Kidnapped democracy

On May 3, 2017, the police picked up Hadiyam Hadma,1 a former village headman and human rights activist, near his village. Initially, the police denied holding him in their custody, forcing his wife to file a writ of habeas corpus in the Chhattisgarh High Court. The police then held a press conference in which Hadma was made to " confess " to participating in an attack by cadres of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist) (henceforth the Maoists)2 on security forces a few weeks earlier, in which twenty-five government paramilitary soldiers had been killed. Hadma was taken to the High Court under heavy police escort. After he had been hung upside down for days, blindfolded, and shot at, it was scarcely surprising that he told the Court he had voluntarily " surrendered " and come to the police for protection. Hadma is now in indefinite police custody. Like Hadma, hundreds of ordinary villagers across central India caught up in the conflict between the state and Maoists have been shown as having " surrendered. " Despite repeated reports in the media exposing the surrenders as fake,3 the practice goes on. Staged surrenders help the police avoid opprobrium for mass arrests, fudge the rehabilitation money offered under the state's surrender policy, adopt carrot and stick policies with villagers to induce compliance (they are told they can go home after surrendering so long as they cooperate with the police), and divide insurgent village communities. If " surrenders " are the seemingly benign face of counterinsurgency, democracy plays the same role at a larger level, where the " choice " exercised in an election is used to delegitimize other kinds of non-electoral choices, including which political party or ideology to support and how to live. This article examines the aporias of democracy, drawing on Derrida's aporias of justice.4 For Derrida, legal indeterminacy constitutes the aporetic aspect of justice: once a case is decided it either revalidates the existing rule, or establishes a new rule, but at the moment of deciding or delivering justice it is neither just nor unjust. Going further back, just as in its founding moment law is neither legal nor illegal for Derrida, democracy in its founding moment is neither democratic nor undemocratic, especially insofar as it also brings together and binds the entity in whose name it rules.5 The same paradox underlies state violence, law, and democracy, starting with Hobbes's argument that the state's monopoly on violence is legitimate because it enables people to live in security, and thus enables democracy; it underlies as well Benjamin's distinction between law making and law preserving violence.6 It is in moments when it claims to represent the ruled that the political system most

A game-theoretical analysis of political kidnapping. Article in Simulation & Games, 1980.

Behdad/A Companion to Comparative Literature, 2011

opposing features from various traditions through two strategies: representation, which allowed it to incorporate citizens’ conflicting interests within a restricted collegiate group that permitted deliberation and agreement, on one side, and universal choice of representatives and governments for limited periods of time, on the other. Since the first decades of the 20th century, this notion of democracy within the framework of a republican constitution was opposed by another one that rejected all forms of parliamentarianism, discussion and public deliberation in the name of a “democracy” based on the identity and homogeneity of a mass of people under the hegemonic leadership of a party, centered around the will and decisions of a managing elite and a charismatic leader, viewed as the sole representative of the people themselves. Both forms of democracy –strict and perverted – are being harassed by the powers unleashed by globalization and transnationalisation that are becoming alien oligarchies, opposed to the notion of citizenship and restrictive of its rights. In liberal parliamentary democracies the functional imperative issued by the financial sector is channeled through a crisis cabinet that assimilates demands and transforms them by managing an everchanging budget whose aim is to add new sufferings to the bulk of the population that can only counteract through protest. Given the constitutional backdrop of these societies, with their deep democratic network, the gradual transformation of the European Union into a transnational arena fuelled by “a club of chiefs of state” has only made yet more patent the oligarchic turn of its post-crisis evolution. In plebiscite democracies the turn was operated through a sovereign entrenchment of the power of the oligarchy on the pretext of resistance to the pressure set by globalization. Since the onset of the 90s, Latin America as well as countries in Eastern Europe have witnessed a gradual turn toward what O’Donnell has termed “delegative democracies”, or neo-populism, according to other authors. These regimes are characterized by exalting a populist leader, upholding him as a savior who will gauge the needs and wishes of the mass of individuals without intermediaries, focusing mainly on those who feel excluded from the mainstream of institutionalized democracy. This ensures feedback to populist regimes supported by a hegemonic political party that lives on State resources and on the rampant corruption it protects in order to finance ‘clientelism’ among those excluded from the system by the policies of the State itself. Key words: Democracy – Oligarchy – Globalization – Finantial Capitalism – Crisis – Populism

