State Crime Journal

vLex
Publisher:
Pluto Journals
Publication date:
2023-03-02
ISBN:
2046-6064

Description:

State Crime Journal is administered by the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI). ISCI is a cross-discliplinary research centre working to further our understanding of state crime, that is organisational deviance violating human rights. State Crime Journal is the first peer-reviewed, international journal that seeks to disseminate leading research on the illicit practices of states.

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime
  • Preface
  • Thinking Palestine, Decolonization and Abolition in Ethnic Studies

    What does it mean to produce and engage in liberatory scholarship and teaching pedagogy on Palestine, given the extant forms of policing, surveillance and censorship that continue to target scholars of Palestine within the US academy? Why do these forms of repression appear even within a field of study—ethnic studies—that grew from emancipatory radical student movements seeking to dismantle (settler) colonial and white-supremacist hegemony in scholarship and teaching pedagogy? And how might we, as scholars engaged in the radical work and theory of abolition and decolonization, protect the field of ethnic studies from a mutilation of the pedagogical structure that such repression seeks to accomplish? To be clear about these terms, by abolition, I mean the insurgent praxis of Black rebellion that sought to abolish not only the system of but the foundational logics of racial-chattel-slavery. This insurgent praxis was not only sustained but renewed following the passage of the 13th amendment which abolished slavery except for as a punishment for crime. Since then, abolition continues to forcefully recreate itself as an ethos, school of thought, praxis, and movement, that redefines Blackness, and Black being against white-supremacist state violence codified in multiple liberal and neoliberal reconfigurations. In the contemporary moment abolitionist praxis seeks a dismantlement of the prison-industrial-complex and carceral logic that animates racist-state violence: policing, extrajudicial killing, racial surveillance and captivity of Black bodies (Browne 2015). But abolition also allows for and invites rebellion among all those whose lives are threatened by the white-being character of the state and its carceral logic and structure as well. This carceral logic extends to structures of regulated exclusion, taking form for example in the erection of carceral borders and border regimes to keep refugees and migrants out or contained, and the counter-insurgent war against knowledge curators, artists, and activists that question the fundamental coloniality and whiteness of the US state. I recognize true decolonization as that which has always been an abolitionist worldview and practice as well. Decolonization seeks not only to undue structures and ideologies of coloniality but to foreground Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and understanding in its place. When I refer to decolonization however, I am not referring only to an epistemic, psychological, or discursive project—I quite literally believe in the rematriation of stolen Indigenous lands to its stewards. By speaking and practising decolonization within, to, and against the academy and university, I am concerned with how our work within this space enables this rematriation.Within this framework, I offer this review of Sherene Razack’s Nothing Has to Make Sense (2022), Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance is a Wasteland (2022) and Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022) to explore partial causality for the institutionalized repression and absence of Palestinian studies within the field of ethnic studies as an institutional project. I propose that these three texts, when read in conversation with one another and alongside the rich tradition of decolonial and abolitionist thought and practice, offer important insights relevant to protecting the radical potential of the ethnic studies project from Zionist liberal co-optation.

  • Daring to Imagine: A Future Without Zionism

    This article locates the rising extremism in Israel in the dynamics of the ongoing Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. It introduces the concept of process in settler-colonial settings as the interaction between the settler-colonial structure with its inherent violence and the agency of the colonized with its inevitable resistance. It is within that context that extremism is nourished and grown. The article argues that Zionism is entrapped in path of escalating violence, the end of which we have not yet seen, to maintain the goals of Jewish supremacy and subdue the natives’ resistance to taking over their land. Therefore, the article defines the challenge of a peaceful relationship between Israelis and Palestinians as being based on abolishing Jewish supremacy and establishing equal political and national rights for Israelis and Palestinians. The article argues that to achieve full equality, recognition of the right and legitimacy of the Israeli Jewish national group to belong to the land in equality with the Palestinian nation and to establish a common political framework of sharing the land, can be achieved only by imagining a future without Zionism.

  • J. Balint, Keeping Hold of Justice-Encounters Between Law and Colonialism
  • What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence

    What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of regret are reshaping Canadian national culture, most pronouncedly with the apologies for the Indian Residential School System ( CBC News 2008a; McIntyre 2017) and the Komagata Maru ( CBC News 2008b; Trudeau 2016). While Public Inquiries and Royal Commissions have long served as state responses to political mobilization, deployment of the machinery of regret has fast become the predictable response to accusations of atrocities, including genocide, enslavement and racial violence.Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on violence, colonial in the case of Fanon (1961), law in that of Benjamin (1996), I examine the apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples and South-Asian diasporic communities by the Canadian state. Locating these pronouncements in the histories of violence they index, I demonstrate how such apologies function as techniques of violence that advance settler power structures and narratives of nationhood. My argument here is that apologies are themselves acts of violence which rework histories of brutalization to meet the political destabilizations of the present. Apologies thus reorganize the racial violence of settler societies, drawing sections of subjugated populations into waging this violence and, in the process, derail resurgent politics of decolonization, abolitionism and anti-racism.

  • Captive Maternals vs. Compradors: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal

    Theorizing Captive Maternal Agency and Comprador Betrayals through the case of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and Philadelphia Judge Lucretia Clemmons, with a focus on the denial of civil and human rights within the US penal/legal system.

  • On Love, the Palestinian Way: Kinship, Care and Abolition in Palestinian Feminist Praxis

    This article centres the forms of kinship and care work that Palestinian women perform within and beyond the institution of the colonial prison in occupied territory through an analysis of letters expressing grief, care and radical hope as material expressions of an abolitionist feminist praxis of decolonial love. Women’s letter-writing practices offer a material expression of the sentient life forms that suture the social fabric of the Palestinian collective, regenerating our connections to each other and to our homeland. This analysis invites consideration of decolonial love as a liberatory method through which Palestinians call each other into intimate relation. It argues that attending to this underexplored feminist praxis enacted from within the space of genocidal duress holds the capacity to amplify a Palestinian sensorium that sharpens our capacity to enact revolutionary struggle against Israeli state violence and settler colonial criminality.

  • State Crime
  • Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine: Upending Circuits of State Violence

    Between 2016 and 2018, Black, Palestinian and Jewish organizations, under the banner of the Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine coalition, led a campaign in Durham, North Carolina, that successfully passed a City Council resolution prohibiting US police exchanges with Israel. Based on direct interviews with the activists who led the campaign, this article sets out to trace the history of the Demilitarize! Effort, detailing its chronological developments with an eye on highlighting how Black–Palestinian solidarity continues to function as an anti-imperial analytic. Particularly, it illuminates how settler colonialism unsettles the demarcation between foreign and domestic frontiers thus entwining military and police force expressed in transnational state violence against racialized communities. In doing so, the article will offer and preserve a movement archive developed by activists in Durham. The Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine coalition is built upon a rich legacy of local Palestine solidarity activism and its coalitionary efforts focused on a narrative of racialized state violence that directly connected militarized US law enforcement to trainings in Israel thus illuminating the local manifestations of US empire. This article also seeks to use the movement archive to consider how seemingly formidable circuits of state violence that undergird imperial domination are simultaneously vulnerable to attack and dismantlement.

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