Law and Resistance

Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Political Trial
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-138-69395-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Social Justice

This book explores a fundamental paradox at the heart of law and resistance: while law emerges from acts of resistance, it systematically denies this origin once established.

Taking Michel Foucault’s genealogical analysis of power and resistance as its starting point, the book asks, from below, is there something in the very nature of law – that is, in its discursive and institutional dynamics, in its spatial, material, and temporal coordinates; in its own conceptual categories, claims, mechanisms, and processes – that makes it something more than the mere instrument and armature of power? If those in power can utilize the devices of law and justice to achieve political ends, isn’t there something about these devices that can accommodate fresh articulations? Contending that there are, indeed, discursive, spatial, and temporal resources that can be reconfigured and redeployed as a counter-power and counter-discourse against sovereignty, the book takes as its focus the judicial apparatus; and, more specifically, the concept of the political or show trial. Examining the landmark political trials of Nelson Mandela, Marwan Barghouti, and Bobby Seale, the political trial, it is argued, evinces a crisis of law and sovereignty: a moment where the submerged crisis of sovereignty appears all across the normative structures of the system.

Law and Resistance considers the different ways in which a politics of resistance is enabled in the courtroom: as it uncovers a performative logic that contingently conditions, and thus breaks open, law’s otherwise closed normativity.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Adult education, Further/Vocational Education, General, and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Allo, Awol

Fachgebiete

• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Rechtswissenschaften Allgemeines Verfahrens-, Zivilprozess- und Insolvenzrecht Allgemeines Prozessrecht, Kostenrecht

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

1. Law and Resistance: A Genealogy of Silencing and Erasure

2. Toward a Performative Epistemology of Law: Sovereignty, Law and the Subject

3.Toward a Performative Conception of the Political Trial

4. ‘The Courtroom as a Site of Performative Resistance: Nelson Mandela at Rivonia

5. Marwan Barghouti in Tel Aviv: Occupation, Terrorism, and Resistance in the Courtroom

6. The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in the Courtroom: Slavery, Founding Fathers, and Black Power in the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial

7. Conclusion: The Traces of Law in Resistance, and the Traces of Resistance in Law

Über Autor(innen)

Awol Allo is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Sheffield, UK. He holds an LLB from Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), an LLM from the University of Notre Dame (USA), and a PhD from the University of Glasgow (UK). He has been a Fung Global Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) (2020–2021) and a Visiting Scholar at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values (Fall 2023). Allo’s research examines the paradoxical relationship between law and resistance, with particular attention to how legal moments, spaces, and discourses both enable and constrain struggles for justice. He is the editor of The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial (2015), and his scholarly work has been published in leading journals including Law and Critique; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Social and Legal Studies, and the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal. Beyond academia, his public writings have appeared in major international outlets such as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, CNN, and Al Jazeera.