States of violence : war, capital punishment, and letting die / edited by Austin Sarat, Jennifer L. Culbert.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Sarat, Austin, editor.

Culbert, Jennifer Louise, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political violence.

Capital punishment.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 320 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states. This book calls into question the legitimacy of state uses of violence and mounts a sustained effort at interpretation, sense making, and critique. It suggests that condemning the state's decisions to use lethal force is not a simple matter of abolishing the death penalty or - to take another exemplary example of the killing state - demanding that the state engage only in just (publicly declared and justified) wars, pointing out that even such overt instances of lethal force are more elusive as targets of critique than one might think. Indeed, altering such decisions may do little to change the essential relationship of the state to violence.

Contents:

Introduction: Interpreting the violent state / Austin Sarat and Jennifer L. Culbert

On the forms of state killing

The innocuousness of state lethality in an age of national security / Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Oedipal sovereignty and the war in Iraq / Jeremy Arnold

Sacrifice and sovereignty / Mateo Taussig-Rubbo

Due process and lethal confinement / Colin Dayan

From time to torture : the hellish future of the criminal sentence / Thomas L. Dumm

The child in the broom closet : states of killing and letting die / Elizabeth A. Povinelli

The lethality of the Canadian state's (re)cognition of indigenous peoples / Mark Antaki and Coel Kirkby

Investigating the discourses of death

Death in the first person / Peter Brooks

Open secrets, or the postscript of capital punishment / Ravit Pe'er-Lamo Reichman

Ethical exception : capital punishment in the figure of sovereignty / Adam Thurschwell

No mercy / Adam Sitze.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Feb 2016).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-511-69855-0

1-107-19866-6

0-521-69976-2

1-282-30295-7

9786612302954

0-511-58106-8

0-511-58074-6

0-511-57918-7

0-511-57844-X

0-511-57992-6

OCLC:

609842859