As his advisors ponder the ever more troubling consequences of regime change in Iraq, Bush is entitled to take some comfort from the far more successful operation just completed in Haiti. [1] No brusque pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping or splintering coalitions have marred the scene; objections from CARICOM and the African Union have carried no threats of reprisal. In overthrowing the constitutionally elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly have provided a more exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies were consulted, the UN Security Council’s blessing sought and immediately received.

By ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective selfdetermination. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom; like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. Recent examples of the sort of popular will that I have in mind include the determination, assembled by South Africa’s United Democratic Front, to overthrow an apartheid based on culture and race, or the mobilization of Haiti’s Lavalas to confront an apartheid based on privilege and class. Conditioned by the specific strategic constraints that structure a particular situation, such mobilizations test the truth expressed in the old cliché, ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’.

“By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and the nexus of Republican politicians, think tanks and land developers started talking about “clean sheets” and exciting opportunities, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering (...) “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”.

“The accident reveals the substance” (Aristotele) – “If so, then the invention of the ‘substance’ is equally the invention of the ‘accident’. The shipwreck is consequently the ‘futurist’ invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station (...) They say invention is merely a way of seeing, of reading accidents as signs and as opportunities. If so, then it is merely high time we opened the museum (...) to that ‘indirect production’ of science and the technosciences constituted by disasters, by industrial or other catastrophes. The repetition of disasters has become a clearly recognizable historical phenomenon - The tool is tending to vanish from consciousness.

The main thrust of my argument is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding "emergency" in terms free from the discourse of sovereignty and its legal implications, in a way that still holds open a certain, limited place for the sovereign decision on the exception. While I am joining here scholars like Ann Stoler who insists on "degrees of sovereignty," or Thomas Aleinikoff who speaks about sovereignty's "semblances", the theoretical context of my argument is different from theirs: it is an attempt to construe a political theory of man-made disasters and use man-made disasters as view point from which it becomes possible, in fact necessary to revise some of political theory's basic concepts.

The Centre for Research Architecture is proud to host a seminar to mark the publication of the book:

The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Edited by Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi,
The book is published by Zone Books, 2009

The seminar, with co-editors and contributors Adi Ophir and Sari Hanafi and chaired by Eyal Weizman will take place on Monday March 1st at Goldsmiths' Research Architecture studio RHB312 (main building, second floor) between 1400-1600.

Cinematic space
This is a five week series of films that were selected due to a research on how cinematic space is constructed and with which means the filmic space relates and correlates with the construction of social space. This selection of films wants to draw attention to architecture‘s performative aspect and the space that is constructed in visual media. „The space that appears in the image (…) is concrete and not abstract or purely mathematical space. And it is (…) to a certain degree,

Following our discussions on The Paradoxes of Aid , bellow you find an interesting article by Hallward that appeared in CounterPunch regarding the militarization of aid in Haiti. We know the theory by heart, AID is increasingly framed as a question of security rather than human rights or relief. Yet it is astonishing to see how this unfolds in real life.

Securing Disaster in Haiti

By PETER HALLWARD

What follows is rather like the famous courtroom scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). [1] In that noir allegory of proletarian virtue in the embrace of ruling-class decadence, Welles plays a leftwing sailor named Michael O’Hara who rolls in the hay with femme fatale Rita Hayworth, and then gets framed for murder. Her husband, Arthur Bannister, the most celebrated criminal lawyer in America, played by Everett Sloane, convinces O’Hara to appoint him as his defence, all the better to ensure his rival’s conviction and execution.

In this text W.Mignolo addresses two interesting questions for the present revitalization of “the commons” in the current debate of the political left. The first one is how the communal provide a political-economical-environmental, and ultimately, philosophical, site for the process of de-colonizing the State which is on the move in the Andes. Secondly, he traces the differences between “the commons” and communal indigenous systems, arguing that only a de-colonized epistemology of the commons - one which is not attached to the western idea of “shared property” - can effectively re-enact the political/spatial strength which actually informs the pluri-national states in the Andes.