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2 books match the query 'Samaddar, Ranabir'

cover of Biopolitics from Below: Crisis, Conjuncture, Rupture

Biopolitics from Below

Crisis, Conjuncture, Rupture

Ranabir Samaddar

Central European University Press, 2025

The current social turmoil enveloping the world has produced knee jerk reactions and a plethora of policy declarations. At the same time, the scenario is marked with response of those with low socioeconomic status to the worldwide chaos and precarious living conditions. In this context, how do we make sense of what is being described variously as a breakdown of democracy, its exhaustion, and the new challenges in the form of an alternative politics of life or a phenomenon that we may term as “biopolitics from below”?

The theme of the book is crisis, conjuncture, and rupture. It relates to the question of correlation of social and political forces in the emergence of certain events, presents certain events as illustrations, and takes a historiographical-analytical route to argue why certain things happen in the way they happen. Usually, crisis is the explanatory factor. This book seeks to go deeper and find out why some crises and not all produce unexpected outcomes. Or, as this book puts it differently, the essential gradient of a crisis is the correlation of forces at a particular time - and thus the question of conjuncture. The book seeks to open up to new adventures in thought, imagining new openings, and creating exits from the situation we find ourselves in.

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cover of The Borders of Justice

The Borders of Justice

Etienne Balibar

Temple University Press, 2013

International in scope and featuring a diverse group of contributors, The Borders of Justice investigates the complexities of transitional justice that emerge from its “social embeddedness.” This original and provocative collection of essays, which stem from a collective research program on social justice undertaken by the Calcutta Research Group, confronts the concept and practices of justice. The editors and contributors question the relationship between geography, methodology, and justice—how and why justice is meted out differently in different places.

Expanding on Michael Walzer's idea of the “spheres of justice,” the contributors argue that justice is burdened with our notions of social realities and expectations, in addition to the influence of money, law, and government. Chapters provide close readings of Pascal, Plato and Marx, theories on global justice, the relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism, struggles of social injustice, and how and where we draw the borders of justice.

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