Blogs

When soldiering gets sexy

Regardless of what they say about a man in uniform, it’s clear that some of them have a particular appeal when they’re half naked and preferably holding a gun.

Competing to be public

We know about the proliferating demands on higher education researchers to collaborate, co-produce and publicly engage; we also know these demands exist in tension with unprecedented pressures on researchers to compete.

Public action: making things visible or catching the attention?

I’ve been meaning to write down some thoughts provoked in particular by the workshop on Security and its Publics that I attended in Ottawa back in September, but other things have been in the way – including another workshop on Rethinking the Public, this time in Bloemfontein, which partly confirmed some of these thou

The citizenship predicament of Britain’s military migrants

Should Britain’s serving and former soldiers from Commonwealth countries be granted UK citizenship as a reward for their military service? Their status as foreign nationals within the armed forces means that they embody a stark contradiction between the soldier as hero and the migrant as unwanted scrounger.

Should we be worried about Global Quasi-Constitutionalization? By Grahame Thompson

By Grahame Thompson

Nick Mahony is openDemocracy’s guest editor of the week

Following on CCIG’s Publics Research Programme June 2012 international workshop ‘Creating publics, creating democracies’, OpenDemocracy has just launched a week-long feature called ‘Creating publics, opening democracies’.

Citizenship, Law and Orientalism, by Stephen Scheel

What are the connections between the make-up of contemporary border regimes, their justification through orientalising discourses and the potential of citizenship as a political resource in migrants’ struggles against disenfranchisement and selective exclusion?

Public crises, public futures

We need to develop new understandings of public action, public culture, public space and the public sphere and what impact it has on these when people see themselves as in crisis.

Read the full article on the Open Democracy website

Making a difference? Riotous assemblies and the state of society

Riots dramatise the state of society - and those of the summer of 2011 in England were no exception. All sorts of differences and divisions were projected on to them: were they about the difference between the purely criminal minority and the hard-working law abiding majority (as so many of our politicians insisted)? Were they about the growing gap between the police and young people?

Knowing the other

On 16 January 2012 the Guardian revealed that the new commissioner of the metropolitan police Bernard Hogan-Howe intends to make officers of operation trident the 'spearhead' of a new police campaign against street gangs. The newspaper reported, moreover, that Hogan-Howe 'has solid political backing' for his envisaged war on gangs, because it is entirely in line with the 'security fight-back' David Cameron has called for in his speech on the riots on 15 August 2011. Apart from the fact that precisely those officers will take the lead in the envisaged 'war on gangs', who ran the operation that led to the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last August, which triggered the riots in the first place, this strategy amounts – at least to my mind – to fighting fire with oil. For the 'war on gangs' will for sure implicate an increase in those 'stop-and-search' operations among marginalised youths, which convinced the latter that last August was the right time to 'violate [the police] just like they violate us'.