Speakers on “Panel 2: Power & Persuasion” will be presenting their work from 10:05–11:40am in Allard 122.
Iman Fadaei (PhD, UVic), Middle East, an exception for the state of exception
Whereas a tough look at a stranger can be subjected as violating the privacy and consequently the safety of a citizen inside some of the developed states, one can go from this inside to a specific outside and kill people and come back as a hero to the country! It is not a new phenomenon, but the durability of this can be considered a new one. In fact, the suspension of the law is not just about a short period of fight in the fronts, instead, it has been years that the law is suspended in the Middle East, with regard to what is considered the international. In this article, I am going to discuss how the state of exception has become a normal state in Middle East for some countries, especially the developed ones.
Here, I would show how the sovereignty in namely developed countries are transcending their boundaries far beyond their real physical ones to reach out the places that enable them to project their need for the state of exception to sustain themselves. In this process, two elements are highly significant to take into the account; first the way Foucault described the modern biopolitics in constructing a self and second the conception of boundaries in recognizing a self. The former, helps the sovereignty to articulate what is inside of it and the latter helps them to recognize and be recognizable for the outside. In this regard, if the state of exception as Agamben articulated is where the outside and inside are indistinguishable, this kind of sovereignty is trying to embody the grounds far beyond their owns as the place that is not easily distinguishable as their outside or inside.
Mariam Abdelaziz (BA, UBC), White Violence, Racialized People: White Supremacy and Global War on Terror
Many scholars have written on Orientalism in the Global War on Terror. As frequently stated, Orientalist representations of ‘Middle Eastern’ peoples as barbaric and uncivilized ‘terrorists’ have played a key role in justifying and covering up US interventions in Iraq and other locales. In this paper, however, I argue that the (over-)emphasis on Orientalism has obscured that which girds it: white supremacy. This paper, therefore, explores the role of white supremacy in the invasion of Iraq, arguing that white supremacy was being enacted and reified through American domination of Iraqi land and subjection of Iraqi bodies to myriad forms of violence, which led to enforced immobility, exposure to death, and the profound dehumanization of Iraqis.
My analysis demonstrates that Orientalism can be viewed as a manifestation of white supremacy’s long history of rationalizing violence against racialized others within the United States. Situating white supremacy at the core of the invasion of Iraq, and the Global War on Terror more generally, allows for a better understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is structured by a racial logic that renders racialized bodies disposable. Finally, the paper connects white supremacy in the USA to its foreign policy. This allows for a better understanding of how racialized peoples, both within and outside the USA, are similarly oppressed, therefore providing a common cause that they can unite and organize against.
Ayşe Kabaca (BA, UBC), The Spies Among Us: Effects of Lateral Surveillance on Turkish Civic Culture and Civil Society
Lateral surveillance denotes ordinary citizens acting as informants for the government, spying on political dissenters to collect evidence for the regime to persecute the alleged ‘enemies of the state’. This paper explores how lateral surveillance has become a part of the civic political culture of Turkish society and its effects on communal relationships and political discourse. Through a detailed examination of how the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has mobilized civilian informants during the State of Emergency of 2016 to target dissenters, I portray the effects of lateral surveillance on civil society.
Through looking at how and to what extent ordinary Turkish citizens are conditioned into spying as well as the community repercussions of this trend, I argue that civilian informants act as a threat against the effective dispersion of political knowledge by acting as the government’s eyes and ears in both private and public spaces. More insidiously, I show how the mere presence of a lateral surveillance system can serve to chill dissent and debate, and erode democratic norms. By understanding the causes and ramifications of lateral surveillance, we can begin to explore potential ways of combatting this form of surveillance to improve civic political culture, particularly in countries where illiberal democratic regimes threaten freedom of speech and hence hinder dissent. Through challenging lateral surveillance and by allowing safe spaces for political discourse to happen on a community level, there is potential to have a trickle-down effect to improve civic political culture and reestablish democratic institutions.
Sanad Tabbaa (MA, UBC), Objective Legitimacy and its Nonexistence
What creates legitimacy, and in turn, how does that affect historical memory? This paper examines the creation of legitimacy in two Pan-Arab states; the Untied Arab Republic and the Hashemite Union/Arab Federation, where one tends to be remembered as a tragic Pan-Arab experiment, while the other is either not remembered or discounted as “illegitimate.”
This paper seeks to problematize the distinction of legitimacy through examining the effects mass/state media on perception, opinion, and thus historical memory. This is done through first arguing that according to endogenous Arab Nationalist ideologies, neither state is truly legitimate, then by examining the differences in media portrayals of and by the two states to argue that one succeeded in persuading the public, while the other did not. My analysis largely uses a theoretical framework derived from the works of Anderson, Baudrillard, and Kierkegaard in considering perceptions of state legitimacy, the impact of mass-media projects, and the nature of public consumption of media, respectively.
This paper argues that legitimacy is a construct which can be profoundly affected by state media as both deal with the quality of human opinion and perception. In the case of the United Arab Republic and the Arab Federation, the former presented itself in a fashion which fulfilled an image that aligned with the Arab goals for unification, while the latter failed at that task. Therefore, the former retains a space in historical memory, while the latter is discounted and thus forgotten.