Law, necropolitics and the stop and search of young people

Flacks, Simon

doi:10.1177/1362480618774036

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…People do not come out because of the fear of death. Necropolitics is therefore the 'work of death' (Flacks, 2018). Interestingly, necropower is not the only exertion of real death but its virtual warning guides the social and mental behaviors of individuals.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘War as Remedy or Poison’: Reading the Blind Man's Garden and the Kite Runner With a Critical Lens of Mbembe’s Necropolitics

Kakar

Riaz

Khan

2021

HSSR

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Purpose of the Study: This study emphasizes the contribution of fiction in highlighting the American exercise of power around the world predominantly Pakistan and Afghanistan. It investigates how America has become a dictating body deciding the life and death of human beings mainly in South Asian developing countries. Methodology: Being Qualitative, this study uses Eaglestone’s (2000) close reading technique to analyze words and structure of the texts of Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Nadeem Aslam Khan’s The Blind Man’s Garden. It develops a descriptive thesis leading to construct arguments by drawing a theoretical framework from Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003). Mbembe took his inspiration from Foucault’s idea of bio-power. Modern narrative discourse on sovereignty and its relation to war is taken as the main subject of necropolitics. Mbembe’s idea of sovereignty as an exercise to get control of the mortality of the enemy helps to interpret the texts via the close reading method. Main Findings: This study evaluated two novels to assert that necropolitics by taking its four basic concepts, power, war, politics, and death was the actual controlling power of a country. It analyzed fictional characters to argue how individuals endured hardships because of the necropolitical exercise of America and Russia in Afghanistan. Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics helps in understanding fiction. Applications of this study: The present study has significant implications from both theoretical and interpretative perspectives. Necropolitics, originally a political notion is reworked in fiction, which asserts that using this concept, power relations, their roots, and exercise around the world can be explored in various fields. This study contributes to dismantling the latent necropolitics in the society represented in fiction. It elevates the social and political consciousness of the general public of South Asia, particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan. This study can be helpful in the field of psychology to popularize the notion of necropolitics in contemporary society. Novelty/Originality of this study: Comparatively a new field, Necropolitics has been discussed in the fields of medical sciences and education. This study significantly highlights its existence in the field of literary studies. Fiction as a direct reflection of society helps in deconstructing the prevailing exercise of necropolitics in South Asian society. It is also helpful in raising the social and political consciousness of South Asian people.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘War as Remedy or Poison’: Reading the Blind Man's Garden and the Kite Runner With a Critical Lens of Mbembe’s Necropolitics

Kakar

Riaz

Khan

2021

HSSR

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“…Incarceration shatters caring networks and diminishes life prospects (Alexander 2011;Spade 2012). Children and young people are denied a sense of safety and belonging through the quotidian violations of stop and search and arbitrary journal of pacifism and nonviolence 2 (2024) 34-63 strip-searching (Flacks 2020;Duff and Kemp Forthcoming). The law's enthusiastic enforcement of a patently unjust order of property generates legitimate anger as well as material deprivation (Walcott 2021;Duff 2017).…”

Section: A Whack-a-mole Conception Of Evilmentioning

confidence: 99%

Just Police Violence: Liberal ideology and the critique of violence from Walter Benjamin to Black Lives Matter

Duff

2024

JPN

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Policing is broadly legitimate – even while imperfect and in need of reform. This axiom of liberal political theory and practice is shaken by movements like Black Lives Matter, which confront and expose carceral violence as the routine, deadly edge of racial capitalism. Thinking with abolitionist currents within these movements, this paper engages critical theory to unpick the ideological discourses that legitimise police violence in ‘real existing liberalism’. I argue that justifications of policing replicate the ‘analytic atomism’ and mythologisation of law that Neu’s Just Liberal Violence identifies in defences of sweatshops, torture, and war. I bring together Benjamin’s classic excavation of sovereign power in the policing function with the experiences of today’s policed subjects to reveal the limitations of liberal appeals to ‘the rule of law’. The standard figuration of oppressive violence as exceptional, deviant, and unlawful, I argue, serves to legitimise the institutions in and through which that violence is normalised.

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“…In these contexts, blackness always comes as a surprise, as an out-of-place presence, as these institutions remain white also when inhabited by non-whites (Anderson, 2015). Black and brown communities are disproportionately more likely to be targeted by stop-and-search police practices, because their members are pre-emptively singled out as ‘suspicious’ – their non-whiteness is interpreted as a marker of criminal and deviant behaviour, as they ‘might’ always have done something wrong (Flacks, 2018). This happens because racism pushes decision-makers to interpret facts and evidence concerning black people ‘within a racially saturated field of visibility’ (Butler, 1993, p. 15), thus charging them with feelings of threat and fear towards people that are perennially constructed as ‘outsiders’, regardless of what they have actually done and, most importantly, what they have not done (Anderson, 2015).…”

Section: Illegality Racialized Law Enforcement and The Production Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)making illegality: Border control, racialized bodies and differential regimes of illegality in Morocco

Gazzotti

2021

The Sociological Review

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What role does race play in the construction of illegality in the face of pervasive border control? Sociologists and anthropologists of migration have apprehended illegality as a constructed category, produced by immigration policies and laws aimed at ‘illegalizing’ established mobility flows. ‘Illegality’ operates as an exclusionary category not only because it is constructed by law, but also because it is activated by racialized forms of prejudice which structure societies according to hierarchies of dangerousness, visibility and deservedness. Scholars, however, have tended to examine the entanglement between race and illegality by focusing mostly on the experience of black and brown people, especially those coming from poor countries in the Global South, thus overlooking how whiteness influences and alters the workings of border control. Drawing on qualitative data gathered between 2013 and 2019 in Morocco, this article questions the category of ‘illegality’ as it is policed at the street level and experienced by different groups of foreigners in Morocco. Building on Sara Ahmed’s understanding of whiteness as an ‘orientation’, in this article the author argues that illegality is a label which is racially altered and expanded by border bureaucrats, who use it to differentially police the presence of migrant bodies pre-emptively visualized as legal or illegal. Whereas black people undergo pervasive containment procedures, white privilege allows white migrants to be oblivious of the border, even when their administrative situation is not compliant with migration law.

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Law, necropolitics and the stop and search of young people

Cited by 10 publications

References 59 publications

‘War as Remedy or Poison’: Reading the Blind Man's Garden and the Kite Runner With a Critical Lens of Mbembe’s Necropolitics

‘War as Remedy or Poison’: Reading the Blind Man's Garden and the Kite Runner With a Critical Lens of Mbembe’s Necropolitics

Just Police Violence: Liberal ideology and the critique of violence from Walter Benjamin to Black Lives Matter

(Un)making illegality: Border control, racialized bodies and differential regimes of illegality in Morocco

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