Complicity

Norway has based its security on aid from great military powers, and is therefore a useful site for examining the idea of complicit masculinities: a position that benefits from the current social order, and thus complying with dominant group interests and hegemonic ideals. This chapter illustrates how such a position led Norway to take an active part in Western interventionism, resulting in a military transformation that challenged national identity, the traditional hegemonic masculinity ideal and the established gender order. This caused a struggle over military identity. By examining this identity struggle the chapter contributes to the broader debates of masculinities, how they work, how they are linked to hierarchical social structures, and how military masculinity is challenged by women’s bodies.

This historical research report presents and analyzes 2 recently identified narratives of women who underwent sterilization experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. A description of the historical and contextual background is presented in which involvement of the prisoner nurse occurred in the sterilization experiments. Using a critical feminist perspective, the ethics of nursing involvement are discussed in these experiments, with an emphasis on the political dimension. Salient implications are explored for contemporary nursing.

This paper addresses the thorny issue of complicity with wrongdoing under conditions of systemic political violence, such as authoritarianism, totalitarianism or military occupation. The challenge of dealing with collaborators – those who colluded with the apparatus of repression or who benefitted from its existence – is central to subsequent processes of justice and memory-making. This paper proposes several arguments. Firstly, it claims we need to think about complicity and resistance not dichotomically, but as a continuum of locations individuals can occupy. Secondly, these locations are influenced by the agents’ positionality within the social world, each agent being situated at the intersection of several axes of distinction: class, gender, racialisation, and religion, among others. Thirdly, to understand complicity we also need to draw a connection between individual’s experience of time and their actions: temporality is experienced from within a social position, through the interplay between memory, imagination and hope. Positionality thus affects one’s memories and self-understanding, the scope of one’s imagination, as well as the type and intensity of one’s hopes. Therefore, individuals’ capacity to build on the past to imagine a future, to invest emotionally in the future and act accordingly are interrelated aspects of their experience, which will influence how they navigate the muddy waters of systemic wrongdoing, more or less complicitly. To give concreteness to these three theoretical arguments, the paper discusses several forms of complicity with violence during the Vichy Regime in France.

In 2009, a full three years before Tinder would popularize the "swipe," Grindr debuted as the world's first geosocial dating app for men. Since then, mobile dating has become immensely popular, particularly for so-called "thin markets" such as the LGBTIQ population. A novel like Alberto Fuguet's Sudor (2016), with its frequent WhatsApp conversations, emails, and Grindr exchanges, invites critical reflection on how these new communications technologies might change the stories we tell about modern intimacy, and how a novel itself can be a technology of connection. The gay characters who populate Sudor take their cues from the narrator's cell phone, by far the most frequently caressed entity in this 600-page novel about mediated connections and the decadence of the publishing industry in the Internet age.1 While it may be true that, as the narrator asserts, "Grindr no es para seducir con conversaciones eternas y complicidades literarias," this article sets out to argue that Grindr provides the necessary means for Sudor to create complicit readers (224). That is, this Grindr narrative precipitates readers who are both attendant to and participative in heretofore unmentionable intimacy.

Shortly before and during the Second World War, Japanese doctors and medical researchers conducted large-scale human experiments in occupied China that were at least as gruesome as those conducted by Nazi doctors. Japan never officially acknowledged the occurrence of the experiments, never tried any of the perpetrators, and never provided compensation to the victims or issued an apology. Building on work by Jing-Bao Nie (2006), this paper argues that the US government is heavily complicit in this grave injustice, and, should respond in an appropriate way in order to reduce this complicity, as well as to avoid complicity in future unethical medical experiments. It also calls on other US institutions, in particular the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, to urge the government to respond, or to at least inform the public and initiate a debate about this dark page of American and Japanese history.

