Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Political prisoners' writings, Iraqi"

In his 2019 critical study, Husayn Sarmak Hassan complained that not enough attention has been given to the production of Iraqi prison writing even after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and its censorship apparatus. He notes, for example, that during the 2017 Cairo book fair, he found thirty (presumably new) prison novels, none of which were written by Iraqis. The relative scarcity of prison novels from Iraq is most certainly not due to lack of content; since the collapse of the old regime, there has been a proliferation of personal accounts, both oral and written, detailing the horrors of Saddam's Ba'th and the extent of the human toll of its wars and oppression. The ensuing documentation projects that emerged out of this mass catharsis aimed to amplify voices that had hitherto been marginalized and silenced, including the experiences of political prisoners. Hassan's study on prison writing, published by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, can be seen in this light: as part of a national effort to process the literary and psychological aspects of the Ba‘th's legacy. However, the author's interest in prison writing also stems from his professional background as a medical doctor and psychiatrist directly involved in the study and treatment of PTSD in military veterans of the Iran–Iraq War. His personal interest in the experiences of Iraqi political prisoners is also made clear by certain paratextual elements in his study; in the acknowledgements, for example, Hassan dedicates his text to a friend who spent twenty years in incarceration as a political prisoner, and to his brother, who he found unrecognizable due to starvation and torture on a visit to a Najaf prison in 1994.

The participation of lawyers as legal advisers to international organizations is reviewed from a historical and political perspective, looking primarily at the United Nations and the League of Nations. An inquiry is made into the “accountability debate” of international organizations and the role that legal advisers play in this regard. The issue of whether lawyers act as technicians or guardians in the international arena is reviewed historically both through academic publications, and through the writings of lawyers who have acted as international legal advisers. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are analyzed with respect to the advice given to states by their international legal advisers.

Abstract The situation of Kurdish prisoners in Iraqi prisoners from 8-2-1963 to 18-11-1963 In the contemporary history of Iraq, the first period of Baa’th party’s era which very significant in the history of the country. After the coup of 8th February 1963, which Iraqi National Guard (Baa’si) obtained power. As a result, Abdul Karem Qasm the first President of the Iraqi Republic (1958-1963), many Iraqi people Kurds were not exempted and who were captured from different cities and rural areas in the whole Iraq, and they were taken to prisons like Arabs or other ethnic and religion groups and Kurdish soldiers (Peshmarga’s) captives from fronts particularly, from 09-06-1963 to 18-11-1963. Those prisoners were accused of being members of Iraqi Communist Party or Kurdistan Democratic Party which were considered as the opposition party of the government. Otherwise, they probably almost did not commit any crime against law and civilians. Therefore, it could be named them political prisoner in the mentioned period. While the Kurdish political prisoners were in Iraqi prisons. Particularly, after 9th Jun, 1963 till 18th November, they were brutally tortured by members of Iraqi militia “National Gourds”, who belonged to Baath’s party. Their brutal actions against Kurdish prisoners such as hitting, boxing, burning, withdrawing nails, and so on. These crimes are unforgettable in the contemporary history of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The paper is a study in the representation of the systematic abuse inflicted by the American Female Soldier (being an image of American militarism) upon the Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail. The American misconducts exercised are based on political and cultural grounds: it is dramatically evident that the American Female Soldier has prejudicially transformed the stage into a battleground, whereon, post colonially, the Iraqi prisoners are viciously addressed by demeaning terms.

This article concerns with the Iraqi prominent sociologist Ali Al-Wardi (1913-1995), as an intellectual occupied a unique position in Iraqi culture in the second half of the twentieth century. In order to comprehend this position, the article describes the Iraqi political and cultural conditions in which al-Wardi's writings emerged and the circumstances of the emergence of sociology as a scientific branch in the Iraqi academy. The article focuses on the role that Al-Wardi attributed to knowledge as a major component and a guide for public policy, and then it evaluates and criticizes his theses and their realistic and scientific efficiency to play this role.

