Memory and Kent State

The Past is Always Present on May 4

I fell into the field of communications by default because I took a debate class at Miami from a professor who turned out to be chair of the department. I was an English major looking for an easy minor. No one could have been more surprised than I that the ...
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Empire, Epidemics and Visions of Racial Apocalypse

The Precursors of Contemporary Xenophobia

In the numerous violent clashes the book depicts, like the one in which Belgian soldiers stationed in consular offices in India massacre thousands of advancing migrants, murder is depicted in orgiastic fashion while officers recite the victories of great conquerors past to raise morale -- tales of crusading knights slaying ...
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The Political Landscape Post Charlottesville

Where Should Students and Academics Stand?

I had thought that the scariest sight that weekend would be the images of the “Unite the Right” rally. Men can be scary enough on their own. Men with violent ideologies are simply terrifying. The white supremacist rally was toxically masculine, looked utterly fascist and sounded like a historical period ...
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The New-Old Terror Wave in Europe (Part 3)

A Comparison of European Terrorism Cycles

Suicide bombers have, in a way, replaced car bombs or improvised explosive devices (IED) by themselves. The use of this tactic is also a reaction to learned experience by European security agencies. Car bombing dominated the previous wave in the United Kingdom, Spain, and France. This made police forces alert ...
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The New-Old Terror Wave in Europe (Part 2)

A Comparison of European Terrorism Cycles

It seems, then, that Europe is currently in a new expansionist phase of this latest cycle of terror. Putting aside the isolated case of the El Descanso restaurant bombing in Madrid in 1985 by the Lebanese Islamic Jihad, Jihadi violence reached Europe in late 1994 when the Armed Islamic Group ...
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The New-Old Terror Wave in Europe (Part 1)

A Comparison of European Terrorism Cycles

Terrorism, understood as non-state political violence that inflicts physical harm on people and property outside of combat or occupied regions with the aim to frighten society and force a state to enact or change certain policies[1], is far from being a new phenomenon in Europe. In fact, it has been ...
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What Berkeley Needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad

Reflections from a civil rights veteran

Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then, we were the equivalent of the "fascists" that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, ...
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Aristotle on Charlottesville

‘Mixed Actions’ and Exercising Judgement on Violence

In the opening movement of book 3 of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that, at bottom, each and every human being is responsible for essentially every action they undertake; put another way: there is nothing a human being does for which they ought not to be praised or blamed. This ...
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Aristotle on Charlottesville

What Makes Reasonable Force Reasonable?

Conceptions of Virtuous Rationality

In a recent essay published by Public Seminar, I argued that we should rethink the appeal to fear as a motive and justification for the use of force by police officers. Although I concluded that fear should not be seen as a legitimate defense of an officer’s decision to use force, my ...
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What Makes Reasonable Force Reasonable?

Three Values of Anger

Chapter Five from ‘Sing the Rage’ by Sonali Chakravarti

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Anger, like other emotions, is closely related to a cluster of affective predispositions, including resentment, sadness, and frustration. Insisting on a narrow definition of anger misses the way these emotions often overlap; conversely a broad interpretation of the emotions, writ large, lacks analytical specificity. Cutting through these ...
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Three Values of Anger

Sing the Rage

Listening to Anger after Mass Violence

The words of Godfrey Xolile Yona, who appeared before the TRC in October 1996, exemplify the type of testimony that is the catalyst for my thinking about the significance of anger in testimony after mass violence and its relationship to restorative justice. Detained for his involvement with the anti-apartheid organization ...
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Sing the Rage