Haggart, Political Science

Transcript: Commentary from the Discussant

Well, Blayne, it’s good to hear that my Facebook addiction did some good after all.

What I’d like to do now is take a minute to talk about some of the broader themes at play, and then make some more specific comments and ask some directed questions.

On the theme of questioning boundaries, these presentations drive us to rethink what it means to do political economy. In dealing with history and institutions; meanings and practices; or semiotic analysis, each of these papers is taking part in what is popularly known, at least in academic circles, as the ‘cultural turn’ in political economy. Of course, those in cultural studies like to call it the ‘return’ to culture in political economy, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

For example, as Bob Jessop argues: “cultural political economy involves not only a materialist analysis, but also a discursive account of power.” Instead of naturalizing or reifying technical and economic objects, like machines, money or the informational economy, cultural political economy holds that these objects are always socially embedded or disembedded, historically specific and in constant need of social reproduction. By breaking down the social and cultural construction of boundaries between the economic and the political, the ‘cultural turn’ simply allows for a more comprehensive and multi-scalar critique of contemporary capitalism.

Now let me get to some comments and questions for the panelists - mainly questions!

Jason, first, let me say that I completely agree with your paper and the background piece you sent: as a 20 billion dollar/year industry in Canada affecting countless lives, the pharmaceutical industry most definitely requires some careful research and analysis. There are a couple questions that came up while I was listening to your presentation. It’s the news many of us have heard before - that due to a lack of anti-viral drugs, people are dying everyday in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, among many other places. In your paper, you note that Canadian patent laws allow for generic companies to manufacture and export drugs that are under patent, but since that amendment came into effect 3 years ago, not a single pill has been delivered to a developing country.

So, who do we point the finger to? Should pharmaceutical companies be concerned with, or responsible for the public good? What then, are some of the changes needed in order to get medicines to those most in need?

Both your paper and Blayne’s paper, though from different perspectives, address the issue of domestic governments acting regionally. In Jason’s case, the US government is acting regionally by influencing Canadian public policy and patent law. While Blayne is arguing that Canada is acting regionally by resisting US and international calls for copyright reform. So: domestic governments as regional political institutions: How effective? How desirable? How democratic?

Because, Blayne, in your paper you argue that domestic governments are more democratic in their decision-making processes. In terms of the Canadian copyright issue, Michael Geist has argued that there was no consultation by the Federal government with civil society, consumer groups or education groups before drafting the new reforms. Now, I wouldn’t argue that regional institutions are more democratic than domestic ones, but perhaps you can expand a bit on how responsive and accessible domestic governments are on issues like North American integration.

More fundamentally, maybe you can clarify what you see as being the role of a “regional political institution.” If we look at your particular case study - how is the Federal government’s lack of movement on copyright reform influencing policy outside or across Canadian borders? Finally, what does it mean to have regional economic integration without the kinds of regional social or political integration we’ve seen in the European Union? What effect will increased economic integration have on domestic political institutions and their ability to govern?

Jim, in preparing my comments on your paper, I decided to try downloading some music through a Bittorrent website - since I’d never done it before (of course). But when I tried accessing the site, all I got was a page that said: “Sorry, this site cannot be accessed by users in Canada due to CRIA legal threats” - which links back to Blayne’s paper. Whether you call it the virtual panopticon, or the society of control, new technologies transform the way piracy is done and the way the dissemination of information occurs.

In relation to this, I’m hoping you can explain a bit more about what kinds of changes the music industry has seen in the move from pirate radio in the 60s and 70s to peer to peer music sharing today, something you deal with more explicitly in your paper. Piracy has been happening for a long time - at least since the advent of movable type and the printing press and probably earlier. How are new, information technologies changing the game?

