The Universal Eye: Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed” and Development of the Modern Surveillance State

Shirk, Mark

doi:10.1093/isq/sqy062

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Scholarship on responses to terrorism has further defined this ‘familiarity.’ Shirk (2019: 335) notes that states strive to make what is illegible legible, so as to tax, control, or otherwise influence people or events, and that violent groups that are ‘illegible’ appear more threatening to states. Significantly, Shirk also gives the example of the anarchists as an ‘illegible,’ unfamiliar movement.…”

Section: Identity Discourse and Perceptions Of Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing American perceptions of post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan and transnational violence

Newell

2020

Security Dialogue

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Recently, public debates have questioned whether or not the American government responds differently to terrorism by white, right-wing, Americans. This article examines a historical period in which similar dynamics were on display in state responses to the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Irish-American Fenians, and anarchists from 1860 to 1920. This history suggests that political officials responded to these groups more on the basis of ideas than their actual levels of violence, including discourses of Americanism shaped by ideology, nativism, and racism. Successful claims to ‘Americanism’ lent the KKK a sense of familiarity that led it to be seen as less of a threat to ontological security, even as it posed a significant threat of physical violence. In contrast, the ideologically subversive and foreign anarchists were responded to more severely, despite being responsible for far fewer deaths and injuries than the KKK. This history suggests that American counter-terrorism has been influenced by factors of racial and national belonging in the past, and provides significant context for the consideration of current debates about responses to right-wing groups.

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Section: Identity Discourse and Perceptions Of Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing American perceptions of post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan and transnational violence

Newell

2020

Security Dialogue

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“…81 Pacifism's rejection of violence for instance is necessarily predicated on a future-oriented conception of what violence would mean for any post-violence society. 82 Turner 1998;Gordon 2018;Shirk 2019;Rossdale 2010;Prichard 2010Prichard , 1647 83 Landauer 1919Landauer /2012b. Luxemburg wrote that anarchism represented 'an extreme deviation ' -2004, 167.…”

Section: No-point Utopianismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure

Gabay

2020

Int. Theory

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Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only ‘realistic’ interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to ‘failure’ than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative ‘no-point’ form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised ‘mid-range’ utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise ‘failure’ in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

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Against Reformism: Anarchy and Green Criminology

2024

Crit Crim

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The Universal Eye: Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed” and Development of the Modern Surveillance State

Cited by 6 publications

References 78 publications

Comparing American perceptions of post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan and transnational violence

Comparing American perceptions of post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan and transnational violence

Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure

Against Reformism: Anarchy and Green Criminology

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