The subject of this research is the images of Siberia conveyed in the travelogues of English and American travelers who visited the Russian Empire at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries. Using the method of imaginal geography, the author attempts to reconstructs the initial representations of foreigners on the region, and their transformation during the visit. Interest towards Siberia among the travelers aroused due to the writings of G. Kennan, who translated image of the land, where political prisoners were exiled to. The authors of travelogues did not hide their desire to see the depicted horrors, although their trip to the region has transformed these perceptions. The conclusion is made on versatility of the image of Siberia in the writings of English and American travelers. The initial representations on the land of exiled were rather clarified; the focus of attention shifted from the political prisoners to the criminogenic situation of the region. However, most travelogues tried to show a “different Siberia”, creating a new image of the resourceful Russian colony, which has yet to fulfill its economic potential and overcome cultural and economic discrepancy with the European “core”. Such shift of tone, from the land of exiled to the land of opportunities positively affected opinion of the society on the Russian authorities.

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectivities in 20th-century Iraqi fiction, and then culls examples of recent diasporic Iraqi novels in which these subjectivities are encoded and amplified in distinct ways. In the diasporic novel, I argue, modern Iraqi intellectuals attain the conceptual and political distance necessary for contending retrospectively with their formative socialization experiences in Iraq. Through a new medium of marginalization—the diasporic experience of the authors themselves—they are equipped with a newfound desire to unmask subcultures in Iraq and to write more effectively about marginal aspects of Iraqi identity inside and outside the country. These new diasporic writings showcase processes of ethnic and religious socialization in the Iraqi public sphere. The result is the deconstruction of mainstream Iraqi identity narratives and the instrumentalization of marginal identities in a nonviolent struggle against sectarian violence.

The Arab world today is encountering a destructive resurgence of sectarianism, which, up to a few years ago, had been confined to books and rhetorical debates. In the first half of the 20th century, Iraqi sociologist Ali Al-Wardi pioneered the critique of sectarianism in the Arab world. Unlike others, he approached the issue from a specific and unique perspective. His observations of Iraqi history were made from a sociological standpoint that aimed at revealing the impact of sectarianism on Iraqi politics. Al-Wardi's writings were carried out to two phases: the first extends from the early 1950s to the early 1960s; and the second covers the period between the publication of his two books, Study on the Nature of Iraqi Society (the year of publication is unknown) and Social Briefs from the Modern History of Iraq (1971). The first phase focused on Islam's heritage and a number of social phenomena; the second focused exclusively on the study of Iraqi society. A number of factors influenced Al-Wardi's personality and thinking, a fact especially evident in the kind of methodology he used, which was new when addressing the sectarian issue. Based on Al-Wardi's research, this paper traces the historical factors and process that affected the historical development of the divisions separating two main sects of Islam – Shi'a and Sunni – resulting in a duel between them, which led to the configuration of Iraqi society along sectarian lines. It elaborates on the methodology used by Al-Wardi in his studies of Iraqi society, as well as his attitude with regard to sectarianism in modern Iraq. It also explores the intellectual and political influences that helped shape his thinking in this domain and its legacy on sociological thought in the Arab world.

The invasion of Kuwait in 1990 resulted in many disastrous effects and negative repercussions on the people and State. It reflected on the Iraqi regime and its people as those effects have been extended to all Arab States and the world at large, where those effects and repercussions have taken on many aspects of political, economic and social. The invasion not only had been effected Kuwait but also broadly in the gulf region. This study aims: firstly to study and analyse the political, economic and social implications as the consequences of the Iraqi invasion over Kuwait; secondly, to elucidate and analyse the effects of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Arab relations; thirdly, to explore on the role of international organizations in addressing the effects of the invasion. The result shows that the invasion has brought to a disastrous schism in the unity of the Arab states and put them left behind in the international stage, and the opening of the area to the Western military presence in the Gulf. The economic loss suffered by the Arab Group reached approximately $1 trillion. The social and psychological effects on society and the individual in Kuwait required long years to be addressed. The international organizations have played a prominent role particularly on recording the file of the prisoners and missing persons, and the compensation is also given to them.DOI: 10.15408/insaniyat.v2i2.7607

