Drug Policy

SUMMARY

This paper argues that the war on drugs is based on retributive values that are illogical, burden the criminal justice system, and are ineffective in reducing drug-related harm. It examines the relation between political agendas and anti-drug legislation. It demonstrates that anti-drug policy has resulted in dramatically inceased punishment and incarceration since 1970, after four decades at a level rate, especially for blacks. This paper contends that segregation was a form of nonjudicial punishment for blacks until 1970, and concludes tht the war on drugs has become a punishment substitute for segregation. It argues that drug prohibition must be replaced by regulation and that devising such a system involves a complex balance of competing values.     

Limites et pertinence de la guerre juste face au terrorisme et aux nouvelles guerres

This article aims to examine the pertinence as well as the limits of the just war theory in order to apprehend the ethical issues raised by contemporary forms of political violence. Terrorism is undoubtedly an extreme case of political violence that puts to the test the theoretical and practical relevance of jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles. From a sociological point of view, it appears necessary to understand contemporary terrorism within the historical evolution of armed conflicts and under the light of current research devoted to the concept of ‘new wars’. Although I will argue that just war theory does not sufficiently take into account current studies on the empirical features of contemporary wars, it is nonetheless possible to salvage the theoretical and practical relevance of just war theory in a more specified sense. From a philosophical point of view, the goal of this article is to confront the theoretical and practical relevance of just war theory with the current body of research in the field of the sociology of war in order to assess both its limitations and its potential scope.     

RECLAIMING HERITAGE: COLOURIZATION,CULTURE WARS AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity, canonicity and tradition, has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the configuration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance, the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within higher education and the humanities. This article attempts to complicate the contemporary politics of nostalgia, showing how a defence of cultural patrimony has distinguished major and minor culture wars, engaging left and right quite differently but with similar presuppositions.     

Coffee by women: the ‘duty of ethical enjoyment’

This article explores the contemporary trend of deploying feminist values in the case of ethical branding. Using the psychoanalytical concepts logics of fantasy and enjoyment, we analyse the campaign by Swedish coffee brand Zoégas, Coffee by Women, to understand how a combination of development discourse, ‘women’s empowerment’ and the opportunity to ‘do good’ is employed to sell coffee. The analysis shows that the campaign depicts the threat of a future lack of coffee, creating anxiety in the consumer, supposedly motivating her to purchase Zoégas, as Coffee by Women is claimed to secure and educate new generations of coffee farmers. Simultaneously, this is presented as ‘empowering women’ in the global South. We argue that this narrative builds on a colonial fantasy of global sisterhood and shared interests that works to conceal the political conflicts connected to global trade and climate change. Through a commodification of feminist values and aesthetics, this fantasy works to redirect the desire for social change towards consumption, offering an enjoyable solution that disregards any wider responsibility. It has been argued that the structure of the social bond before the era of mass consumption was characterized by a prohibition on individual enjoyment for the benefit of the common good. After the arrival of mass consumption, the social bond instead became marked by a duty to enjoy. In the contemporary context of ethical capitalism, we suggest that the social bond is rather structured by a ‘duty of ethical enjoyment’, containing elements of both prohibition and pleasure.     

Honorary whiteness

‘The fantasy of the exception’ is a seductive trope. More penetrating than any explicit legal codes or political structures, the fantasy is embedded in a constellation of politics and psychology and is linked to both colonial and neocolonial logics. In her book Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, Anne Norton presents the ‘fantasy of the exception’ as luring individuals to repress or magnify parts of their identities in exchange for increased access to political and economic privilege. This study argues that the fantasy of exception is intrinsically intertwined in constructs of ‘honorary whiteness’ as exemplified in the contemporary academy, as well as in colonial and neocolonial constructs of identity. Building on Norton's definition of this fantasy, I examine its colonial roots and contemporary manifestations in the broader neoliberal agenda. In doing so, I will show how the fantasy is exemplified by individuals' aspirations for ‘honorary white’ status, and how their drive to achieve power comes at the expense of the splitting of their selves. By examining the narratives of ‘non-white’ individuals and their struggle for power and identity in the face of colonial and neoliberal orders, the fantasy of exception is revealed as reinforcing inequality and oppression, and ultimately, sustains fabricated differences that fuel the legacy of colonial racism.     

The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities

In this article I consider the relations between historical and contemporary forms of transnational political networks. I contest accounts that counterpose a networked present against a more settled and bounded past, arguing that this contrast rests on a problematic temporalization of difference in the construction of political identities. I consider how this temporalization produces particular accounts of relations between space, politics and identity. Drawing on the insurgent imaginative geography of resistance in C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, I argue for a focus on the dynamic geographies of connection formed through transnational networks. I develop this position through a discussion of the relations of the London Corresponding Society, formed in London in 1792, to transnational routes of political activists, organizational forms and ideas. This account highlights the multiple political identities crafted through transnational political networks. I conclude by outlining elements of a ‘usable past’ for contemporary counter‐global struggles.     

Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.     

Mafias,Markets, Mules: Gender Stereotypes in Discourses About Drug Trafficking

Popular and political discourses about drug trafficking are premised on a gender binary based on sexist stereotypes. Simply put, popular and political discourses about drug trafficking tend to describe men as the brains and women as mere bodies. Academic research on drug mules and drug trafficking tends to rely on, rather than problematise, this gender binary, limiting contemporary enquiry and knowledge about drug trafficking. Furthermore, this gendered binary informs anti‐drug trafficking policy international in harmful ways.     

The Defeat of the Guitar Army: Don DeLillo,John Sinclair,and the Rock Revolution

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street is seldom analysed as a serious engagement with the rock music and countercultural politics of the 1960s, yet these constitute its historical context, its subject matter, and its central concerns. An historicized reading positions the novel as an intervention into contemporary debates about the causes and consequences of the defeat of the 1960s ‘rock revolution’. These debates were most thoroughly synthesized by the rock culture’s chief agitator and organic intellectual John Sinclair in his 1972 book Guitar Army. Like Guitar Army, Great Jones Street dwells on the connections between the political failure of the rock revolution and the provenance and validity of rock’s anti-rational aesthetic. Sinclair finds political hope in re-emphasizing rock’s anti-rationalism, rooted equally in black music and the psychedelic experience. More sceptical, DeLillo offers a very different reading of the rock culture’s view of African American aesthetics and its use of psychedelics.     

Victims and Vamps,Madonnas and Whores

This article explores how the US ‘war on drugs’ depends on certain notions of femininity and womanhood. In particular, I examine how female drug couriers from the Americas are constructed at US border sites of international airports in the 1990s. I find that female drug couriers are described in terms of victims and vamps – a take off of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The victim and vamp discourses, I argue, are the performative enactments of a security state that operates according to a racialized logic of masculinist protection. I hold in tension the circulation of the victim/vamp discourses with the story of Paula, a Colombian woman who was caught trafficking heroin in hidden compartments of her suitcase. I use Paula's story to call attention to the political work in dismissing women as agents in the international drug trade.     

Fathers Don’t Cry: On Gender,Kinship, and the Death Drive

ABSTRACT

A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, because this particular view solves for psychoanalysis some basic problems that it does not have the conceptual repertoire to address. This article goes on a journey through the story of boys, Samson from the Hebrew bible, a young New York boy who falls of his bike, Freud’s three sons and his theoretically adoptive son Karl Abraham, and one of my patients. It is a journey through the civilization-long prohibition on parents and boys to attach, a prohibition that I argue serves the arch-value of sacrifice by which patriarchy is driven. I also trace in this journey the story of the controversial and powerful analytic concept of the death drive. And I argue that this concept, born during and after World War I, bears the mark of the frightened, homo-attachment-phobic impulse that has taken over a psychoanalysis unable to cope with the madness of a world war without blaming the victim. I offer toward the end a glimpse of an alternative.     

Codes and conflict

Conclusion If theory caused a more critical study of war, it would have achieved its purpose. (Clausewitz)In this article I have shown that in times of war, beneath the apparently rational surface of modern societies and states there lurks a powerful religious dimension that is of crucial importance in structuring political and military activity, in informing public, political, and intellectual discourse, and in shaping opinion, beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, and social action. The religious dimension is neither a mere jumble of diffuse sentiments, beliefs, and ideas, nor a simple ideological reflection of social interests — it is an autonomous, internally coherent, analogically organized code that specifies sacred and profane elements and embodies an endogenous apophantic logic. This analytically autonomous code provides for the specification of war as ritual in concrete historical sequences. If the reader comes away from this article feeling that she better understands the role and organization of culture in war, and that consequently war cannot be explained, understood, and interpreted only in terms of economic, geopolitical, and psychological variables, then I will have achieved my chief objective here. However, I hope that this article also has a larger contribution to make. Sociology has inherited a rich tradition of ideas from its founding fathers. This tradition, enshrined in the classic works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, has informed and shaped the discipline. It seems a shame that contemporary trends in social thought and research draw increasingly upon selected strands of thought in the legacy of only two of those gentlemen. The result of this movement, I believe, is not just a trend toward impoverished uni-dimensional studies of social reality, but also the loss of the auto-critical possibilities engendered by a discourse that draws upon diverse theoretical resources. As I have tried to demonstrate here, Durkheim's legacy, with its unique emphasis on ritual and symbolism, still provides a useful resource for the critique of social theory and the analysis of social life — even in those areas where one would least expect any fruitful insights to arise. More importantly, as Clausewitz recognized, theory contains the possibility not merely for the formal study, but also for the critical study of war. With its stress on voluntarism, a Durkheimian theory of war provides a vital and distinct contrast to those theories of war that attribute causation to factors outside of human control, be they psychological, geopolitical, or economic. The awareness of ethical responsibility arising from such an under-standing provides, one would like to think, the possibility for change.     