In your paper, you address a number of important questions: like the role of intellectual property in what Lawrence Lessig calls Free Culture; and whether online content can be monetized. I think another issue worth looking at is whether or not piracy can act as a public good. For example, linking back to Jason’s topic, Matt Mason states that India between 1970 and 2005, ignored western patents on many life-saving drugs, simply because they needed to save lives and couldn’t afford market prices. During that time, life expectancy went from 40 years up to the 64 years we see today. In terms of public good, the strategy worked, and the Western pharmaceutical companies did eventually come to the table with lower prices. With regards to the music industry, though not about life and death, depending on who you talk to, is there a parallel trend? How does this relate to your concept of “neo-scarcity” in a digital economy?

Finally, in terms of your paper, you’ve acknowledged that piracy is a loaded term: how do you distinguish between piracy for profit, through the selling of copied CDs for example, with free culture piracy? Is there a difference in terms of ethics or laws that govern these kinds of transactions?

In all these papers, a recurring theme is the political economy of control. Control over the production and distribution of pharmaceuticals, control over access to music and other artistic innovations, and in the case of Realdoll ownership, control over social life itself.

Elizabeth, after reading your paper, I just had to visit the Realdolls website - with my academic hat on of course - and I was amazed that the dolls, or nonhuman women, if I can use that term, look incredibly life-like. Like an x-rated version of Madame Toussaud’s museum. And a first question came to mind: In terms of control over social life, are Realdolls the logical extension of mail-order brides? But I’ll leave that question open and move on.

I think the concept of human-machine hybrids is an interesting one. Often we talk about making machines more human, so that they can be better integrated into our daily lives. What is often missed is another direction for social and cultural flows, where humans become more like machines. Hardt and Negri argue that much of the production based on new technologies results in humans who increasingly think like computers. This is seen in the concept of the flexible worker, who, like the artificial intelligence of a computer, can modify, self-regulate and perfect its operation based on interaction with its user and environment, only acting when called upon. Now, to me, that sounds a lot like what Realdolls do.

Then, on a website called Feministe, one person argues: “Screwing a sex toy is fine by me. Calling it your girlfriend and wishing that real women were like dolls is not” So, what is the social or cultural status of a Realdoll? Is it a human-machine hybrid in the same ways that we are? Is there or should there be an alternative system of ethics when considering interactions with or between human-machine hybrids?

Your paper argues that the boundaries are increasingly blurred between what constitutes a human and what constitutes a machine; where they merge in the construct of a cyborg. From your quoting of Haraway, “copies without originals may be a highly attractive solution to avoid perpetuating the mistakes of humankind.” I was hoping you could expand on this, since an argument from Deleuze, drawing on Henri Bergson, is the idea that “originals without copies” is part of what it means to be human.

In Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, she argues that there isn’t anything about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. That there isn’t even such a state as ‘being’ female, “itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.” I can see how Haraway mobilizes the cyborg concept as a challenge to both capitalism and essentialist feminism, but I wonder what role the Realdoll plays in all this. Is the Realdoll one of those social practices that contribute to what it means to becoming female?

Anyways, it looks like they are working on animatronic versions of the Realdoll, similar to the Reborn product line of life-like nonhuman babies that imitate the movement of breathing, which might be worth looking into. Of course, in this case, there are no diapers to change, no crying and no waking up in the middle of the night.

Meanwhile, futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that we will have machines with human intelligence, including emotional intelligence by 2029. While intelligence researcher David Levy argues that a person will legally marry a robot within the next 45 years. Is this the birth of the nuclear, silicone, human-hybrid family - of parents and their 2.5 children?

Just to tie things up, we’ve looked at the copying of music and the copying of pharmaceuticals; at intellectual property in terms of both continental and social integration. We’ve talked about the manufacture of both generic drugs and generic nonhuman women. When we consider these new patterns of production and consumption, do they constitute a challenge to, or a transformation of contemporary capitalism? After all, this is a political economy conference. Should we say “evolution” or “revolution”?