AbstractThis article argues that Bernard Mandeville's ideas were more likely to have influenced Jeremy Bentham's writings than previously believed. The conventional interpretation of Mandeville as a forerunner of the Hayekian “theory of spontaneous order” has obscured Mandeville and Bentham's shared emphasis on legal and interventionist solutions for the issues of prostitution and prisoners. This influence is evinced by focusing on some of Mandeville's minor works, which anticipated some of Bentham's arguments. It is unlikely that Bentham directly knew of Mandeville's minor works, but his reformist and interventionist bent was consistent and discernible in the Fable, which Jeremy Bentham read in his youth.

Abstract The function of uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory) within classical Islamic law has been the object of protracted debate. Based on the writings of Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d.476/1083), I propose that uṣūl al-fiqh served two pedagogical purposes within the Iraqi legal community of the 4th/10th and 5th/11th centuries: first, to avoid taqlīd, defined as the subscription to a position without evidence; and second, to provide jurists with tools to assess the validity of a proof when they were confused about its merits. My analysis sheds light on uṣūl al-fiqh’s role in providing epistemological foundations for juristic reasoning. It also reveals that practical engagement on disputed legal matters (masāʾil al-khilāf) prevailed over uṣūl al-fiqh in the training of jurists. The consequence: uṣūl al-fiqh was a methodology of last resort.

Abstract This paper investigates the writing of A.B. Magil, a journalist for the Communist Party of the USA. In Palestine in 1948, he witnessed the birth of the State of Israel and, correspondingly, the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis. Magil had unfettered access to Jewish military commanders who later joined Israel’s political elite, but also to Palestinian prisoners of war and Communist politicians. He reported from recently ethnically cleansed towns and villages without seeming to recognise the enormity of what had taken place. A close study of Magil’s coverage throw into relief subsequent shifts in the Western left’s understandings of imperialism, (settler-)colonialism and resistance. After returning to the US, he continued his commentary on the Middle East, his later writings revealing how leftist sympathies for Israel were tested throughout the 1950s, including by the Suez Crisis, though without a re-evaluation of the circumstances of Israel’s creation.

Extending the burgeoning body of work on the penal tourism industry, this project investigates how slavery is forgotten and remembered at a US plantation prison. Through a case study of Angola, I explore if and how the prison’s plantation history is acknowledged at the prison rodeo and arts and crafts festival, commemorated in museum exhibits, and discussed in prisoner writings. My analysis reveals the contested nature of Angola’s history and the place of slavery (and racial inequality more generally) in it. In an act of racial violence, the administration tells a story of progress that disregards slavery along with its parallels to the present. On the other hand, some prisoners resist this narrative and evoke memories of slavery in protest of their current circumstances. I conclude with a discussion of what this struggle over Angola’s, and the nation’s, history might mean for the prospect of penal reform.

This article critically questions the popular idea of hope as a motivating emotion as well as the more specific idea of hope as engendering solidary ties. Both notions can be found in social movement research and will be introduced in the first section. The idea that hope is such an activating force that binds people together is challenged by reports of some survivors of Nazi concentration camps. In the second part I will turn to a selection from the writings of Tadeusz Borowski and Ruth Klüger, both of whom survived Auschwitz. They emphasize that it was (besides other factors) the prisoners’ hope that isolated them from each other and which prevented them from undertaking acts of resistance against their tormentors. In the third and main section a close reading of Friedrich Torberg's novel Vengeance is Mine will help to identify particular features of such numbing forms of hope. Although fictitious, this novel broadens our understanding of hope by revealing two social dynamics encouraging hopes that have isolating effects and that induce passivity. I will close with reflections on how these negative accounts of hope can be integrated into a general conception of hope. I suggest differentiating between two meanings of hope: the one refers to ideas of a better future, the other one to the ways by which such futures may be achieved. It is useful to distinguish these two meanings analytically in order to understand the empirically different forms of hope.