I want to thank our panelists for their thought-provoking papers on Peirce's notion of abduction, and I also want to thank them for inviting me to join as a discussant, so that we can think together along the various lines they have laid out. The reflections I wish to offer here, though inspired by all of the papers, are not specific to any one of them. What I have to say will nevertheless touch upon each one of them, although in a somewhat oblique way. But what I have become interested in, and would like to think about more, are some of the things abduction as a style of reasoning presupposes, especially in relation to the understanding of truth it entails, the notions of experience and time on which it depends, and the various virtues it valorizes – including the openness to surprise, the skill of being led by distraction, and the capacity for inventiveness. What I am especially interested in is the allure of abduction, not just in how we might get abducted by abduction, but also in how abduction might abduct itself and the conditions of its own efficacy, and particularly in the face of recent experience. Now at this point, even if it seems like a digression, I think there is something that needs to be said in light of recent events, which have come as a shock to nearly every person with a claim to social theoretical expertise. In the midst of the current confusion, we should seriously ask ourselves if we can trust our capacities to adjudicate between, or even come up with, social-political theoretical explanations at all. I speak not only of these elections. We might place their outcome within a continuum of recent events that have stunned and stymied all of us – including Brexit, the rise of Occupy and Tea-Party like movements across the globe, the election of an African-American president in a nation still deeply mired in racism and segregation, the financial crash of 2008 – whose magnitude we still haven't fully apprehended, and not least, the wave of uprisings that swept Egypt and much of the Arab world. That all of these took us by utter surprise, left (and continue to leave) us in great confusion, should lead us to doubt our capacities to understand the social world in which we live, much less adjudicate the various proposals made to apprehend these recent events. We might have to reassess the state of contemporary social theory, and question whether we have the analytic language we need to account for present times. Indeed, our social theory expertise seems futile with respect to the recent elections, the various renderings of which don't really add up. In the face of this, I have found the words of the following political commentator, whose work also conveys a skepticism of social-theory expertise, especially incisive:

International Critical Thought, 2022

This is the original manuscript (AOM) of an article published in INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 2022, VOL. 12, NO. 2, 199–212 (published online: 15 Jun 2022) https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2022.2073883

Law and Critique, 2020

The concept of the republic is a complex meta-principle that facilitates and conceals global relations of domination. Specifcally, it enables the invisibility of racism as the core of political power. From its very origins the concept of republic serves to seize constituent power or politeia. In modernity, as it merges with private property, it will serve as the launchpad of a vast colonization project that then evolves in a new form of power in coloniality. The article applies the theory of the ‘encryption of power’—to decrypt the historical concept of the republic. In doing so, we will demonstrate the key antidemocratic role it has played at the heart of global coloniality. We will bear witness as to how, from within the concept of republic, a refned mechanism of domination raises and expands, conforming the most magnifcent and lethal form of power of our times. We exemplify our theory showing that the concept of ‘republic’ is the common thread between the law that abolished slavery in Brazil (known as Lei Aurea) and the 1988 constitution. Within this scope, we propose a vital space of reconsideration of political ontology through radical democracy as the only means to build the world from immanent diference.

For many humanitarian agencies, acceptance—gaining the trust and protection of local communities—is the preferred security management tool for reasons of perception, ease of access and cost (both real and opportunity costs). Humanitarian agencies have long been uncomfortable with the contradiction of using deterrence mechanisms in humanitarian operations, although the increased use of armed guards has been a noticeable trend over the last decade or so. Protection—'bunkerisation'—has also become the norm in many highly insecure contexts, with similar contradictions and feelings of discomfort associated with this strategy. But in hyper-insecure contexts, is acceptance a viable option? This paper argues that in some contexts, the acceptance strategy no longer works. The primary cause of this is the increasing severity of the kidnapping risk which has overwhelmed the usefulness of 'normal', non-deterrence and non-protection-oriented security measures such as acceptance. The dangers of relying on deterrence measures for humanitarian organisations in such sensitive contexts will be reviewed. As a case study, the experience of one particular humanitarian organisation working in northern Nigeria and Syria in the 2012–2014 period is elaborated upon. A 'zone of exception' framework is proposed based on the work of Carl Schmitt. Issues for future reflection by organisations working in such contexts are introduced.

Apostolate of St.Thomas in India, 2024