Landscape is real-estate. Paintings of the “natural” world are travelogue posters evoking a time and place that no longer exists. The world is no longer divided between the town and country. The planet is now Uber-Urban and Sub-Urban. Today within the economic “reality” of global capitalism landscape painting is nothing more than the evocation of the large suburban lot, where you know you are rich when you cannot see or hear your neighbours. It is a home in the Disney World fantasy of the individual’s natural place surviving untouched and uncorrupted by the corporate collective communism of pollution. Landscape painting is the iconic mantra of private property that lives in denial of the growing global terror of universal communism and its ever rapidly growing collective property - pollution. It spreads like an uncontrollable Stalinist storm of fire and ice across our Mother Earth unchecked.

Holly Friesen in her painting “work in freefall” captures the hope and horror of Omnigothic Neofuturism. Here the horizontal cubism of an environmental Geurnica of the groin finds spiritual threads reminiscent of feudal triptych iconography. Her images are more than just an Orientalist idealization of earth spirits. The pastiche of materials in this painting moves human energy through time and space. This heretical work of visual art has a beginning/middle/and end. Words crawl up and down the flowing spines of hot and cold like kisses of wet spent love turning the viewer’s eye into a licking tongue filled with the sensual taste of raw lust set free from the constraints of consumer society where sex is endlessly sold like bland boiled potatoes to the hungry in a spiritual famine. Pass the salt, and if I could only have a little cabbage broth on the side, then I would be apocalyptically happy.

The raven to one side perhaps says it all. We are doomed. The pure virgin dragon of scientific discourse crashes. Its face is dismembered human fertility. It flaps its angelic wings of material promise, but down it goes anyway. The moon spits human kind back down to earth. Technology is swallowed. We fossilise into a whirling dance of orality as our mouths blister with the collective lies that silences our souls. Yet the cancerous flame of our wonton consumptive desire ignites a spark. With in the split alienation of our cloven existence a fire burns deep and it will rises up like a whore of words howling in the night. The yin and yang will twist and turn. The vaginal face of a wolf will speak. The landscape will burst alive with the language of fire.

Mainly, or at least from my uninformed position, because it actually presents serious challenges to the positions of socialists of varying stripes. In short, it forces one, unless they choose not to read the book or uncritically shrug Hayek’s arguments off, to actually ponder and critically analyze the positions that they hold. The basic argument, that certain aspects of state planning produce the propensity towards greater power concentrations (’totalitarianism’, as he puts it), though not a truism, is certainly borne out in historical practice. Thus, for proponents of national state socialism, Hayek provides the perfect springboard for critically approaching the practical dilemmas of coordination, decision-making, power distribution and adjudication. Indeed, those radical democrats who decry technocratic rulership that, at least currently, goes hand in hand with national centralization will share at least one common point with Hayek. For the growing number that views the national state with the same distrust as capital, be they liberal anarchists, social libertarians, left communitarians or any of the myriad political distinctions out there, Hayek’s book is largely dated. Almost all of Hayek’s arguments assume the national state, which is increasingly being contested in the scholarly community - but there is still value in reading this book as a way of further contextualizing their positions within a long strand of intellectual history.

But of course, The Road to Serfdom is not without its flaws. Hayek’s use of rhetoric is conniving and distracts from his actual message, which he explicitly states is his intention. As an example, Hayek crudley equates “fascism” (which is almost never used in the book) with “socialism”. This is clearly an attempt to reframe the word to include the negativity of Britain’s Nazi enemies without regard to the qualitative differences between the two terms. It would be like claiming that ‘anarchism’, in the pejorative sense, is liberalism, in the Hayekian sense. Chapter 12 seeks to trace “The Socialist Roots of Naziism”, an endeavor with about as much validity as tracing the roots of British slavery to the rediscovery of Aristotle during the Renaissance. These two factors are clearly correlated, and indeed, many proponents of slavery did rely on the classic texts, but they are clearly not causally linked in any rigorous way. Hayek’s spuriousness and imprecision in making this argument leaves him open to ridicule, such as that German democracy sprang from Naziism - after all, Hayek says himself that the Nazi’s viewed themselves as practicing the ‘true democracy’.