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of why sex harassment persists in organizations for prolonged periods-often as an open secret. Design/methodology/approach-In-depth interviews were conducted with 28 people in diverse organizations experiencing persistent sex harassment. Data were analyzed using standard qualitative methods. Findings-The overarching finding was that perpetrators were embedded in networks of complicity that were central to explaining the persistence of sex harassment in organizations. By using power and manipulating information, perpetrators built networks that protected them from sanction and enabled their behavior to continue unchecked. Networks of complicity metastasized and caused lasting harm to victims, other employees and the organization as a whole. Research limitations/implications-The authors used broad, open-ended questions and guided introspection to guard against the tendency to ask for information to confirm their assumptions, and the authors analyzed the data independently to mitigate subjectivity and establish reliability. Practical implications-To stop persistent sex harassment, not only must perpetrators be removed, but formal and informal ties among network of complicity members must also be weakened or broken, and victims must be integrated into networks of support. Bystanders must be trained and activated to take positive action, and power must be diffused through egalitarian leadership. Social implications-Understanding the power of networks in enabling perpetrators to persist in their destructive behavior is another step in countering sex harassment. Originality/value-Social network theory has rarely been used to understand sex harassment or why it persists.

Over the last few decades, both the European Union and European States have been implementing various strategies to externalize border controls with the declared intent of saving human lives and countering smuggling but with the actual end result of shifting borders, circumventing international obligations and ultimately preventing access to Europe. What has been principally deplored is the fact that externalizing border controls risks creating ‘legal black holes’. Furthermore, what is particularly worrying in the current European debate is the intensification of this practice by multiple arrangements with unsafe third countries, exposing migrants and asylum seekers to serious human rights violations.
This book explores whether European States can succeed in shifting their responsibility onto Third States in cases of human rights violations. Focusing, in particular, on the 2017 Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding, the book investigates the possible basis for triggering the responsibility of outsourcing States. The second part of the book examines how the Italy-Libya MoU is only a small part of a broader scenario, exploring EU policies of externalization. A brief overview of the recent decisions of the EU Court vis-à-vis two aspects of externalization (the EU-Turkey statement and the issue of humanitarian visas) will pave the way for the conclusions since, in the author’s view, the current attitude of the Luxembourg Court confirms the importance of focusing on the responsibility of European States and the urgent need to investigate the possibility of bringing a claim against the outsourcing States before the Court of Strasbourg.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are often complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. But why women become complicit remains an open question. The aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of complicity by focusing on the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's account. I begin by evaluating Susan James's interpretation of complicity qua republican freedom, which emphasizes the dependent situation of women as the primary cause of their complicity. I argue that James's analysis is compelling as far as it goes, but that it implies complicity is the inevitable outcome of women's current existence and fails to adequately account for Beauvoir's claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. I then draw out the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's analysis, demonstrating how this enables us to systematize Beauvoir's account of women's oppressive situation with her claims regarding the active role women can play in reinforcing their own unfreedom. I argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but provides a better account of cases where complicity may not be inevitable and yet some women still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom.

In debates regarding what sort of policy and legal responses are most appropriate in addressing the problem of sex trafficking, it is possible to identify two sides: abolitionists and non-abolitionists. One point that sharply divides these two sides concerns whether to criminalize buying sex. Some think that the feminist-abolitionist call to criminalize the purchase of sex faces insurmountable objections. If selling sex is a genuinely consensual and valuable experience for some people, the argument goes, then feminist abolitionism’s arguments against buying sex must fail. This Article considers what concessions, if any, feminist-abolitionism should make in response to this objection and articulates two justifications for criminalizing the purchase of sex that are immune to the objection.

Teaching students to think about white settlers' and racialized non-black people's complicity in settler colonial violence can still be an instance of settler-centric pedagogy underlined by the trope of the 'dying Indian'. Through re!ecting on my teaching of a well-circulated article by a racialized scholar, I discuss how, despite my intentions, my orientation toward Indigenous peoples' resistance remained temporary whereas colonial violence became permanent in my pedagogy. Through paying particular attention to the methodology of unmapping, I argue that challenging the colonial world order does not necessarily lead to decolonization if Indigenous peoples' conceptions of land, lives, and their futurities are not centered. Because of my inability to understand the refusals staged by Indigenous people in their scholarship and all other political acts, they remained as dying and vestigial while white settlers and racialized (non-black) people were the agentic subjects in my classroom. I re!ect on my harm-producing colonial pedagogy to think about how we have to carefully teach the ethics and politics of complicity without making it into yet another damage-producing narrative about settlers' empathy. I talk about failures that were personal and also produced structurally to think about how apparently decolonial, scholarship and pedagogies can be simply settler-centric.

