Despotic Power Research Articles

The discourse of law and the discourse of power in the works by Yury Dombrovsky

The article is devoted to the study of the discourse of law and the discourse of power in the prose by Y.O. Dombrovsky. The authors have identified a number of aspects of law and power discourses in order to demonstrate how law and power, reproduced in the works by Y.O. Dombrovsky, can interact with socio-cultural realities. The study involved the axioms of law – fundamental legal principles that have developed because of centuries of law practice and have 7become statements that do not require proof. The analysis of a number of law axioms shows that in the totalitarian reality depicted by the author the law axiomatic is distorted, and fundamental legal laws cease to work. Attention was also drawn to the fact that court scenes are abstract in the prose by Y.O. Dombrovsky and the reasons for this absence are analyzed in the article. It was established that the court in his works can be depicted indirectly (through memories, protocols, etc.), but the hero himself does not participate in the court. In the controlled judicial system of the Stalinist period, the court disappears as an unnecessary instance, since the accused is guilty a priori. Due to the lack of a real advocateship in court, the arrested person can only defend himself if he makes a plea deal in order to get a shorter sentence. When studying the discourse of law and the discourse of power, we turned to the theory of speech genres by M. M. Bakhtin. We have identified and analyzed such genres of judicial and law discourse as the genre of interrogation, indictment, lawyer’s speech, arguments of the parties and protocol, as well as such imperative speech genres of power discourse as the genre of order, submission and possession. It was concluded that the characters by Y.O. Dombrovsky can oppose the ideas of stoicism to despotic power.

Liberties Poets Take: Towards a Verbal Pedagogy of Revolt

Poetry has always been the tool of resistance for writers who seek to assert the voice of freedom against those who attempt to deny it to human beings. Its brevity and concise nature have often been associated with the sharp and surprising effect of weapons. In this paper I argue that of all genres, (resistance) poetry is the one that subversively grants a license to itself, that licenses itself and takes liberties for the defense of liberty. It is constantly preoccupied with innovative ways for infringing the seemingly rigid rules set up by despotic power. The liberties that a poet takes in recreating language, in transforming it from within, and the poetic licenses which are taken in defiance of the conventions of verse writing must be seen as emblematic of the essence of resistance poetry in particular and poetry in general which by nature is based on challenging all norms and standards. Resistance poets and the so-called poets of witness have therefore always associated their aesthetic modes with these liberties which they take at the level of diction, grammar and logic, a gesture which hints to how language must be radically changed or per(sub)verted in order to alter the vision of people with a view to liberating them at a subsequent stage. Poetry then offers the best pedagogy of revolt, one that drives forward the people in their rhythmic march towards what Jacques Derrida calls the ‘arrivant’ or the different future. I will take the liberty in this paper to start with license and end it with liberty or freedom or emancipation. This is because aesthetics and politics can never be split.Keywords: Liberties, Pedagogy, writers

The Dynamics of Maya State Process: An Integrated Perspective from the San Lucas Neighborhood of Copán, Honduras

ABSTRACTRecognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city of Copán was a major center of Maya culture during the Classic Period (AD 250–900). While archaeologists have been traditionally concerned with the top‐down despotic power of Maya rulers, I show how infrastructural power—the ability of the state to affect the everyday lives of its residents—waxed and waned. As a representative subset of the city at large, the intermediate scale of neighborhoods best reveals effects of and reactions to state power. I focus on politcal dynamics at six households within the San Lucas neighorbood, attending to episodes of landscape engineering, architectural construction, and artifactual trends. I consider these changes together with political events recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions at Copán Center. This correlation shows whether and how state policies altered the daily lives of residents. Incorporating a bottom‐up perspective from the intermediate scale of neighborhoods enables an integrated assessment of citywide political dynamics. [political dynamics, collective action theory, urbanism, neighborhoods, Maya]

Resistance From Within: Power and Defiance in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters

Montesquieu reflects on the intricacies of government, social customs, and identity in his epistolary novel titled Persian Letters (1721). For many of these topics, Montesquieu addresses the themes of power and agency, mainly in the context of despotism as symbolized by a seraglio in the book. This article uses the explanatory research method through a case analysis of “power” in the Persian Letters to facilitate a nuanced, gendered understanding of “power” as a concept. The case analysis incorporates and applies feminist perspectives on power, as well as a theoretical framework and empirical observations from Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985), to define and operationalize “despotic power” and “defiant power.”