The paper deals with the life story of Dr. Djura Djurovic (1900-1983), one of key targets of Yugoslav communist totalitarianism. He was a Belgrade lawyer who worked in the Administration of the City of Belgrade before WWII. In 1943 he joined the Yugoslav Home Army (YHA) of General Mihailovic, and held high positions in the YHA press and propaganda departments. His duties included running the Radio-telegraphic agency Democratic Yugoslavia. He accompanied General Mihailovic on his meetings with OSS Colonel McDowell, and with Captain Rakovic he established successful cooperation with Red Army units in October 1944. He was arrested by Tito?s partisans in 1945, given a show-trial and sentenced to twenty years in prison. In his writings he described horrible conditions, sufferings and various types of torture used against political prisoners in Yugoslav communist prisons. He himself spent more than two years in solitary confinement, and on several occasions nearly died in prison. He was released in 1962, and was able to establish a circle of former political convicts from the ranks of the YHA and other anticommunists in Belgrade and Serbia. He maintained this network, advocated pro-American policies and hoped that at some point the United States might intervene against communism in Yugoslavia. Gradually he came to the conclusion that Tito was an American ally, and was satisfied to maintain his network of likeminded anticommunists and prepare reports on the situation in Yugoslavia. As a pre-war freemason, he sent one such report to Luther Smith, Grand Commander of AAFM of Southern Jurisdiction of American masons, describing the ghastly conditions in Yugoslav communist prisons. He was rearrested in 1973 on account of his relations with a Serbian ?migr? in Paris, Andra Loncaric, and spent another four years in prison. Thus, the almost twenty-one years he spent in communist prisons qualify him for the top of the list of political prisoners in Yugoslav communism. In 1962-1973 he was spied on by a network of in?formers and operatives of the Yugoslav secret service. The paper is based on Djurovic?s personal files preserved in the penitentiaries in Sremska Mitrovica and Zabela, and his personal file from the archive of the Yugoslav secret service (UDBA/SDB). This is the first paper based on personal files of ?political enemies? compiled by the Yugoslav communist secret service, disclosing the latter?s activities and methods against anti?communist circles in Belgrade.

The article sheds light on the experience of being an inorodets (a non-Russian, non-Christian subjects of the Russian Empire) in the imperial penitentiary system. The Tatar intellectual elite of the early 20th century pondered over the “prison experience” of this period in a number of texts, and the most significant of them are ego-documents written by a new generation of the Tatar elite that reflect new trends in the public discourse of the Muslim community of late imperial Russia. The present publication is based on the texts of private origin (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries) of a number of Muslim prisoners who had a difficult relationship with the authorities as well as with the officially recognized Muslim clergy. The article analyzes three works representing different views of Muslim authors on their prison experience. The prison reality at the turn of the 1870-1880s is depicted in the autobiography of Gabdrashid Ibragimov, who described it from the position of a young Muslim believer. He experienced feelings of shame during in time imprisoned; and at the same he realized that the prison had become for him a “school of life.” The other two writings are the famous work “Prison [Tiur’ma]” by Gaiaz Iskhaqyi and “Prison Reminiscences [Tiuremnye vospominaniia]” by Iusuf Akchura. They were published in 1907 and describe the prison experience of a Muslim in a Tsarist prison from an alternative perspective. We see that the emerging Tatar intellectual circle was quite seriously incorporated into the political context of the late Russian Empire. Therefore, religious aspects of prison reality occupy a rather modest place in the works of the Tatar political activists, and the personal experience of religious feelings is marginal. This corresponds to the circumstance that personal religious experience did not dominate the general worldview of the authors. At the same time the description of prison experience in the form of a more or less developed literary work reflected the level of the various authors’ “personality as well as cognitive and human maturity.”

