Genocide as Contentious Politics

The State and Contentious Politics:

“I was invited by Isa to his house to have lunch with his mother and siblings. ‘My sisters will love you. You are a good role model for them. I want them to study, like you,” he said to me to convince me to go to the lunch. His father was disappeared by the security forces in 1992 when Isa was 14 years old and his youngest brother was just couple of months old, and his family was forced by the ...

Disability protests: contentious politics, 1970-1999

Rhetoric, Social History, and Contentious Politics: Reply to Critics

Aristotle’s vigorous vindication of rhetoric pairs it with dialectic. Dialectic, for Aristotle, combines logical propositions with induction from rigorous evidence in an effort to prove a case beyond doubt. Rhetoric parallels dialectic, but combines arguments with examples in an effort to persuade. Neither one amounts to science, which for Aristotle requires irrefutable establishment of general...

Excavating the Agile State: Adaptive State Responses to Contentious Politics

Introduction “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you'd generally get to somewhere else if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, I see. It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll’s Al...

Introduction : Disasters as Politics – Politics as Disasters

What is the relationship between politics and disasters and how does this relate to the recent boom in disaster studies? The introduction to this volume argues that the recent interest in disasters is not because there are more disasters, but because of two recent developments within the social sciences: first, a focus on rupture rather than on continuity and second, a focus on materiality. Dis...