The Priority of the Good and the Contrapuntal Character of Aristotle’s Politics I

Abstract Politics I has been the subject of a number of textual questions about the relation of the Ethics to the Politics. These textual questions involve us in theoretical questions about the differences between contemporary and ancient conceptions of political rule. Resolving the exegetical challenges can help us clarify the theoretical differences. A fresh approach to the textual challenges reveals that Politics I has a contrapuntal character with two reinforcing movements. One explores why and how despotic conceptions of politics fail using case studies of despotic power: slavery and money-making. Aristotle shows dialectically how this despotic approach to rule undermines the requirements for political life. The other movement explores the character of natural human associations, culminating in the polis. The two movements converge in Aristotle’s claim about the centrality of the human good for political rule. This claim challenges modern social contract theory’s understanding of the differences between despotic and political rule.

‘This man is my property’: Slavery and political absolutism in Locke and the classical social contract tradition

It is morally impossible, Locke argued, for individuals to consensually establish absolute rule over themselves. That would be to transfer to rulers a power that is not ours, but God’s alone: ownership of our lives. This article analyses the conceptual presuppositions of Locke’s argument for the moral impossibility of self-enslavement through a comparison with other classical social contract theorists, including Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf. Despite notoriously defending the permissibility of voluntary enslavement of individuals and even entire peoples, Grotius similarly endorsed divine ownership of human life. He could do so coherently, we show, because he denied that despotic power gives rulers rights in the lives of their subjects. Masters do not own slaves in the way we own material things (which we may destroy at will). Reworking received Roman law categories, Grotius maintained that ‘perfect slavery’ consists in masters having a personal right to the slave’s perpetual service; a condition equivalent to what Locke called ‘drudgery’ and deemed permissible. Our analysis of this unpalatable set of ideas reveals that Locke’s argument is premised upon idiosyncratic conceptions of slavery and absolutism, disavowed by prominent defenders of absolutism in the classical social contract tradition. It is hence less powerful than commonly believed.

Edenic Equality and the Rejection of “Right Divine” in Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women (1810)

ABSTRACTLucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations (1810) traces the deplorable condition of women in western civilization from “ill-fated Eve” in the Garden of Eden to the daughters of “fair Albion” in the eighteenth century. In her first epistle, Aikin characterizes the “natural” subordination of women to men as the “Right Divine” of kings to censure those, like the “great [Republican] Milton,” who condemn the religious legitimacy of monarchical rule, yet hypocritically sanction man’s despotic power over women by citing biblical authority. This essay explores how Aikin’s epic poem challenges the biblical origins of female subordination by offering an alternative exegesis of Genesis. I argue that Aikin wields her considerable scriptural knowledge to contest Eve’s culpability in the Fall, thereby refuting the religious pretext for women’s subjugation. Informed by the Dissenting tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as prior feminist re-imaginings of Adam and Eve, Aikin positions herself as a theological and poetic authority fit to pen an epic revision of Genesis to rival John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674).

Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America ed. by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson

Reviewed by: Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America ed. by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson Walter Scheidel Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America. Edited by clifford ando and seth richardson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 309 pp. This volume addresses the question of how—and how autonomously—the rulers and political elites of ancient states exercised power over the populations and territories to which they laid claim. The discussion is structured around Michael Mann's twin concepts of "infrastructural power"—the state's capacity to penetrate civil society and implement decisions—and "despotic power," which allowed its agents to act without consultation or negotiation with civil society constituencies. Premodern states are commonly considered to have been rather deficient in the first of these types of political power, and this is certainly true if conditions in more modern societies serve as our principal frame of reference. Yet, even many centuries ago, central authorities needed to be able to maintain a certain degree of control in order to sustain the force generation and extractive activities that were required for preserving their position and deterring rivals. This collaborative project is designed to explore state capacity empirically by means of a series of historical case studies that are theoretically informed by Mann's ideal types (as well as by some cognate theorizing), which have been largely neglected by students of the ancient world. It thus seems unhelpful that readers need to make it to chapters 2 and 4 to encounter actual definitions of Mann's key concepts, which Clifford Ando's introduction curiously withholds [End Page 447] (most notably on page 9). The geographic and chronological range is impressive: while the volume concentrates on western Eurasia—with seven chapters covering the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Iran—one chapter each is devoted to early China and the Inca empire, an addition that is particularly welcome in view of the all-too-common exclusion of New World societies from what counts as "ancient history." Although one could always ask for more—early imperial China has much more to offer and pre-Islamic South Asia would surely have been worth a look – this is a promising start. If there is a common theme that runs through the volume, sometimes clearly developed and sometimes more obliquely implied, it is the evolution of infrastructural power over time. Seth Richardson, building on his earlier work on what he calls the "presumptive state," stresses the weakness of centralized state power in the Old Babylonian period: notwithstanding rulers' expansive rhetoric, territory was poorly defined and formal law was of little import. Even so, exaggerated claims to power helped build up real capabilities, which gradually surfaced in subsequent stages of Mesopotamian state formation. Emily Mackil paints a more optimistic picture for archaic Greece. Drawing on evidence that is centered on the island of Crete, she argues that early written laws that often concerned themselves with private property rights served to define territoriality and played a significant role in the emergence of small polities with growing infrastructural capacity. The historical record is (even) more tenuous for Western Zhou China, where—as Wang Haicheng maintains on the basis of elite-facing commemorative inscriptions on bronze vessels—direct political control was confined to the capital regions and most territories were run by aristocratic elites to whom power had been delegated. How this affected the scope of royal powers remains unclear. Turning to the much better documented mature Roman empire, Ando analyzes administrative attributions that drew rural communities into the institutional framework of nearby cities and imperial regulations that imposed road maintenance on local residents. These were among the mechanisms that extended the reach of the center by establishing both infrastructural and despotic power "in mutually constitutive ways" (p. 119). The evolutionary theme features very prominently in John Weisweiler's chapter in which he discusses the expansion of Roman governmental capacity in response to the shocks of the third century C.E. Marrying inclusive rhetoric with greater, if costly, penetration of civil society, a bundle of reforms amplified the despotic dimension of the emperor's persona, decentered established aristocratic elites, and drew in new constituents via fiscal, legal, and [End Page...

Метафоры деспотизма: От «железной руки» до «железной пяты»

In the European cultural space there are related metaphors associated with the image of a knight chained in armor: «iron hand», «iron foot/heel», «armored fist», «iron hand in a velvet glove». Most often they are used as a sign of ruthless, despotic power. They are adjacent to the image of «bayonets» as a symbol of despotic power. The article explores the origin and existence of these metaphors in various national cultures.

Brexit and the British Constitution: Reflections on the Last Three years and the Next Fifty

AbstractThe decision to leave the EU provoked the biggest constitutional crisis of recent British history. The referendum—a device for circumventing the parliamentary process—was followed by conflict between a minority government and a majority of MPs unwilling to leave the EU without satisfactory alternative arrangements. The courts, drawn into this conflict, upheld conventions that sustain the authority of Parliament and restrain the despotic power of ministers. The reaction of members of the current government was to take disreputable and anti‐democratic positions against both the Speaker of the House of Commons and the courts. They now have a sufficient majority in Parliament to resume adherence to constitutional conventions and restore a political culture of debate and tolerance, but they show little sign of doing so, and there is a risk that they will do irreparable damage to the political culture that underpins democracy.