The Arab woman not only has contributed to the changing of the contemporary Arab literature but also has used her pen in times of wars and conflicts as a kind of resistance. Nawal Saadawi says: “does anything more than danger stimulate our creativity? And does anything threaten our creativity more than danger?” (N. Saadawi, 1996:157). In her article “Mapping Peace”, the literary critic Miriam Cooke claims that women have a stake in interpreting their war experiences. In fact, writing during war time is an experience that is part of war itself, an experience that informs the socio-political roles that precede it. The Lebanese, the Palestinian, and most recently the Iraqi women writers are vivid, genuine representatives of what a woman can create during times of war, how she can re-shape her experience of war and which portrait she can give to this experience. Hanane Sheikh, Sahar Khalifah, Mai Ghoussoub and Huda Barakat’s writings are instances of the Arab woman’s creativity in moments of conflicts, of wars and of danger. Women’s war literature allows the intolerable to be written because women do not take part in wars with arms but rather with their pens, their voices and their intellects. In fact, women writers subvert time, space and thus history to create their own world and their own records. This trend of Arab literature is viewed as an authoritative tool against the violence of war and as a passive resistance. It is also authoritative in terms of representing space and time as reshaped by wars. Contemporary Arab women writers have shown a big interest of creativity in writing novels, poems and short stories that lucidly portray the transformations war brings, and they have also shown a genuine capacity of subverting moments of war and transforming war time into moments of creation and metamorphosis. The present paper unveils Arab women writers’ genuine ability in creating a narrative space and a narrative time that is proper to moments of wars through their literary writings. Huda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter is going to be our corpus as it represents a vivid depiction of the Lebanese Civil War, and “the best novel written about the Lebanese civil war.”

With the 1990s, after the communist regime collapsed in Romania, the reading public could see the rapidly increasing publication of poetry composed by former prisoners of conscience. Still, to this day, such works have remained a somewhat peripheral concern of literary critics and the society alike. These writings, nevertheless, have a lot to offer in terms of meanings, beyond the aesthetic plane, in gaining further insight into the human condition and creativity amid traumatic circumstances. One may find studies about Romanian prison poetry, on the one hand, describing the abusive political power as well as victims’ resistance to it and, on the other, identifying elements of collective memories transmitted through literary discourse. However, the unique ways in which these texts have been able to help their authors maintain their moral values and identity have not undergone a thorough exploration. This article aims to offer a glimpse into this very issue and emphasise its relevance to literary, memory and trauma studies. This brief analysis hermeneutically approaches the poetry created by Bishop Ioan Ploscaru during his ideologicallymotivated incarceration. More specifically, it focuses on how, amid the dynamics between the poetic act and the prisoner’s mental state, his “rhymed reflections” gain the qualities of a ‘memory sanctuary’. This notion derives from that of symbolic “sites of memory” and relates to processes of remembering, contemplating and seeking protection. In their original, unwritten state, Ioan Ploscaru’s poems - later featured in the volume Cruci de gratii (Crosses of Prison Grates) - evoke an inner space of representation, where detention experiences get invested with new meanings. In the circumstances of life-threatening abuses, these verses illustrate how the mental (re)composing of personal poems works towards achieving the survival of conscience.