But for me at least, these flaws are balanced by the intellectual honesty that Hayek displays in the first paragraph of the preface to his original book. He states, “This is a political book.[…] But, whatever the name, the essential point remains that all I shall have to say is derived from certain ultimate values. I hope I have adequately discharged in the book itself a second and no less important duty: to make it clear beyond doubt what these ultimate values are and on which the whole argument depends” (xlv, 1994 ed.). We may, and should, criticize those “ultimate” values for being utopian, selfish, insufficient, inefficient and irrational, almost all of which Hayek has a counter-argument for that will spark important debates, but we must also commend him for not hiding behind “scientific fact” or determinism, and (not entirely) relying on reductive and static conceptions of human nature, unlike his future ‘disciples’.

For me, the most fundamental fallacy Hayek makes is to equate the decentralization of power in society with the automatic propensity for competition (214). We have the historical ‘advantage’ of living through what Peck and Tickell call ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, where Schumpeterian creative destruction reigns free (ironically still carefully regulated of course), and can see that competition is only a classificatory means of changing who will hold power, rather than a progressive end, or even a sustainable process. Those who have subverted Hayek’s proscriptions in chapter 14, those unlucky recipients of neoliberal policy, have only redecorated for a new era of monopoly capitalism.

Avoiding The Road to Serfdom is an easy thing to do, if we choose to hole away in hospitable intellectual enclaves, but we do so at our peril, while those who manipulate Hayek’s ideas work to advance the interests of those whom he condemns (namely monopoloy capitalists, or just about all of them!). And for those who think that reading this book is unnecessary due to its antiquated publication date, it’s not, at least not to the uninitiated like myself. Just as Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation has garnered so much attention in recent years (an absolutely perfect complement and critique to Hayek, written in the same year by yet another Austrian - perhaps the subject of another post), The Road to Serfdom is still highly relevant for those engaged in the critique of contemporary North American society. I encourage everyone who is interested in the values underpinning socialism, and critical thought, to actually read this book - it will make criticizing Thatcher and Reagan a little easier!

First, Rocker employs functionalist language and thought quite consciously and overtly, even going so far as to expound a sustained version of the classic human body analogy. My own perspective would prevent my assuming essentialized functions for social institutions in favor of the dynamic and endless possibilities of political ‘negotiation’. Thus, while Rocker asserts that the state can never have a role in alleviating non-state induced forms of domination and oppression - owing to the fact that this would overstep its naturalized function - I would contend that the state can challenge forms of societal domination and act in the interests of broader cross-section of citizens, even if its history has shown fairly clearly that it is rare that it does. Thus, the Keynesian welfare state, even while it primarily favored white male workers, could conceivably have worked to smooth the sharply unequal power relations structuring people’s material living conditions and ideal identities, just as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” might have made the transition from ‘actually existing socialism’ to a more idealized, and hitherto unrealized, form.

Still, one must concede that the impetus for Rocker’s rhetorical strategy is undoubtedly the pervasion of Darwinism in public discourse in the 20s and 30s, when he was forming his arguments. Thus, that Anarcho-Syndicalism as Rocker portrays it is in direct opposition to Social Darwinism, even while it relies on Darwinistic ideas, must be qualified with the recognition that this is actually a clever rhetorical strategy aimed at appealing to a broad public readership.