Al-Azhar University in the Events of the Arab Spring (Case of Egypt)

Due to the comprehensiveness of Islam, the role of the “Islamic factor” in political processes in the Middle East and North Africa is great, while the nature of the manifestations of the “Islamic factor” largely depends among other things on the current state of modern religious educational institutions, including those serving as a forge of Islamic personnel today. One of the most prestigious universities in Islamic oikumene, giving religious education for Muslims from all over the world, is AlAzhar al-Sharif (the shorter Al-Azhar is more common). It was here that some famous thinkers studied, who further significantly contributed to the development of the so-called “political Islam”. This study is an attempt to clarify the role of Al-Azhar University and related Islamic scholars in the socio-political processes of the Middle East and North Africa. Conducting the research, the author largely turned to the sources of the Islamic religion (the Qur’an, Hadith), theological texts of a number of thinkers (for example, the interpretation of the Qur’an Rashid Rida), religious polemical works (the work of Sheikh Osama al-Azhari against the “Muslim Brotherhood” and other “Islamist” trends), documents compiled by the leadership of Al-Azhar; academic literature on related issues. The author came to the conclusion that the “Islamic factor” did not play a crucial role at the beginning of events, but vividly manifested itself subsequently. The actual suppression of Islam by secular dictators created a fertile ground for the acute discontent of believing citizens and activists of various movements who uphold a particular version of the Islamic political alternative. The most influential university in the Islamic world, Al-Azhar, in an official document, “Arab Spring”, indicated the possibility of a shift in despotic power, while emphasizing at the same time the inadmissibility of violent suppression of peaceful protest. Certain Azharite theologians were directly involved in the events of the “Arab Spring”, in particular, the passionate scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement and graduated from Al-Azhar, as well as Sheikh Emad Effat, who died during the suppression of an unarmed speech 15 December 2011. Such activity of various Islamic forces in the political sphere is primarily due to the very nature of the Islamic tradition, which does not separate the “sacred” and “profane”.

Irrigación y Organización Social en una Sociedad en Transición al Capitalismo: el Caso de la Asociación de Canalistas del Maipo en Chile (S.XIX)

El artículo problematiza la privatización de los derechos del agua en Chile en perspectiva histórica. Analiza la configuración del papel hegemónico de la Sociedad del Canal Maipo sobre la gestión del agua de riego, como un caso paradigmático que condicionó la estructuración de las redes hidrosociales en Chile, en el contexto del proceso de incorporación del país en los mercados mundiales. Sostenemos que la Asociación de Canalistas del Maipo logró, a partir de una eventualidad histórica particular (aguaceros de 1827 en el Canal San Carlos), apoderarse de un bien común sin ningún contrapeso, ejerciendo un poder despótico sobre el riego que terminó, en el largo plazo, condicionando profundamente la relación entre la sociedad y el agua en Chile. Analizamos diferentes conflictos en torno a las distintas estrategias de control, administración y acceso al agua empleadas por la Asociación, a fin de dilucidar los mecanismos que adoptó con el objetivo de legitimar y perpetuar su predominio y poder.

Gothic Ivan the Terrible in the 1920s: Iurii Tarich’s Wings of a Serf and the Curious Case of Ignatii Stelletskii

The article centers on close readings of Iurii Tarich’s little studied film Wings of a Serf (1926) and the life and times of the archaeologist Ignatii Iakovlevich Stelletskii (1878–1949), who obsessively sought to discover the legendary library of Ivan the Terrible, thought to lie concealed beneath the Moscow Kremlin. These examples show the peculiar fascination of early Soviet audiences with the tsarist past in its most extreme expressions of violence and cruelty. The alluring, frightening early Soviet Ivan the Terrible demonstrates post-Revolutionary society’s queasy sense that the excesses of the old regime threatened to reemerge in the new, Soviet era. The conclusion of the article considers how the Stalinist period, both in its unprecedented bloodshed and violence and in its positive myth of Ivan the Terrible as a great leader despite his cruelty, fulfilled this fearful anticipation in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1920s. This macabre return of a superseded past undergirded the one Stalinist representation of Ivan to revisit the 1920s Gothic image of the tsar, Sergei Eisenstein’s ambivalent portrayal of despotic power and violence in his uncompleted film trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1942–1944).