In the modern era, as the cooperation between States in military and counter-terrorism efforts increases, so does the risk that a State will facilitate the grave crimes of another State through its political, military, or economic assistance. One of the most prominent recent examples is Russia’s support to the Assad regime in Syria, despite the atrocities the Assad regime committed against its own people. This raises the question: What legal obligations do States have to refrain from assisting other States in committing grave international crimes?

This Article argues that much like there is an oft-cited responsibility to protect (R2P), which obligates States to protect the human rights of people in other countries when their own governments are unwilling or unable to do so, there is an analogous duty to refrain (D2R) from aiding and abetting other States who commit grave violations of human rights, like genocide and crimes against humanity. Drawing from existing sources of international law, this Article argues that D2R already constitutes a binding principle of international law. In
addition, this Article makes a significant contribution to the current scholarship on State responsibility by  exploring the factors that contribute to impunity
for State complicity in international wrongdoing. The author contends that a narrower focus on State complicity in crimes that constitute violations of jus
cogens norms would strengthen its enforcement.

The Article then concludes by proposing novel ideas for more effective enforcement of D2R through bilateral agreements and the employment of sanctioning
powers of the United Nations General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace Resolution, when the Security Council, whose members are at times complicit
in grave international crimes, is unwilling or unable to act.

The gruesome biblical narrative of the gang rape of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19-21 is interpreted through the death bed confession/ diary of the Jewish ghetto police man Calel Perechodnik who guarded the assembly and transport of his wife and daughter to Treblinka. Using Levinas, the paper challenges traditional notions of theodicy that attempt to give meaning to episodes of suffering.

The moment in which we live proposes a staggering new challenge to past, present, and future understanding of our existence: climate change in general, and the Anthropocene in particular, requires a recalibration of all temporal relationships. In this article, I propose to identify the agent of change with current forms of complicity, or, as I call it in the title to this piece, the Homo complexus. A focus on complicity, I will argue, suggests that any future analysis of our society will recognize a short-term investment in a threat hovering above different forms of existence, or a new "sense of an ending."

States Party to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) regularly provide third States with key aid or assistance in performing extraterritorial targeted killings through armed drones: by doing so, they can be said to engage in conduct amounting to "complicity" for the purposes of international law of State responsibility. Strictly speaking, however, ECHR provisions do not apply to such conduct, which cannot be included into existing models of "jurisdiction" as per Article 1 ECHR-namely, "spatial" and "personal". This results in a troublesome legal vacuum. The present article proposes an appraisal of such conduct through the lenses of a third jurisdictional model, already acknowledged by other human rights systems but largely ignored (or even discarded) by the European Court of Human Rights: the so-called "impact" model, which covers extraterritorial effects of territorial conduct. It will be demonstrated that to a limited extent the ECHR case-law already resorts to such model, as in several cases jurisdiction is believed to arise when impugned events, albeit taking place extraterritorially, are the consequence of State's conduct (thus through a "causation" test) or when third States' conduct can somehow be attributed to a State Party (through an "attribution" test). Albeit implicitly, this is an endorsement of the "impact" model of jurisdiction. It is argued that the Court should fully recognize this third model, and consequently apply it to extraterritorial conduct amounting to "complicity" in order to ensure a principled scrutiny over States Party's conduct.

