Academic Theory

Author: Bill Rolston

We have moved into a new, post-Cold War era. Military dictatorships are no longer fashionable and many seemingly intractable civil conflicts creep towards solutions. Globalisation means not just the supremacy of the market, but also the spread of a powerful western discourse that there is a much more ‘reasonable’ way of going about politics. There is no doubt that this discourse has allowed for the creation of a space for a global culture of human rights. This has allowed many to take up the unfinished business of past human rights abuses by states on the grounds that impunity, once acceptable, is no longer so.

Author: Sharon Pickering

The experience of researching violence is underpinned by experiences of emotionality. Yet such emotionality is considered at best peripheral to the substance of our research or even our ‘confessional tales’. This paper is interested in the ways emotionality has been so easily ignored in most criminological work and the ways it was impossible to ignore during a study of women, policing and resistance in Northern Ireland. Examining the impact of emotionality on the experience of researching violence offers a way to challenge traditional distinctions between reason and emotion and suggests that there are serious theoretical and epistemological consequences in ignoring the many roles of emotion in our research. In this paper I identify the ways emotionality is central to understanding the experience of researching violence.

Authors: Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith

The central thesis in our book The Coercive State: The Decline of Democracy in Britain was that the contemporary British state falls a long way short of democracy. We argued that it is better characterized as 'coercive'. By this we mean that decisionmaking and administration are exclusive, providing few opportunities for popular participation, and where opportunities do exist, then participation for the majority takes place on highly unequal terms. The workings of the state are shrouded in secrecy so that access to information is at best limited. This paper revisits our earlier arguments.

Author: Tony Bunyan

In cold war times, the ‘West’ espoused liberal democracy and freedom from surveillance and control. It is thus ironic that with the cold war a distant memory – though it only ended less than twenty years ago – the EU and its member states are set on a path which will, in just a few years time, turn it into the most surveilled, monitored region in the world. The wider context for all this is increased state racism (both at the national and EU levels), combined with the emergence of the ‘policing state’, engendered by a political and governmental authoritarianism that legitimises itself through the trappings of representative democracy.

Author: Paddy Hillyard

The Research Assessment Exercise has produced some very unequal results. Lawyers are now three times more likely to be in grade 5 or 5* departments than social policy colleagues. The paper begins with a light–hearted theoretical explanation of these results to make the serious point that an old fashioned notion of power and a simple analysis of the available data can produce important insights into what is happening in the real world – a research paradigm which the RAE has discouraged. The paper then makes a number of criticisms of current theoretical endeavours in sociolegal studies: the confusion over what is meant by theory, its fixation on deconstruction and a Foucauldian notion of power, and the neglect of universal categories. The central argument is that sociolegal studies needs to focus more on the materiality of everyday life and, in particular, the growing inequalities in the world and the role that law and legal institutions play in the structuring of these inequalities. In conclusion, the paper argues that as sociolegal scholars we need to analyse the impact of our decisions on others and to take a stand against unfair and unjust distribution of resources whether at the local, national or international level. We need a vision of a just society which is informed by moral indignation.