This article explores the contribution to the development of international law science by the outstanding German philosopher and economist Ludwig Kondratievich Jacob (Ludwig Heinrich von Jacob) (1759–1827), who for some time worked as a professor of diplomacy and political economy at Kharkiv University. L. Jacob's contribution to the development of the science of international law is not limited to reading lectures on positive international law, which was taught at the Department of Diplomacy and Political Economy in the first decades of Kharkiv University. L. K. Jacob prepared and published a series of textbooks on logic, grammar, psychology, aesthetics, rhetoric, political economy and law under the general title «Philosophy Course for High Schools of the Russian Empire», the seventh part of which was devoted to the problems of natural law, including international law. International Law Jacob interpreted it as part of natural law, which determines relations between independent states. Among the fundamental rights of the nation he distinguishes: 1) the right to independence, which includes the right to take possession of things that did not belong to anyone (it is clear that the author here justifies the right to take over the so-called res nullius, which was widely used in international law at the time, 2) the right to independence from any other nation; 3) the right to formal equality with any other nation. Considerable attention in his textbook L. K. Jakob attributes the right to international treaties, though he sees no distinction between treaties that nation conclude with other nations and with foreign individuals. Some emphasis is also placed on diplomatic law in the textbook. In the work of L. К. Jakob quite comprehensive doctrine of the right to war, which, again, is quite typical for proponents of natural law in the science of international law, is based on the identification of relations between independent nations (states) with relations between individuals in the natural state. His international legal doctrine is literally imbued with the ideas of the humanization of war – he strongly opposes treachery and the use of such means of war, which cause the enemy extreme pain, requires respect for the rights of prisoners of war.On the last pages of his textbook L. K. Jacob is installing an application in which he proposes the idea of uniting the independent states into a confederation, provided that each of them maintains complete independence in their internal affairs. In this project it is easy to see the impact of the ideas of the treatise «To Eternal Peace» by I. Kant, a consistent follower of the philosophical doctrine of which L. K. Jacob performed in his philosophical writings.

This article examines the writings of the emigré Iraqi-Kurdish poet Buland al-Haydari (1926-1996) and thus explores components of his identity as reflected in themes and motifs of his poetry, in light of the fact that Iraqis belong to a variety of ethnicities, religions and sects. This article will also address the question of whether the poet's self-perception was transformed from a complex hybrid identity with Muslim, Christian, and other influences but excluding Kurdish elements, to a "new" Kurdish identity, as an outcome of the Iraqi chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. The assumption is that although the Halabja incident was the point at which the poet began to relate to his Kurdish origins, he was still loyal to Baghdad, to Iraq and to Arab culture, rather than solely emphasising his Kurdish identity. The article will examine the thematic and aesthetic effects of the tragedy in Halabja on al-Haydari's poetry in Arabic, focusing on different forms of identity as reflected in the poetry of this political activist. Gelo Helebçe xala werçerxê bû bo helbestvan Bulend el-Heyderî?Ev gotar vekolînek e li ser nivîsên helbestvan Buland el-Heyderî (1926-1996) ku koçberekî ji Kurdên Iraqê bû. Ji ber hindê, ev gotar hêmanên nasnameya wî, yên ku di babet û motîvên helbestên wî da rengvedane, derdihîne li gel hayjêhebûna ku Iraqî xwedî nasnameyên têvel yên etnîkî, dînî û mezhebî ne. Herwisan, ev gotar dê hewl bide ku pirsekê jî bibersivîne: Gelo wekî encama êrîşa Iraqê ya kîmyayî li ser bajarê Helebçeyê di 1988ê da, xwebîniya vî helbestvanî ji nasnameya wî ya durehî ya têkel -wekî Misilmanî, Mesîhîtî û bandorên din, ji bilî hêmanên Kurdîtiyê- ber bi nasnameyeka Kurdî ya nû ve daguheriye? Pêşbînî ev e ku herçend helbestvan vegeriyaye ser rehên xwe yên Kurdîtiyê, ew pirtir maye dilsozê Bexda, Iraq û çanda Ereban, ji dêlva ku tenê pûte bi nasnameya xwe ya Kurdîtiyê bide. Ev gotar dê bandora tematîk û estetîk ya trajediya Helebçeyê li ser helbestên Haydarî yên bi Erebî vekole bi baldariyeka li ser şêweyên têvel ên nasnameyê ku rengvedane di helbestên vî aktîvîstê siyasî da. ئایا هەڵەبجە خاڵی وەرچەرخان بوو بۆ بوڵەند ئەلحەیدەریی شاعیر؟ئەم گوتارە لە نووسینەکانی شاعیری عیراقی- کوردیی کۆچبەر بوڵەند ئەلحەیدەری (١٩٢٦-١٩٩٦) ورد دەبێتەوە و بەو شێوەیەیش بەشە پێکهێنەکانی ناسنامەی وی، وەک لە بابەت و موتیفەکانی شیعرەکانیدا ڕەنگیان داوەتەوە، دەردەخات، لەبەر ڕووناکیی ئەو ڕاستییەدا کە عیراقییەکان سەر بە ئێتنیک و ئایین و کۆمەڵی جۆراوجۆرن. ئەم وتارە ڕووبەڕووی ئەو پرسیارەیش دەبێتەوە کە ئایا خۆناسینی شاعیر ئەو شێوەگۆڕییەی بەسەردا هاتووە لە ناسنامەیەکی تێکەڵاوی ئاڵۆزکاوەوە کە کارکردی موسڵمان، مەسیحی و شتی دیکەی لەسەر بووە ، بەڵام کوردی تێدا نەبووە، ببێتە ناسنامەیەکی ''نوێ''ی کوردی، وەک ئەنجامێکی ئەوەی کە عیراق شاری کوردیی هەڵەبجەی لە ١٩٨٨دا گازباران کرد؟ وا دادەنرێت کە ئەگەرچی ڕووداوەکەی هەڵەبجە ئەو نوختەیە بوو کە شاعیر لێیەوە دەستی پێ کرد بگەڕێتەوە بۆ ڕەگوڕیشەی کوردانەی خۆی، بەڵام هێشتایش هەر دڵسۆز بوو بۆ بەغدا، بۆ عیراق و بۆ فەرهەنگی عەرەب، نەک ئەوەی تەنیا ناسنامەی کوردانەی خۆی جەخت بکات. وتارەکە لە کارکردی بابەت و ئێستێتیکیی کارەساتەکەی هەڵەبجە لەسەر شیعری عەرەبیی ئەلحەیدەری ورد دەبێتەوە و پێ لەسەر شێوەی جیاوازی ناسنامە دادەگرێت وەک لە شیعری ئەم چالاکە سیاسییەدا ڕەنگی داوەتەوە.