El presente ensayo se incorpora como un capítulo del presente libro que conmemora el 70o Aniversario de la adopción de la Convención para la Prevención y Sanción del Delito de Genocidio de 1948. El tema central es la evolución del crimen de genocidio en la práctica y la doctrina, así como el legado del hoy ya extinto TPIY. Conforme a ello, el capítulo presente se ha centrado en un tema muy complejo y debatido en su aplicación no sólo en el TPIY sino en su tribunal hermano, el TPIR, cuya jurisprudencia en el tema de genocidio de no considerarla dejaría incompleto el análisis. Me refiero al análisis de la contribución de estos tribunales a la definición de las cinco modalidades de comisión del genocidio y de los “otros actos” que se recogen en el artículo 4 párrafos (2) y (3) del Estatuto del TPIY y el artículo 2 párrafos (2) y (3) del Estatuto del TPIR [...] Con respecto a los “otros actos,” o formas de responsabilidad secundaria, como la conspiración, la incitación pública y directa, la tentativa y la complicidad para cometer genocidio, que por su gravedad había que castigar, siendo incorporados en el artículo 4 (3) del TPIY y 2 (3) del TPIR, así como III de la Convención de 1948, son objeto de análisis en este capítulo. Dichos “actos” no son estrictamente hablando genocidio, sino, acaso, crímenes menores, conocidos como “formas de responsabilidad secundaria” que no contienen el mismo estigma adscrito al crimen de genocidio pero que pueden tener lugar incluso si el crimen principal no es cometido. Con base en lo anterior, veamos a continuación la contribución del TPIY al desarrollo del objeto de nuestro estudio, teniendo en cuenta, en particular, que su jurisprudencia (y la del TPIR) relativa a los “otros actos genocidas” (es decir, la conspiración, la incitación directa y pública, la tentativa y la complicidad en el genocidio) es particularmente relevante, considerando que el artículo 25 (3) del Estatuto de la CPI recoge las formas punibles de intervención en la comisión o tentativa, en la instigación directa y pública así como en la complicidad de comisión del genocidio.

For more than thirty years the English law established that whenever two defendants had a common intention to commit a particular crime, but one of them committed another crime, the other party was criminally liable for the acts by the primary offender if he had foreseen the possibility that he might have acted as he did. The principle was based on the equation between foresight and intent. The recent decision of the UK Supreme Court in the joint cases Jogee and Ruddock changes the law, by restating the older principle according to which the mental element required of a secondary party is an intention to assist or encourage the principal to commit the crime. Foresight is not equivalent to authorisation. This decision has the effect of bringing the mental element of the secondary party back into broad parity with what is required of the principal and of narrowing the scope of criminal law. It can also stimulate Italian lawyers and law-makers to start a thorough rethinking of the law of the much-debated concorso anomalo.

This historical research report presents and analyzes 2 recently identified narratives of women who underwent sterilization experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. A description of the historical and contextual background is presented in which involvement of the prisoner nurse occurred in the sterilization experiments. Using a critical feminist perspective, the ethics of nursing involvement are discussed in these experiments, with an emphasis on the political dimension. Salient implications are explored for contemporary nursing.

I draw out from Kierkegaard's work a critical perspective on evaluative frameworks that rely on a sharp distinction between agents and patients. In this perspective, human lives are shaped by complex entanglements of actions and sufferings. By abstracting away from this complexity, the agent/patient dichotomy occludes important ethical phenomena. I focus here on one such phenomenon: 'ambiguous guilt'.

Implication, one might attempt to paraphrase Michael Rothberg's concept, renders subjects guilty of wrongdoing of various kinds. Rothberg, however, avoids the charged terms guilt and morality in order to attain a fresh perspective onto why people of various historical and cultural contexts participate in wrongdoing, even in spite of knowing better. Such a fresh perspective is urgently needed in order to move beyond a mere naming, blaming, and singling out of culprits, towards any analysis of the complexity of involvements. My contribution seeks to outline that a more complex engagement with the conceptual history and systematic claims of canonical notions of 'guilt' and 'morality', nevertheless, makes implication a stronger concept for approaching both historical complicities and the contemporary crisis in democratic participation due to a seemingly ubiquitous implication in neoliberal structures. My response to Rothberg will proceed in three steps: The first section will outline Rothberg's treatment of moral concepts and the systematic purpose of these terms in understanding wrongdoing; the second section will propose a broadening of Rothberg's notion of implication and link it to my own work on the crisis in democratic participation; the third section will propose language as a model for comprehending implication in a pre-formed structure that, still, prompts and demands individual responsibility. Language as presented in literature emphasises this complex structure, as I will show with reference to Herta Müller's novel The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel). A reading of select passages from her text serves to outline the relevance of Rothberg's concept of implication in the analysis of problematic participation in wrongdoing, and to demonstrate that an expanded notion of implication that comprises traditional moral terminology is even more productive than Rothberg's narrower focus. My response starts with a key passage from Müller's text that both evokes the issue of guilt and refutes the naming of culprits as inadequate, thus prompting the urgency of an alternative terminology to address problematic participation.