The making of the global gambling industry: An application and extension of field theory

The past two decades have seen a global convergence from gambling prohibition to legalization, but also a divergence regarding how new gambling industries are structured and regulated. This article compares two cases of casino legalization exhibiting different and, given conventional understandings of the two countries, unexpected outcomes. In the United States, ethnic entrepreneurs (Indian tribes) were granted a monopoly on casinos in California; in South Africa, the new ANC government legalized a competitive, corporate casino industry. Through explaining these disparate industry structurings, two arguments are advanced. First, Bourdieu's field theory best describes the interests and strategies of industry “players” as they attempted to shape policy. Second, Bourdieu neglects the independent role of institutions in mediating between field-level dynamics and concrete regulatory outcomes. In California, Tribes converted economic into political capital through a public election. In South Africa, the ANC used a centralized commission to implement corporate gambling over public opposition, in essence converting political into economic capital. By viewing policy domains as “dramaturgical prisms” whose sign–production tools and audiences facilitate certain but not other capital conversion projects, I both explain unexpected regulatory outcomes and synthesize field and political process theories. Jeffrey J. Sallaz received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. In addition to examining the struggles surrounding gambling legalization, he has studied ethnographically the experience of service work in the global casino industry and the politics of deindustrialization in the US rust belt. He is currently conducting research for a project analyzing the uneven diffusion of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas into the field of American sociology over the past three decades.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Gender,visuality and violence: visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan

Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.     

Military,masculinity and mediated representations: (con)fusing the real and the reel

In this paper I argue that it is time to rethink the military within Management and Organization Theory. The starting point for this discussion is a juxtaposition of the (lack of) study of the military within Management and Organization Theory compared with the recent (and sustained) interest in depicting war, the military and the military subject within popular culture. I argue that the military is a gendered and gendering organization that has wider discursive effects on the lived experience of masculinity. Having laid down these conceptual claims, I then argue for the value of film, and popular culture more broadly, as an important source of ‘knowledge’ about organizational life. To elaborate this claim, I conduct a close reading of four films that represent post‐Cold War conflicts and identify three recurring themes that tell particular ‘truths’ of the experiences of the contemporary military organizational subject. I conclude that there is something meaningful and relevant in the contemporary popular culture of war that can help address the limitations of the exploration of the military within Management and Organization Theory.     

Elite positionings towards Hindi: Language policies,political stances and language competence in India1

In India, Hindi is imagined and institutionalized as the national language which weds together India's pluralistic population under the banner of a shared Indian identity. Approaching language competence as embedded in and performed through language practices and ideologies, I explore how a New Delhi elite community positions themselves towards Hindi vis‐à‐vis national language policies and political movements. Contrasting with traditional unified elite portrayals, e.g. ‘elite closure’ ( Myers‐Scotton 1990 ), India has multiple sociolinguistically discordant elite groups, and these liberal elites ideologically construct their Hindi (in)competency in an alternative framework attending to the history (and failure) of Hindi‐based nationalism, their disalignment with modern right‐wing movements, and their continued affiliation with English. This perspective of some elites as negotiating and disagreeing with contemporary political movements and language policy legislature illuminates language competencies as socially constructed and locally grounded, and challenges past interpretations of postcolonial elites as unified actors controlling the dominant linguistic marketplace.     

Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comparative reading of Morrison’s celebrated novel, Song of Solomon (1977), and Adichie’s popular text, Americanah (2013) – both recipients of the National Book Critics Circle award, this essay offers a fresh, specifically transatlantic and transnational, analysis of Morrison’s African-American views on blackness through the contemporary, Afrodiasporic lens of Adichie. Guided by the dialogic call-and-response mode, and underpinned by cultural, race and diaspora theory, the essay suggests and explores the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, interrogating ontologies of race, particularly blackness, through an ‘Africanness’ that takes cognizance of culturally specific and context-responsive, globalized configurations of female subjectivity in particular. In this way, this essay seeks to expand understandings of, and discussions around, black issues and black life in order not just to resituate the relevance of black cultural ontologies but, through comparative engagement with the ‘politics’ of blackness, to revive in the political consciousness and imagination their crucial significance.     

Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements

After a period of interdisciplinary openness, contemporary sociology has only recently rediscovered culture. This is especially true of political sociology, where institutional and network analyses, as well as rational choice models, have dominated. This article will offer another approach by focusing on the role of music and the visual arts in relation to the formation of collective identity, collective memory and collective action. Drawing on my own research on the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the memory of slavery in the formation of African-American identity, and its opposite, the place of white power music in contemporary neo-fascist movements, I will outline a model of culture as more than a mobilization resource and of the arts as political mediators.