India’s migrant crisis: the sovereign injunction that was not

by Ira Raja

In the weeks that followed the announcement of the lockdown, the Government of India, not unlike governments elsewhere, issued several rules and decrees, all purportedly aimed at containing the contagion through non-violent measures or what the Indian PM called ‘the people’s curfew’. But the biopolitical measure of the lockdown, meant to illustrate the mechanism of making (rather than letting) live, was beset from the beginning by a range of contradictions.

Issue 133, April 2016

Politics of Critique and the Critique of Politics Articles: Habermas on the European crisis: Attempting the impossible Volker M. Heins Abstract: Based on a critical reading of Jürgen Habermas’s journalistic writings on the European Union, the article argues that Europe’s current crisis is also a crisis of its narratives, and hence a crisis of meaning. The…

Issue 127, April 2015

Cultural systems, crisis, and entrepreneurship Articles: What is world-systems analysis? Distinguishing theory from perspective Salvatore Babones Abstract: World-systems analysis is a well-established but poorly-defined critical research tradition in the social sciences. Its undisputed progenitor, Immanuel Wallerstein, steadfastly maintains that world-systems analysis is not a theory, yet it is widely referred to as such by commentators,…

Issue 119, December 2013

This issue brings together several essays in different fields of inquiry, from German Idealism to biopolitics. While they may appear to be disparate in their focus, the themes of autonomy, freedom, and identity nevertheless emerge as a common basic problematic. Rundell ventures into the arcane world of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge to plumb its depths…