The participation of lawyers as legal advisers to international organizations is reviewed from a historical and political perspective, looking primarily at the United Nations and the League of Nations. An inquiry is made into the “accountability debate” of international organizations and the role that legal advisers play in this regard. The issue of whether lawyers act as technicians or guardians in the international arena is reviewed historically both through academic publications, and through the writings of lawyers who have acted as international legal advisers. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are analyzed with respect to the advice given to states by their international legal advisers.

ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga, accompanied by Mr. Angelo Gnaedinger, the Delegate General for the Middle East, was in the Middle East from 3 to 7 September 1990 for high-level talks with the Jordanian, Iraqi and Iranian authorities concerning the Gulf crisis. To quote President Sommaruga, the purpose of this mission was to achieve a “comprehensive humanitarian mobilization”. The mission itself was in keeping with the ICRC's mandate to act in the event of international armed conflict on the basis of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the institution's statutory right of initiative. It had four main objectives:• to provide protection and assistance, in both Iraq and Kuwait, to the various categories of civilians affected by the events;• to improve co-ordination and step up the ICRC's operation in Jordan in behalf of foreigners transiting through the country;• to examine possibilities of assisting foreign nationals crossing other borders (particularly into Iran);• to review the current situation with regard to the repatriation of Iraqi and Iranian prisoners of war.

The donkey is a mammal animal which has been mentioned in the Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform writings. The ancient Iraqi people used donkeys for riding and carrying heavy loads, as well as in agriculture and plowing. The positive characteristics of the donkey made it domesticated and used widely by most families who used to possess at least one or more donkeys.The donkey was probably domesticated long before the horse and was descended from the wild ass called the onager. The domesticated donkey appeared in artistic forms for the first time in the Ubaid era, where clay samples representing a donkey were found and donkey representations were widely seen on cylinderic seals during the Uruk and Jemdat Nasr eras.