I began this article, and focused quite a bit, on Palestine. I began with asking a question about the ethics of talking about Palestine in academia. But Palestine is an important archetype, an important site for my critiques and reflections. As my discussions above clearly show, I am critical of all ‘objects’ (by which I mean spaces, events, and structures) which have or can become a site for performing unhelpful (if not harmful) radicality for academics.  I am critical of Brahmin scholars who write about caste without making their positionality and intentions clear, without carefully and ethically centering Dalit-Bahujan theorists in non-fetishizing ways; I am suspicious of several kinds of works on Kashmir by savarna scholars that do not begin with their own dinner table conversations and calling Indian occupation by its name; I am invested in thinking about how I talk about white settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to perform my radical politics, without thinking about all the violences done in my name to so many of my Others in Pakistan. Whether it’s Palestine, or Kashmir, or Balochistan, or caste-talk, all of these can become sites for counter-productive work if we stop asking these important questions about complicity.

Occupy, Commons and other social experiments show: New collectivities are invented and tested. Gesa Ziemer enriches this debate through the insight that in the process, the reinterpretation of old forms of joint action can play an essential role. By looking at complicities in art, science and economy, ongoing collectivization is exposed.

Complicity means the committing of an act together, so the definition of criminal law. But for a long time now the concept has also been targeted at legal collective actions – mainly in innovative environments. Individuals act jointly in an intensely affective way – albeit only temporarily, bindingly in common – but still individually, inventively – and at the same time in a goal-oriented manner.
"This text was published in Gesa Ziemer, Complicity, transcript Bielefeld, 2016. It is posted here by permission of transcript Verlag for personal use only, not for redistribution."

This article builds upon critiques of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, asserting that the Commission “recalled” apartheid violence in the dichotomous terms of perpetrator and victim that have served to obscure the structural character of violence before and after 1994. The literary texts this article analyses – the novel “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986) and the short story“Riva”(1983), both by the Capetonian author Richard Rive – each contains a Jewish mock-monarch character. These play-monarchs evoke the positions of complicity that were inherent to the structure of apartheid, but which are largely absent from the national “memory” of apartheid that the Commission informed. Rive’s two texts, and his two mock-monarchs in particular, provoke reflection upon the character and temporality of apartheid violence and upon what might constitute a literature of resistance to it.

This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and commemorating white activism against apartheid, specifically war resistance in 1980s South Africa. As such, the chapter analyses the politics of complicity in activism by privileged subjects, the obscuring and exposing of complicity in the commemoration of previous activism and the role of academic research in upholding and threatening ongoing ‘ignorance’ about such complicity.  In a reflexive account of researching and analysing the social and political activism of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), a white led anti-apartheid movement and specifically the responses to published work and analysis of the ECC, I argue that the ECC challenged many fundamental aspects of militarised apartheid governance, but my analysis of the movement also traced the compromises and contradictions of the ECC and the gendered political messages it posed. As white South Africans, activists were also caught in debates about complicity and privilege in racial, economic and gendered terms. Furthermore, when researching in the 2000s, I became aware that former activists and conscientious objectors were keen to obscure former divisions in the movement and emphasise their agency and heroism in opposing apartheid, narratives that fed into broader political discourses premised on white citizenship claims in contemporary South Africa. The chapter explores the outraged responses to analyses by some former ECC activists, resistance to the study and questioning of whiteness as a salient category of research and an attempt by the (white led) parliamentary opposition (the Democratic Alliance) to rehabilitate white liberal agency in ending apartheid and discrediting the ANC government. This white 'backlash' politics is also contextualised as emergent from the responses to the  #RHODESMUSTFALL and # FEESMUSTFALL movements. The chapter also relates this to the increased focus on supposed white suffering during apartheid (of conscripts and other soldiers) and the decentring of injustice suffered by the black population. I argue that that these are socio-political narratives premised on ‘white talk’ (Steyn 2000) and ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, 2007 ; Steyn 2012): a politics of obscuring and complicit with ongoing white privilege.