Social inequality in the evolution of human societies

The author develops ideas about the origin of social inequality during the evolution of human societies and reflects on the possibilities of its overcoming. What makes human beings different from other primates is a high level of egalitarianism and altruism, which contributed to more successful adaptability of human collectives at early stages of the development of society. The transition to agriculture, coupled with substantially increasing population density, was marked by the emergence and institutionalisation of social inequality based on the inequality of tangible assets and symbolic wealth. Then, new institutions of warfare came into existence, and they were aimed at conquering and enslaving the neighbours engaged in productive labour. While exercising control over nature, people also established and strengthened their power over other people. Chiefdom as a new type of polity came into being. Elementary forms of power (political, economic and ideological) served as a basis for the formation of early states. The societies in those states were characterised by social inequality and cruelties, including slavery, mass violence and numerous victims. Nowadays, the old elementary forms of power that are inherent in personalistic chiefdom are still functioning along with modern institutions of public and private bureaucracy. This constitutes the key contradiction of our time, which is the juxtaposition of individual despotic power and public infrastructural one. However, society is evolving towards an ever more efficient combination of social initiatives with the sustainability and viability of large-scale organisations.

한말(1894∼1907) 고종의 專制 권력과 流刑

본 연구는 갑오개혁 이후부터 1907년 7월 고종이 퇴위될 때까지 시행된 流刑과 고종의 전제 권 력과의 상관성을 살피는데 있다. 1894년에 들어서면서 동학농민운동, 일본의 경복궁 점령, 갑오개 혁 등으로 인해 고종의 왕권은 극도로 쇠약해졌고 1895년 10월 을미사변 이후에는 생명의 위협을 느꼈다. 뿐만 아니라 이준용·박영효 등의 반역음모사건에 왕권마저 위협 받고 있었다. 고종은 이러한 위기를 탈피하고자 1896년 2월 아관파천을 단행하였고 왕권을 쇄신하고 강화할 목적에서 <大明律>에 기반하여 여러 형법을 제정, 공포하면서 전제 권력을 강화시키고자 했다. 특히 고종은 전제 왕권에 대항하는 세력에 대해서는 ‘국사범’이라 하여 철저히 응징하고자 했고, 대표적인 것이 유형이었다. 당시 근대적인 형법제도를 도입하여 ‘징역형’이 신설되었지만 ‘국사범’ 들을 정치권에서 완전히 배제시키고자 고종 자신이 직접 최종 판결을 내리는 유형을 적극 활용하 였다. 이에 1894년 이후 1907년까지 300여 명이 각지의 도서로 유배되었다. 이를 시기별로 살펴보면 1894년부터 1896년 2월 아관파천 이전까지는 갑오세력에 의해 민씨 척 족이나 고종의 측근 세력들이 유형에 처해졌다. 특히 경복궁에 유폐되다시피 한 고종을 구출하기 위해 벌인 춘생문 사건 관련자들이 대부분이었다. 이들에게는 모반율이 적용되었고 가담 정도에 따라 교형에서 징역 3년까지 언도되었다. 다만, 이준용왕위옹립사건은 엄연한 모반죄로 사형에 처 해야함에도 불구하고 유형 10년으로 처리한 뒤 일본으로 망명할 수 있도록 선처를 해주기도 했다. 아관파천을 단행한 고종은 거꾸로 을미사변과 춘생문 사건에 관여한 자들을 가장 우선하여 유 형을 단행하였다. 이들 대부분은 고종이 물러날 때까지 해배되지 않았다. 그리고 1898년 이후 정 치세력화한 독립협회와의 갈등으로 양측 인사들의 유형이 잦았고 더욱이 일본으로 망명한 박영 효·안경수·이준용 등과 관련한 사건들이 발생하면서 유형되는 인물들로 적지 않았다. 그런데 1899년 고종이 대한국국제를 선포하고 전제권을 확립한 시기에는 정치적인 유형보다는 황실을 추숭하는데 문제를 일으킨 인사들이 유형에 처해졌다. 주로 왕릉에 투장하거나 화재로 인 한 감독을 소홀히 했을 경우였다. 하지만 러일전쟁 이후 일제의 내정 간섭이 심해지고 더욱이 을사늑약이 체결된 이후 고종의 전 제권력이 쇠락해지면서 유형은 일제에 의해 마음대로 운영되었다. 고종에 의해 유형에 처해진 인 사들을 해배시켜 자기들 세력으로 끌어들이는가 하면, 의병이나 의열활동을 펼친 독립운동가들을 반란죄라는 죄목으로 유형에 처하여 사회로부터 격리시켰다. 유형 제도는 전근대적인 형태의 법이었지만 격동적이었던 한말에 고종의 전제 권력을 강화시키 는데 유용하게 활용되기도 했지만, 반면에 일제가 한국을 통치하는데 악용되기도 했다.