Where I disagree with Rocker secondly is on his contradictory rejection of ’society’ as a relevant, important - and power-laden - unifying force in the human experience. I say contradictory, for Rocker explicitly rejects social power alongside the political and economic, even while he champions the cooperative social relations of syndicalist organization. Rocker’s use of ‘libertarian’, at times with an ambiguous meaning, but especially prevalent in the epilogue available in the second edition, appears to stress the individual in contrast to the social setting, rather than in relation to it. Just as an idea does not exist out of context, individuals do not exist outside their social setting, and it would be futile and dangerous to hope for the ultimate “individualization” of humanity (our generation has the advantage of hindsight and the experience of neoliberalism to elucidate this!). Still, this reader does sense in the general feeling of the text a different understanding of the social, and perhaps the confusion rests in careless writing, rather than consciously determined implied meaning. What I take from Rocker’s overall message is that the social relations of our current statist/capitalist order, influenced by and interacting with the associated political and economic relations must be altered, and not social relations and social power inherently. As an example, Rocker devotes ample time to portraying the experience of the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists in Catalonia who he claims had developed genuinely distinct (if not necessarily new) forms of social organization, and cultural practices that he deeply approves of.

Lastly, Rocker problematically declares that all power is inherently and only repressive. This more than anything leaves him open to the criticism of being Utopian that he so sorely rejects. Still, one can forgive this slippage as being heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Weber, and not having the privilege of the insights of Foucault who would come some 40 years later. Again, this statement must be closely considered alongside his treatment of the Spanish case to see that there are minor contradictions within his theorizing.

Overall, Anarcho-Syndicalism is a good read for those interested in the basics of the theory, even though the practical aspects could be (and probably have been) updated by contemporary authors to reflect the current political economic conditions of our context (say, e.g.: late capitalism). This is something that is aptly noted in the introduction to the most recent edition by AK Press. So long as capitalism persists along with its symbiote the nation-state, Rocker’s analysis will remain relevant for those interested in critically engaging with their surroundings.

Aihwa Ong’s latest book, Neo-liberalism as exception, is a multifaceted exercise in expanding upon our understanding of neo-liberalism in relation to citizenship and sovereign power. As a collection of essays mostly published over the past decade, the work draws heavily on the governmentality school of socio-political thought. The book’s central thesis is one that runs counter to the dominant perspective of neo-liberalism as an economic doctrine. Instead, Ong argues that neo-liberalism can be understood as a malleable technology of governing, designed and employed to include particular types of individuals and populations while excluding others. Equally important, the empirical work included in this volume fills a void in current discussions of neo-liberalism, which often focus predominantly on the North American experience. In offering an alternative and revealing analysis, Ong covers a wide spectrum of issues from the East Asian and South-East Asian regions. Of particular interest to the author are the ways in which different regimes employ technologies of neo-liberalism, be they authoritarian, democratic or communist.

Ong’s anthropological and ethnographic approach to neo-liberalism and citizenship is presented in part as a critique of authors such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who contend, inter alia, that a uniform global labour regime is emerging. Rather, Ong argues in favour of more localized and situated analyses of labour regimes, focusing on the various manifestations of ‘translocal publics’, for example, where specific interests intersect and are given particular formulations (p. 62). As an alternative to examining ‘identities’, which are often simplified interpretations of national groups or ethnic communities possessing considerable diversity, the book emphasizes that the concept of translocal publics describes ‘the new kinds of borderless ethnic identifications enabled by technologies and forums of opinion making’ (p. 63). Ong’s work examines a wide range of regional events and assemblages, from the Chinese diaspora after the 1997 Asian financial crisis (chapter 2), to foreign domestic workers in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong (chapter 9).

Neo-liberalism as exception is also a critique of juridical-legal interpretations of the connections between citizenship and government. Ong argues that this method is evident in Giorgio Agamben’s focus on the bifurcation of the population into two halves: zones of citizenship, consisting of political beings, and zones of bare life, consisting of those without citizenship protections (p. 22). Instead, Ong contends that a ‘temporal conceptualization of the politics of exception’ is a more appropriate means for recognizing the validity of other ethical regimes - such as the various world religions - that also ‘operate along the continuum of inclusion and exclusion, though without mapping onto the same division between citizens and bare life’ (p. 197). In contrast to Agamben, Ong argues that new modes of analysis are necessary for examining the ways in which those without territorialized citizenship might make claims, whether through local communities, NGOs or corporations (p. 24). While most of the book’s content consists of essays already published elsewhere, Ong also presents new contributions, and has reworked and reorganized the existing material to provide an ethnographic perspective critical to an understanding of the global economy and socio-political systems. By placing each article in a particular context that reveals new insights into neo-liberal transformations of citizenship and sovereignty, Ong brings theoretical potency and empirical energy to a growing field of scholarship.

