Crime, Sovereignty, and the State: On the Metaphysics of Global Disorder
This lecture explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves. It argues that, as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business – even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity.
Date: 31 May 2018, 17:00 (Thursday, 6th week, Trinity 2018)
Venue: St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details: Investcorp Lecture Theatre
Speakers: Jean Comaroff (Harvard), John Comaroff (Harvard)
Organising department: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Organisers: David Priestland (St Edmund Hall), Professor Marilyn Booth (Al Saud Professor, Magdalen College), Dr Faisal Devji
Organiser contact email address: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Rethinking the Contemporary: The World since the Cold War
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Maxime Dargaud-Fons