Individual liberty and the importance of the concept of the people

Through publically agreed laws that correspond to a common set of public restrictions, the ‘people as a sovereign body’ serves to protect against violations of individual liberty and despotic power. Where no such common body exists, individuals are deprived of this protection. In such cases, individuals must obey without liberty, while those in power command under a state of license. Neoliberal theorists maintain that any common personality, with its corresponding set of public and arbitrary positive and negative restrictions on liberty, undermines individual liberty. Neoliberal theory only allows for private restrictions on liberty. Against these neoliberal assumptions, we argue that rejecting public restrictions on liberty does not promote individual liberty. To the contrary, it creates conditions in which free individuals become servile and political inequality becomes entrenched, where citizens are divided into those who obey and those who command. Tracing the consequences of neoliberalism, we argue that unless we take seriously both the people as a political category and the right to equal and reciprocal coercion, individual liberty will be at risk. The article argues that neoliberalism ultimately leads to the total exclusion of certain citizens under the veil of full liberty. With the vanishing of the people’s will comes the utter disappearance of certain citizens, who live in a spontaneous society as if they were stateless or lawless persons. To better understand the connections between the rejection of the concept of the people, private restrictions on liberty and the fostering of the servile citizen, this paper considers the political philosophy of Hayek and Nozick. It also considers key ideas from Locke and Kant—theorists who, despite the differences between their philosophical perspectives, and despite the fact that they both provided crucial inspiration for Hayek’s political economy and Nozick’s libertarianism, stressed the protective role of the people with regard to individual liberty.

Eco-Catastrophe, Arithmetic Patriotism and the Thatcherite Promise of Nature

This essay describes how the renovated 1970s liberalism that would become a major thread of Thatcherism grew on the back of public perceptions of crisis, and adapted worries about ecology to worries about ‘financial ecology’, or money supply. The natural conditions of money movement have a particular place in the British constitution as the original basis of authority for the 1688 state, when Newtonian ideas of eternal laws of physics were ‘financialised’ by John Locke. In this thinking, the property basis of citizenship itself is nature, and must be underwired by universal terms of exchange following natural rules. Although Thatcherism has often been described as an alien credo, it was largely enabled by this promise of a return to a financial natural law. In the terms borrowed from Luc Boltanski by William Davies, it returns to a ‘political physics’ which now takes on a moral role preventing catastrophe, or an ‘economic patriotism’ seen to protect the constitution from political force. The 1970s return to Locke’s understanding of nature builds on and repurposes visions of the catastrophic in popular culture, fiction, children’s books and TV, which I describe here. It begins with those eco-catastrophes that describe a ‘disaster of nature’, which it sees as also including the disaster of the property-producing role of labour, in the ‘despotic’ role of trade unions, and the perceived threat to money as a universal measure, a disaster that would increasingly be given an arithmetic measure in inflation. For key liberal or neo-Lockean think-tanks of the mid­1970s, the attack on natural law by despotic power, measured in inflation, could be seen as a mass erosion of individual responsibility, as dystopian, and as always calling for a restoration of the balances of nature. The result is a permanent and quotidian vigilance over threats to nature that sees their solution, paradoxically, as the creation of more property. Understanding this binding between nature and property in the constitution that gave rise to Anglophone capitalist modernity also helps give a fix on the way stories of ecological disaster can, as Frederick Buell has described, themselves be given values and repurposed for increased consumption.