Originally published in: International Affairs 83(4), 2007.

The book is presented in the form of a medical analysis, beginning with the ‘Diagnosis’ in which terrorism is examined through the lenses of war, crime and emergency. Ackerman argues that terrorism is distinct from war, in that acts of terror do not directly threaten the political survival and constitutional system of the state. Additionally, he points out that terrorism is not a crime, since criminal organizations, such as the mafia, do not seek to openly confront the legitimacy of government and political order-what Ackerman calls ‘effective sovereignty’ (p. 41). As such, criminal law is not only inadequate, but also incapable of addressing terrorism, given that ‘the normal operation of the criminal law presupposes the effective sovereignty of the state, but a major terrorist attack challenges it’ (p. 43). In dismantling the war-crime dichotomy, Ackerman argues that the period immediately after a terrorist attack is a state of emergency, and it calls for special measures ‘to reassure the public by moving aggressively against a second strike without allowing the president to damage civil and political liberties on a permanent basis’ (p. 67). There is, of course, the danger of normalizing the rhetoric of emergency, as expressed in the United States shortly after September 11 by Dick Cheney as the ‘new normalcy’. This is exactly what Ackerman opposes in advocating terrorism as emergency, and not as war or crime. The most effective method of preventing a perpetual state of emergency, the author argues, is through a unique constitution.

The second part of the book, under the title of ‘Prescription’, offers detailed guidelines for establishing an emergency constitution. Placing primacy on the US tradition of political checks and balances, Ackerman presents three core components of his proposal. First, the political element of the emergency constitution is the ’supermajoritarian escalator’, in which the continuation of a state of emergency would require ‘an escalating cascade of supermajorities’ in Congress to protect against normalization (p. 80). Second, the legal component is embodied by time limits on the detention of terror suspects, and a ‘rigorous respect for decency [by the courts] as long as the traditional protections of the criminal law have been suspended’ (p. 119). Third, the economic factor entails financial compensation for detainees found innocent of any wrongdoing. The book argues that a special constitution consisting of these three components would present the state of emergency as a limited regime, tolerated only as a regrettable necessity and always on the path towards termination. For Ackerman, restoring ‘equilibrium’ between the Executive, Congress and the judiciary is the only way to prevent abuses of emergency power (p. 139). This new configuration is especially relevant to the current political environment, most notably in the United States, where the Military Commissions Act and the National Defence Authorization Act were passed in late 2006, with ominous consequences for the writ of habeas corpus and posse comitatus. These recent events, occurring after the book’s publication, indicate a political and legal movement away from Ackerman’s project of protecting civil liberties, and it is unfortunate that the author was unable to address this dilemma.

Apart from questions on the possibilities for the actual implementation of Ackerman’s emergency constitution, there is also the problem of preventing a ‘first strike’. It is common to hear the argument that constant vigilance and a perpetual state of emergency are now necessary mechanisms for preventing a terrorist attack. This counter-argument is no doubt flawed, but it reflects the dominant perspective on modern counter-terrorism, and could have been addressed more closely in the text. If a ‘cure’ for terrorism is indeed possible, prevailing heads of state and policy-makers working to protect civil liberties in liberal democratic regimes will find value in taking a dose of Ackerman’s juridical prescription for political change. However, it is worth noting that a preventive approach to addressing terrorism and its causes remains in need of research, for it is less effective to treat the symptoms than it is to prevent the disease.

Originally published in: International Affairs 83(3), 2007.