"This book provides the reader with a new, challenging, and sophisticated critical analysis of the Song of Roland." --Choice " Haidu's] close reading of the Song of Roland is interesting, informative, and significant... " --American Historical Review "Probably the most sophisticated book ever written on the Song of Roland.... It is at once a work of linguistic analysis, of literary theory, of literary history, and, finally, of history." --R. Howard Bloch Haidu argues that the 12th-century Song of Roland played an essential role in the creation of the nation-state, in that the narrative transforms the independent and violent warriors of the feudal period into the subordinate instruments of the nation-state by enforcing on them the subjection to the rule of monarchy.

This book is an exercise in political theology, exploring the problem of gender- based violence by focusing on violent male subjects and the issue of entitlement. It addresses gender-based violence in familial and military settings before engaging with a wider political context. The chapters draw on sources ranging from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Étienne Balibar to Rowan Williams and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Entitlement is theorized and interpreted as a gender pattern, predisposing subjects towards controlling behaviour and/or violent actions. Steven Ogden develops a theology of transformation, stressing immanence. He examines entitled subjects, predisposed to violence, where transformation requires a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself. The book then reflects on today’s pervasive strongman politics, where political rationalities foster proprietorial thinking and entitlement gender patterns, and how theology is called to develop counter-discourses and counter-practices.

Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women's words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women's practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Alessandra Gribaldo explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. On this basis it advances theoretical reflections on questions of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, and their implications for ethnographic theory. Gribaldo analyzes the dynamics that produce the subjectivity of the victim, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women. Perfect for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, this book will appeal to anthropologists and scholars of law, society, and gender.

This study focuses on conceptual questions that arise when we explore the fundamental aspects of violence. Mark Vorobej teases apart what is meant by the term ‘violence,’ showing that it is a surprisingly complex, unwieldy and highly contested concept. Rather than attempting to develop a fixed definition of violence, Vorobej explores the varied dimensions of the phenomenon of violence and the questions they raise, addressing the criteria of harm, agency, victimhood, instrumentality, and normativity. Vorobej uses this multifaceted understanding of violence to engage with and complicate existing approaches to the essential nature of violence: first, Vorobej explores the liberal tradition that ties violence to the intentional infliction of harm, and that grows out of a concern for protecting individual liberty or autonomy. He goes on to explore a more progressive tradition – one that is usually associated with the political left – that ties violence to the bare occurrence of harm, and that is more concerned with an equitable promotion of human welfare than with the protection of individual liberty. Finally, the book turns to a tradition that operates with a more robust normative characterization of violence as a morally flawed (or forbidden) response to the ontological fact of (human) vulnerability. This nuanced and in-depth study of the nature of violence will be especially relevant to researchers in applied ethics, peace studies and political philosophy.

Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of ‘violence’ itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin’s famous 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers—Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt—grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology.

Provides an original analysis of the routine and spectacular forms of violence deployed by the Asad regime in Syria over the last four decades.

This volume brings together reflections on citizenship, political violence, race, ethnicity and gender, by some of the most critical voices of our times. Detailed and wide-ranging individual reflections, take the writings of prominent Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani as a touchstone for thinking about the world from Africa. Contributors apply this theory to argue that we cannot make sense of the political contentions of difference, identity and citizenship today without understanding the legacies of colonial rule on our world. Chapters examine the persistence of the past, and how we must reckon with its tragedies, its injustices, and its utopias in order to chart a new politics; the politics of possible futures that are more inclusive and more egalitarian, and that can think of difference in more equitable ways. In a time when the call to decolonize knowledge, and politics rings loud and clear, this is both a timely and a crucial intervention.