Dr Mahvish Ahmad

This course is available on the MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics and MSc in Political Sociology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement, with priority given to students on the MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics and MSc in Political Sociology. As demand is typically high, this may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

This course investigates lawful violence sanctioned and deployed by modern nation states. We pay particular attention to philosophical legitimations, institutional formations, and circulating techniques of state-sanctioned violence. Through an expansive corpus of intellectual work – including journal articles and books, abolitionist manifestoes, prison writings, anti-militarist films, testimonials from sites of war, and political poetry – we analyse police, prisons, armies, border regimes, surveillance technologies, legalised weaponry, paramilitary outfits, private security, militarised occupation, detention centres and more. The relationship between state violence and racial, colonial, imperial hierarchies; gendered and patriarchal orders; and the management of class, capitalism, and late neoliberalism will structure our conversations throughout the term.

The course begins by conceptualising the relationship between state, law, and violence, paying particular attention to a classic definition of the state as an entity that holds the legitimate monopoly over violence within a defined territory. In this first part of the course, we revisit the philosophical and historical underpinnings that led to the emergence and solidification of the violence-making institutions of the state. This includes a critical interrogation of the figure of the ‘terrorist’, ‘criminal’, ‘traitor’, and others considered legitimate targets of state violence. We also focus on technologies of violence, including prisons, immigrant detention, counterterror confinement, drone warfare, privatised security and surveillance. Finally, we look at grassroots movements including abolitionist, anti-war, anti-racist, and anti-colonial movements in places like Kashmir, the US, Iran, Egypt, Balochistan, South Africa, Hong Kong, Brazil, and elsewhere. Throughout this course, students will gain a solid understanding of state violence–and alternative imaginations of political community and justice that fundamentally refigure the place of violence and its relationship to collective life.

This course is delivered through a combination of short lectures, student interventions on select research projects, and discussion-based seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours in WT. 

The student interventions are an especially key pedagogical tool within this course. All students will present an independent research project via short oral interventions in class on which they will receive detailed feedback from the instructor. This will form the basis of formative and summative assignments (see below).

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy. 

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the WT.

The formative assessment will consist of one 800-word abstract which will form the basis for a summative essay.

• Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law & Order, (Red Globe Press, 2013).
• Walter Benjamin, ‘A Critique of Violence’ in Marcus Bullok and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I (1913-1926) (Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Laleh Khalili. 2012. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford University Press.
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2022. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso Books.
• Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018).
• Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2010).
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.
• Adam Elliot-Cooper, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester University Press, 2021).
• Behrouz Boochani. 2018. No Friend But The Mountain. Picador Australia.
• Alaa Abd el-Fatah. 2021. You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
• Bushra al-Maqtari. 2022, What Have You Left Behind? Fitzcarraldo Editions.
• Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, Deepti Misri. 2022. Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies. Routledge.
• Mirza Waheed. The Collaborator. Penguin Books.
• Darren Byler. 2022. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Duke University Press.
• Neocleous, Mark. 2014. War Power, Police Power. Edinburg University Press.
• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. 2016. Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, Duke University Press
• Schrader, Stuart. 2019. Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press
• Bruce-Jones, Eddie. 2016. Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe. 1st edition. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.
• McCoy, Alfred. 2009. The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Ateneo de Manila University Press.
• Wang, Jackie. 2017. Carceral Capitalism. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series, The MIT Press.
• Paik, A. Naomi. 2020. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century. First edition. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
• Dlamini, Jacob. 2020. The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators and the Security Police. Harvard University Press.
• Guzman, Patricio. 2010. Nostalgia for the Light. Film.
• Maria Mies and Silvia Federici, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (Zed Books, 2014).
• Al-Bulushi, Samar, Sahana Ghosh, and Inderpal Grewal. ‘Security from the South’. Social Text 40, no. 3 (1 September 2022): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9771021.
• Ghosh, Sahana. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands. Univ of California Press, 2023.

Essay (85%, 4000 words) in the ST.
Group presentation (15%) in the WT.

15% will be given for a student intervention. Students will present via a short student intervention delivered verbally in class on a chosen, original research topic that will also form a final, summative essay. This encourages students to take active part in the seminar throughout the Winter Term, discuss their ideas intensely with their presentation group, and gain feedback on original research and ideas from the rest of the class.

85% of the final mark will be given for a 4000-word essay on an original research topic to be prepared in Spring Term. The original research topic will draw from the student presentations and will be based on a formative abstract submitted in Winter Term. This mark ensures that students will develop independent intellectual work in relation to the topics covered in class.

Attendance at all seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.