Research Highlights and Abstract The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas: Demonstrate that the ‘Big Society’ agenda, while based on a dichotomy with ‘Big Government’, in fact produces a diffusion of bigger, better government throughout British society. Illustrate that despite claims of the Big Society being a matter of empowerment, its diverse tactics and techniques of what Foucault calls ‘governmentality’, or the ‘conduct of conduct’, shows the opposite: management and control. Outline the logic of the Big Society and how it has played out in two important policies of the Coalition Government: National Citizen Service and Community Resilience. Suggest that while the ‘Big Society’ targets widespread behavioural change, the ultimate aim is to produce a population of efficient, responsible, productive and self‐governing individuals and communities. Cameron's flagship policy of the ‘Big Society’ rests on a society/government dichotomy, diagnosing a ‘broken society’ caused by ‘big government’ having assumed the role communities once played. The remedy is greater social responsibility and the ‘Big Society’. This article argues that the dichotomy is deceptive. We aim to show that the Big Society is big government, as it employs techniques for managing the conduct of individuals and communities such that the mentality of government, far from being removed or reduced, is bettered and made more efficient. To illustrate this, we explore two major initiatives: the National Citizen Service and the Community Resilience programme. These projects demonstrate how practices of informing and guiding the conduct of individuals both produce agents and normalise certain values, resulting in the population being better known and controlled. Thus, far from lessening government and empowering people, the Big Society extends governmentality throughout the social body.

An increasing amount of attention is being given to the use of human rights measurement indicators in monitoring ‘progress’ in rights and there is consequently a growing focus on statistics and information. This article concentrates on the use of statistics in rights discourse, with reference to the new human rights institution for the European Union: the Fundamental Rights Agency. The article has two main objectives: first, to show that statistics operate as technologies of governmentality — by explaining that statistics both govern rights and govern through rights. Second, the article discusses the implications that this has for rights discourse — rights become a discourse of governmentality, that is a normalizing and regulating discourse. In doing so, the article stresses the importance of critique and questioning new socio-legal methodologies, which involve the collection and dissemination of information and data (statistics), in rights discourse.

No abstract

I. IntroductionHalfway through the year of postgraduate studies that is required for the LLM at Queen's University Belfast, I give a talk to the students, entitled 'Asking the Right Questions: Understanding Methodology.' It is not always particularly well received. On one occasion I was approached by a student afterward, who commented, 'All that "how questions" stuff confused the hell out of me. This article stresses the importance and possibility of training the critical attitude. It suggests that the critical attitude, or what Foucault also calls 'critique', are characteristics of methodology -that is, of how to think a project. It is crucial that as researchers we are able to articulate our methodologies. It is also crucial that as educators, we can teach our students why they need to articulate the way in which they think. Can we therefore teach, the article asks, critical legal education? I suggest here that the way to do this is to market

The riots that took place in England in August 2011 have widely been described as destructive, senseless and without purpose. This article, taking inspiration from Michel Foucault's later work on revolt as counter-conduct, argues for a new understanding of how to read political expression and thereby calls for the riots to be thought differently, as a form of counter-conduct. This demands a new appreciation for the possibilities of revolt where spontaneous, impulsive, mundane and non-spectacular events like riots can be construed as political rather than purely criminal. It also opens up possibilities for how we might understand the ethos of the 'revolting subject'. KeywordsCounter-conduct; riots; London Riots; Occupy 2 Introduction I teach Legal Theory to final year undergraduates. One of the exercises we set the students, to highlight the practical application of theory, is to think about the 'London Riots' from different theoretical perspectives to see how the narrative changes depending on how one thinks the event. Regardless of perspective, one thing they usually agree on is that the riots were destructive and senseless. But, I query with them, if critique is about thinking differently, can we think the London Riots as something other than only destructive and senseless?1 This article aims to do precisely that -to re-read the riots as something other than only destructive and senseless using the critical framework of counter-conduct. This framework allows me to tell a different story, one that is removed from the popular dismissive readings of the riots that my students sided with, and which focuses on the behavior of the rioter as a performance of struggle which says I do not want to be conducted like that. The story is then about refusal of a type of conducting power that defines the right way to resist and which criminalises behavior that does not fit this label. It is not about whether the behavior of the rioter is bad but focuses instead on how she actually acts without the need to judge it as right behavior. There is then no 'hero' in my story -but there is no 'villain' either; my re-reading of the riots does not glorify the rioter or her behaviour but rather labeling her revolt counter-conduct allows me to see her behavior as political and not only criminal. Moreover, my story also draws attention to what the riots produced and not only what they destroyed in terms of both the counter-communities that the riots have seen flourish and in terms of the crisis in modern British society, defined as a Big Society, 2 which they reveal.My objective in this article is then twofold; first, to explain the utility of counterconduct as a framework for a new appreciation of the possibilities of resistance, and 1 Critique can be linked with 'curiosity' -that is, 'a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilised before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way' in M ...