The Politics Of Force

"Twenty years ago, when The Politics of Force was first published, the issue of police brutality was rarely covered in the news. This book was inspired by events following the Los Angeles Police Department's brutal treatment of Rodney King, a Black motorist whose beating by LAPD officers was captured from the balcony of a nearby resident, George Holliday, who happened to have a video camera (this, of course, was in the era before digital phones). First aired by a local television station, scenes from that videotape were shown repeatedly on national news outlets for weeks, giving rise to an unprecedented public reaction. "When George Holliday's video surfaced," one Black journalist observed, "it signaled to a lot of citizens just how bad police violence visited upon marginalized communities actually was" (Smith 2015). The officers' subsequent trial and acquittal, and the uprising in Los Angeles that followed, kept the issues of race and policing in the news for many weeks. That tumult was eventually replaced by relative silence on the issue, occasionally punctuated by news coverage of other violent police-citizen encounters, such as the brutal NYPD assault on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997 and the death of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999, hit with 19 bullets fired by NYPD officers. But as is the case with other policy problems not championed by elites, coverage of police brutality was limited, sporadic, and largely tied to the occasional incident that became a major news story. Then, in the summer of 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Though what exactly lead up to Brown's death may have been unclear, the aftermath was captured on a bystander' cell phone video. It showed Brown's body left uncovered and unattended, face-down in the street, while neighbors grew agitated and police seemed to mill casually about. Suddenly, the issue again became national news. Brown's death and the intense social media activity and protest it evoked within and beyond Ferguson prompted another, more prolonged and more searing national argument about police brutality"--

Examining the Berlin crises of 1948-49 and 1961, the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958, and the Cuban crisis of 1962, the author elucidates various intermediate and highly politicized forms of international coercion. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.

The potential engagement of British forces in military action often leads to intense public debate. This book assesses the public legal justifications for such operations. It critiques the idea that using international legal norms to justify decisions on the use of force will necessarily result in fewer instances of military intervention.

Tracing the political origins of the Mexican indigenous rights movement, from the colonial encounter to the Zapatista uprising, and from Chiapas to Geneva, Courtney Jung locates indigenous identity in the history of Mexican state formation. She argues that indigenous identity is not an accident of birth but a political achievement that offers a new voice to many of the world's poorest and most dispossessed. The moral force of indigenous claims rests not on the existence of cultural differences, or identity, but on the history of exclusion and selective inclusion that constitutes indigenous identity. As a result, the book shows that privatizing or protecting such groups is a mistake and develops a theory of critical liberalism that commits democratic government to active engagement with the claims of culture. This book will appeal to scholars and students of political theory, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology studying multiculturalism and the politics of culture.

Developments and problems associated with police power are at the very front of current public debate. This volume addresses contemporary issues of policing with a focus on the characteristics of police power as a coercive force in society and its continued need for legitimacy in a democratic social order.

“The most creative and courageous social theorist working today” examines the ethical binds that emerge within the force field of violence (Cornel West). “ . . . nonviolence is often seen as passive and resolutely individual. Butler’s philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic.” —New York Times Judith Butler shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. While many think of nonviolence as passive or individualist, Butler argues nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. She champions an ‘aggressive’ nonviolence, which accepts hostility as part of our psychic constitution—but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. Some challengers say a politics of nonviolence is subjective: What qualifies as violence versus nonviolence? This distinction is often mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires two things: a critique of individualism and an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ‘ungrievable’. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. Ultimately, the struggle for nonviolence is found in modes of resistance and social movements that separate aggression from its destructive aims to affirm the living potentials of radical egalitarian politics.

This book aims to examine the conditions under which the decision to use force can be reckoned as legitimate in international relations. Drawing on communicative action theory, it provides a provocative answer to the hotly contested question of how to understand the legitimacy of the use of force in international politics. The use of force is one of the most critical and controversial aspects of international politics. Scholars and policy-makers have long tried to develop meaningful standards capable of restricting the use of force to a legally narrow yet morally defensible set of circumstances. However, these standards have recently been challenged by concerns over how the international community should react to gross human rights abuses or to terrorist threats. This book argues that current legal and moral standards on the use of force are unable to effectively deal with these challenges. The author argues that the concept of 'deliberative legitimacy', understood as the non-coerced commitment of an actor to abide by a decision reached through a process of communicative action, offers the most appropriate framework for addressing this problem. The theoretical originality and empirical value of the concept of deliberative legitimacy comes fully into force with the examination of two of the most severe international crises from the post Cold War period: the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo and the 2003 US military action against Iraq. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, ethics, international law, discourse theory and IR. Corneliu Bjola is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, and has a PhD in International Relations.