Lacunae in Provision of Arrest: Need for Police Accountability and Reformation

The lacunae in provision of arrest: Need for police accountability and reformation is a case for police accountability regarding despotic power of arrest, primarily concerns itself with the abysmally draconian way in which the Police misuses the power of arresting people, which is bestowed on it by the Criminal Procedure Code. This also extends suggestions to cope up with the discrepancies by reforming the internal and external mechanism of the police system. Irrespective of numerous guidelines which the apex court has provided, and a plethora of reports formulated by the Law Commission, the discrepancies with the law associated to arrests and its accountability exists in the manner which proves detrimental to the subjects as well as the object of the discerned non-partisan law. In this research paper, a case for a more active and responsive police system is made out. Analysis of laws relevant to arrest and the misuse of the same by police officials have been highlighted. Apart from it, the reason for the misuse and the possible methods to deal with such failures and misuse has been suggested. Here the endeavor is to highlight the duty of the police as the protector of rights of people. An attempt has been made to analyze the relevant statutory provisions under the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973 and the unscrupulous usage of those powers and also to give an insight into the role of Courts and need for amendment in legislation. This work investigates into the reasons which are responsible for such discrepancies, and the manner in which the gradual effort has been put to efface it chronologically. This will elucidate a trend in which the law developed and its better implementation. Expansion of the studied area is then extended to make a comparative analysis of the police system of India with Japan, U.K., and Italy to extract a missing point of balance in the laws, functions and its implementation. Further, cognizance is taken about the gap between the framed law and its non-biased implementation and suggestions have been provided which are directed towards the subject and the object of law and could be adopted at the fundamental level. The conclusion sums up the discussion that the need for reforms to implement police accountability is too important to be neglected and too urgent to be delayed.

The power effects of human rights reforms in Turkey: enhanced surveillance and depoliticisation

While the perspective of ‘liberalism of fear’ assumes that human rights limit the despotic power of the state, this paper argues that human rights reforms promoted in the context of institution- and capacity-building programmes have had significant power effects by enhancing the disciplinary capacities of the Turkish state and blunting the transformative potential of rights claiming. The reforms increased state surveillance by rechanneling criminal justice processes towards producing evidence (such as telecommunications data, DNA collection, etc) rather than testimonies. Instead of limiting state power, these reforms enhanced the disciplinary mechanisms of social control. They depoliticised the problem of torture by constructing it as an occupational accident (as opposed to a state crime) that happens because of lack of police officer know-how or resources for the investigation of crime. Finally, reforms revamped the way police investigated crimes, rather than launching campaigns against torture and dismissing past wrongdoers in the police. The paper concludes that the neoliberal emphasis on the technicalisation of political problems has limited the democratic potential of human rights reforms.

Rethinking the “Killing Field” of the Democratic Kampuchea Regime on Nationalism

This study attempts to shed light on the historical meaning of the DK regime from an angle of cultural transmission and adaptation, specifically focused on nationalism. Every culture, either the natural born or the adapted, put down its root in a certain social context. In the context, a certain group of people came to be the leadership of the culture. Based on the leadership’s interpretation of the context the vision of the future is presented, and the society is driven by the vision. The overall post-independent Cambodia has been controlled by the charismatic authoritarian leadership one and another until today. Nationalism has been an important slogan for the leaders to mobilize the people and secure the legitimacy of their despotic power. The Western modern nationalism transplanted to Cambodia under the contexts of vulnerable geographical location, the tradition of absolute rule, the obsession of the glorious past, and dual socioeconomic condition. The nationalistic socialism was chosen as the means of cutting off the past and putting a bridge to the glorious future of the nation state. Nationalism has a certain role in the tragic landmark of Killing Field in the post-independent Cambodian history. So, the notion of cultural transmission and adaptation suggested by Toynbee, “one man’s meat’ can be ‘another man’s poison,” would be applicable to the case of Killing Field under the DK regime.