Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

PrefaceThe Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures 2001The Nation in Heterogeneous TimePopulations and Political SocietyThe Politics of the GovernedGlobal/Local: Before and After September 11The Great PeaceBattle HymnThe Contradictions of SecularismAre Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois At Last?Bibliography

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The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World

The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migration studies has emerged as an inherently interdisciplinary field, made up of scholars around the world, seeking to describe and analyze these dynamics and invent new methodological tools with which to do so. In this review, we offer a short history of theoretical developments, outlining the different ways in which scholars have defined and approached transnational migration. We then summarize what is known about migrant transnationalism in different arenas—economics, politics, the social, the cultural, and the religious. Finally, we discuss methodological...

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Transnational Migration Studies: Past Developments and Future Trends

MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

What are we to make of the fact that most violence in India rarely has any visible or clear actors? Why is most violence represented as ‘pure events’ without identifiable actors—but as ‘mobs’, as spontaneous combustion, as spontaneous rage that arises from perceived collective grievances and insults? Why in a country saturated in political rhetoric is it that acts of violence have acquired their own semiotic register, a singular form of ‘political communication’? Fire and incidents of arson are at the heart of this naturalization of violence, as events without actors. Fire is not only one of the densest cultural signifiers in India, it also is at the heart of the transgressions, the exceptions, the taboos, the sacrifices, the agency, the sense of communitas that unfold in times of heightened conflict and violent clashes with the state or other communities. Drawing on examples from Mumbai and elsewhere, the paper attempts to theorize and elaborate the nexus between fire, violence and collective sentiments.

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The political theology of violence in contemporary India

As I began fieldwork in Chatsworth, a large, formerly Indian township outside of Durban in South Africa in 1998, I was immediately struck by two features of everyday life there. The first was a pervasive sense of loss and displacement in the face of the new freedoms afforded by the country’s tense but gentle transition to democracy in 1994. While the new era and its new possibilities were celebrated by some, including many well-educated people of Indian origin, the predominant feelings among the ordinary working class Indians in the township, colloquially known as charous [literally “burnt man” in Afrikaans] were those of loss and bewilderment. The oft-repeated saying – “[B]efore we were not white enough, now we are not black enough” – summed up this sentiment.

Melancholia of Freedom: Humour and Nostalgia among Indians in South Africa

India’s celebrated ‘arrival on the global stage’ as a desirable ‘emerging market’ for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limitless future promised by the new. In this special issue, we set our focus on the aesthetics of arrival that signal novelty, visibility and celebration of post-reform India within and outside the nation. We ask how novelty is manufactured and experienced when the majority of the population remains excluded from new India. The answer probably lies in the way in which this other India is signified as the past, as ‘old India’ that holds back the nation. The novelty, we propose, is not only experienced in the promise of the future, but also in the aesthetic force of the promise to overcome a humiliating past, tainted by colonialism, in order to realise a truer and mo...

Aesthetics of arrival: spectacle, capital, novelty in post-reform India

Thomas Blom Hansen argues that the increasing strictures on freedom of speech in India, and the shrinking tolerance for dissenting ideas and opposition to the government since 2014, has deeper roots in how the relationship between the Indian state and the broader public has developed since the 1970s. Hansen focuses on how this relationship has been increasingly governed by two kinds of violence: a) a growth of the Indian state’s repressive capacities and an unchecked development of violent modalities of policing and control that disproportionately affects lower caste communities and religious and ethnic minorities in the country, and b) the increasingly routinized use of public violence – mob violence, destruction of public property, etc. – as a legitimate means of political expression and performance of grievances and anger. Hansen argues that larger groups across India have been mobilized around emotional attachments to their vernacular political communities, their caste and to perceived injustices in the name of popular sovereignty that is understood to exist beyond the state and electoral representation. Today, the limitations of politics, public violence, or the threat thereof, are no longer one of the most legitimate means of political (self) expression in the country.

Thomas Blom Hansen

Papers

The political theology of violence in contemporary India

Melancholia of Freedom: Humour and Nostalgia among Indians in South Africa

Aesthetics of arrival: spectacle, capital, novelty in post-reform India

Democracy Against the Law: Reflections on India’s Illiberal Democracy

Melancholia of Freedom