If the nexus between post 09/11 counterterrorism and the encroachment of citizens’ civil rights and individual and collective liberties seems to be already well established in the professional literature, there are other aspects of world politics in the age of the war on terror which deserve to be investigated. The connection between the 2001 turning point and the current international, economic crisis is of course one of them. Yet, the most interesting aspect might be the way in which the international, financial turmoil has been used for private interests around the world to advance their own agenda of privatization, deregulation, fiscal discipline and balanced government budgets. While the advancement of this agenda has often been wrapped in a type of rhetoric which time and again refers to the imperatives of governance in exceptional, hard times, this paper explores the possible implications of the war on terror tactics on the quality and sustainability of our democracies. By focusing on the notions of emergency powers and on the old, twentieth century controversy on the state of exception, this paper points to the difficulties inherent to violence control, to the emergence of private governments, and to the nation-state’s loss of centrality in both domestic and international politics as the three main avenues through which the state of exception might become – as Walter Benjamin foreshadowed – a permanent trait of our systems, and our current crisis of governance might be recycled into something like the government of the crisis.

Walter Benjamin’s early essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt [Zur Kritik] first published in 1921 is a notoriously difficult text, but its relevance to contemporary politics makes it a text to which theorists repeatedly return. This reading takes issue with those critics, notably Axel Honneth, who see Benjamin’s project in Zur Kritik as fatally, dangerously flawed. It is suggested here that Benjamin’s text, despite the difficulties, still posits the possibility of a ‘lookout point’ - not prescriptive per se but in keeping with his abiding interest in literature, metaphorical and exegetical. There is no ground on which to stand that does not in effect constitute the lookout point of the place and times of the lookout, but this reading suggests that the Benjaminian lookout point is the lookout which is never fixed because it is not ‘looking out’ on but towards others, and is not merely addressing and prescribing, but talking with itself and others. That Benjamin embraces religious language to effect this move, perhaps suggesting, a lookout in judgment from a fixed point, from some ‘higher’ (transcendental) ground, certainly might be troubling for some, but it will be suggested these anxieties are misplaced.

For Benjamin, it was clear that there was something fundamentally “rotten in the law” – be it the law of monarchy, western democracy or autocratic regimes. The violence inherent to the law contradicts itself since law enforcement – e.g. the police – always blurs the line between lawpreserving and law-making or law-constituting (rechtsetzende) violence. Conversely, most attempts to break the law and its supporting powers lead to the establishment of a new law. But how are we to conceive a realm of revolutionary politics outside and beyond of the law – a sphere of justice and non-legal violence?

The term ‘terrorism’ is usually applied in a very narrow sense to refer to acts of violence carried out by non-state actors. The question remains whether a certain type of violence committed by state forces can be also legitimately be referred as ‘terrorism’. This topic is highly controversial in the academic field. This contribution argues strongly in favour of the proposition that there is such a thing as “state terrorism”.

Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) is a seminal work in the study of political violence. It famously draws a distinction between power and violence and argues that the latter must be excluded from the political sphere. Although this may make Arendt’s text an appealing resource for critiques of rising political violence today, I argue that we should resist this temptation. In this article, I identify how the divisions and exclusions within her theory enable her to explicitly disavow violence on one level, while implicitly relying on a constitutive and racialized form of violence on another. In particular, Arendt leaves legal and state violence presumed, but untheorized, focusing her critique instead on dissident action, especially that of the Black Power movement. Any analysis that incorporates Arendt’s conceptual distinctions is therefore susceptible to reproducing a political theory that neglects state violence in the service of White rule, yet charges those who resist it with breaching the peace. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3551&context=clcweb