Browsing by Subject "Political Theory"
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Item Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom in Israel-Palestine(2020-02) Gortler, ShaiWhat do 20th century attempts of Israelis, Palestinians, and Humanitarians to affect subject formation in Israeli prisons reveal about the relation between domination and freedom? Literatures of carceral subject formation regard prisons as sites where subjectivity is either irrelevant (Wallace 2015, Guenther 2013), liberatory (Nashif 2008, Bargu 2014, Dilts 2014), or manipulated (Daka 2011). The resulting analyses of these approaches regard Israeli incarceration of Palestinians as a site of “neutral and objective” humanitarian work by the Red Cross, purely liberatory political action by Palestinian prisoners, or an all-catching Israeli top-down apparatus that is able to harness every attempt of Palestinian political action to its own benefit. To offer a competing approach, my dissertation builds on newly exposed archival materials from Israeli, Palestinian, and Red Cross archives on Israeli prisons between the arrest of the first self-proclaimed Palestinian political prisoner in 1965 and 2019. With and against contemporary political and social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Iris Young, and Walid Daka the dissertation traces how the Israeli Prison Service attempted to use the prisoners’ actions—such as their leadership structures, hunger strikes, demands for improved material conditions, and inner-relations—to amplify Israeli interests. It further traces how the Red Cross’s “neutral” humanitarian work participated in the constitution of the prisoners as individualized consumers and limited the prisoners’ ability to act collectively. Last, it traces how the prisoners were nevertheless able to change their reality by cultivating alternative kinships, textures of collectivity, and senses of selves. The result is a differentiation between practices where the Palestinian prisoners were only able to act according to definitions set by others and those rare moments when they were able to participate in defining the structure of their participation.Item Greenhouse Democracy: A Political Theory for Climate Change(2017-09) Hobbs-Morgan, ChaseThis dissertation offers a critique of what scholars have called the ‘dominant climate imaginary:’ a way of thinking that animates mainstream climate politics. It proposes in turn a ‘democratic imaginary’ through which to respond to anthropogenic climate change. Through the lens of the dominant imaginary: 1) climate change appears as an essentially technical and scientific problem, 2) the impacts of climate change are presumed to be spatially and/or temporally distant, and 3) individuals and communities implicated in a changing climate are encouraged to accept that countering climate change is primarily the responsibility of distant organizations and institutions. As such, the dominant imaginary provides little room for centering and addressing everyday entanglements with climate change, even as it stymies opportunities for approaching climate change through bottom-up, democratic politics. In response, this dissertation argues that concerned political theorists and activists ought resist the dominant climate imaginary, and proposes the concept of ‘climate violence’ as a means of doing so. Once climate change is understood as a problem of violence – and therefore not only a technical and scientific problem – questions about its political implications are more easily asked. Who is responsible for the problem? Who is most impacted? How should those who are implicated in one way or another think about responsibility for, and democratic responses to, climate change? Having critiqued the dominant imaginary and argued for the concept of climate violence, the dissertation ends with a turn to democratic and feminist political theorists. By putting such theorists into conversation with the problem of climate violence, I end by outlining ‘greenhouse democracy’ a set of ecologically sensitive democratic commitments and provocations. According to greenhouse democracy the experience of living under the threat of climate violence, rather than any official citizenship granted by states, qualifies and invites one to participate in building bottom-up, collective responses to climate violence.Item A Kantian Theory of Criminal Law(2016-08) Steffen, JasonIn this dissertation, I develop a new theory of criminal law that rests on Kantian principles. I show that attention to two aspects of Kant’s political theory—his accounts of civic freedom and civic virtue—can help us develop a more just model of criminal law. In particular, I argue that we may properly criminalize only those activities which, by their nature, violate certain conditions enabling citizens to pursue their civic freedom. I then propose expanding the use of the jury in order to develop civic virtues that citizens of a just society ought to embrace. Finally, I argue that Kantian principles can both show why criminal punishment is necessary, and also help us discern its proper modes and extent.