Medical complicity in torture is prohibited by international law and codes of professional ethics. But in the many countries in which torture is common, doctors are frequently expected to assist unethical acts that they are unable to prevent. Sometimes these doctors face a dilemma: they are asked to provide diagnoses or treatments that respond to genuine health needs but that also make further torture more likely or more effective. The duty to avoid complicity in torture then comes into conflict with the doctor’s duty to care for patients. In this paper we argue that this dilemma is real and that sometimes the right thing for a doctor to do requires complicity in torture. We propose three criteria for determining when this is the case: the expected consequences of the doctor’s actions, the wishes of the patient, and the extent of the doctor’s complicity with wrongdoing. Finally, we suggest a way for medical associations to support physicians who face this dilemma while maintaining a commitment to clear principles that denounce torture.

Thank you for your critical and thought-provoking journal. I would like to address Kate Milley's article, " Where is John Wayne when you need him? Anti-native organizing and the Caledonia Crisis " (UTA 9). I learned a lot about mobilizations of white settlers against Six Nations from her article. However, what remained with me was her very important claim that " ordinary " white settlers are actively engaged in ongoing colonialism and that " the moral distance is uncomfortably narrow between those who are easily cast in the category of white supremacists and those who comprise the majority of white Canadians. " In other words, there is no race to innocence, and the are no good white settlers for Milley. Milley's article has made me once again question the binary of white settlers versus the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Where do I, a settler of colour, and other settlers of colour like myself, fit into this equation of white settlers versus Aboriginal peoples? Are we innocent just because we are people of colour and do not have a relationship of conquest to this land? Is our relationship to First Peoples colonial? I recently conducted a workshop for people of colour on how we see ourselves in relation to this land. While the enthusiasm of the people present at the workshop was wonderful, one of the questions that generated the most debate and discussion was whether or not people of colour are indeed settlers, or if whiteness is a precondition for being considered a settler. Some of the questions that came up included whether we were being too " academic " in using this vocabulary. How would we tell poor, racialized women of colour, for instance, that they were settlers here? My purpose in mentioning these questions is not to somehow claim that I am better than those who do not see themselves as complicit in routinized violence against Aboriginal peoples. Rather, I write these questions because these are important discussions that settlers of colour need to engage in. The narrow moral distance that Milley discusses in her article has made me ask myself what that distance is between people of colour here and white settlers. I have often heard people of colour with left politics claim that " our relation to this land is different. " How is this difference lived differently by bodies of colour? On one hand, people like me fight for justice in the name of being Canadians. We often stand in various anti-racist rallies to claim our rights as Canadians, and some of us – especially those born here – feel offended when we are asked where we are " really " from. On the other hand, we also claim innocence. We say that we are coming from other post-colonies, and that we too are victims of direct or indirect European colonization. Even when we recognize that we are settlers, there is no sense of urgency for most of us to organize with the Indigenous peoples and nations here. I think that we not only need to question where we are coming from but more importantly, also consider the place we have come to. What does citizenship mean for racialized people in a white settler-colony? What does it mean when we demand these citizenship rights, which are rights based in white supremacy, dispossession, and genocide of Aboriginal peoples? For instance, when Muslims today (and I include myself here) write and organize against legislation like the Anti-Terrorism Act or against acts of racial profiling, do we look at what the Indian Act is still doing to continue genocide against Indigenous peoples here? Do we look at how Indigenous activists have a long history of being labelled as terrorists? Do we ask ourselves why Aboriginality and urbanity are still framed as mutually exclusive? If we think that we people of colour have a right to be here, then where do we think people of native nations belong? There are a few clarifications I would like to make here: I am not saying that we share the same power as white settlers, or that race, class, gender, and citizenship do not define where and how bodies are organized Introductions