AbstractRadicalization to terrorism is a multifaceted process with no single theory or approach to explain it. Although research has focused on understanding the process, there is still a dearth of studies that examine an empirically driven pathway to terrorism behavior. This study examines a cross‐sectional sample of incarcerated men convicted of terrorism in Iraq (N = 160). A questionnaire‐guided interview included adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), conduct disorder (CD), antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), religious and political ideology, views about causes of terrorism, and the severity of terrorist acts. Path analysis was employed to examine the relationships between these factors and to identify the model with the best fit. After adjusting for age, employment, and location, results indicated that ACEs positively impacted CD, ASPD, religious guidance, and terrorism attitudes. ASPD positively affected political commitment and terrorism attitudes, but inversely affected current religious commitment. Political commitment inversely influenced terrorism attitudes. Religious commitment positively influenced the prioritization of religion in life, which subsequently impacted terrorism attitudes and behavior severity. Additionally, attitudes toward terrorism directly affected the severity of terrorism behavior. All paths in the final model were statistically significant at p < 0.05. Although these findings may be limited in generalizability due to the unique sample, results support the complex and interdependent nature of childhood and adult experiences on the development of both terrorism attitudes and the severity of terrorism behavior.

The research deals with the transitional period in Iraq and the changes that lead to a democratic country governed by the right standards. People should obtain their rights and freedom which are provided in the 2005 effective constitution. The foundation of supporting bodies was one of the results of such changes. The Supreme Criminal Court, the Property Dispute Body, Political Prisoners Body, and the National Reconciliation Committee were examples of those establishments. The National Reconciliation Committee is one of non-judicial transitional justice whose job is achieving reconciliation among the different sects of Iraqi people in addition to the political blocs. The Committee had a role in achieving the aim according to the authority it had been granted. So, national reconciliation is one of non-judicial procedures that contributed in the transitional period in Iraq in addition to other procedures which aim at establishments' reform, achieving justice, and human rights reinforcement after a set of changes and disputes. All the aforementioned should lead to ensuring compensation of the previous regime victims, reinforcement of recovery, founding an independent body to monitor security.

Abstract This article explores the turn to human rights of Tunisian Maoist activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of these Tunisians later became human rights activists. I argue against prevailing views that ideological changes toward human rights in the late 1970s were the result of paradigmatic ideological shifts or the demise of socialist, anti-imperialist thinking, or an outcome of international human rights norm diffusion. Doubt or loss of faith in some or all parts of Marxism-Leninism led to a diversity of ideological transformations that were complex and hybrid. Drawing on interviews with former Tunisian Maoists, as well as on their writings, the article outlines the political and ideological environment in which they operated. It describes their solidarity work for political prisoners and explores their encounter with Amnesty International as well as the Tunisian League for Human Rights in its first years of existence, showcasing how multiple approaches to human rights existed among the activists.

Abstract This article revisits the origins of Khomeini’s concept of the guardianship of the jurisconsult (wilāyat al-faqīh) and argues that his own formulation of this concept needs to be embedded in debates around the clerical mandate in the state among clerical activists in Iraq he encountered during his exile. Focus will be on the so-called Shīrāzī network around the brothers Muḥammad (1928-2001), Ḥasan (1927-80) and Ṣādiq al-Shīrāzī (b. 1942) and their nephew Muḥammad Taqī al-Mudarrisī (b. 1945) The article discusses the close relationship between Khomeini and Muḥammad al-Shīrāzī and the important role the religio-political networks associated with the Shīrāzī brothers played in early post-revolutionary Iran. A detailed discussion of the writings of the Shīrāzī brothers and Taqī al-Mudarrisī, written between 1960 and 1970, is undertaken to illustrate that debates around wilāyat al-faqīh among Iraqi clerical activists preceded Khomeini’s own lectures on the concept in Najaf in 1970.

Following the revelations about what had been going on in Iraqi prisons, run by American and British troops, there has been universal and justified condemnation. Moral philosophers will hardly need in the future to invent arguments against the utilitarian justification of torture or to look for examples of inuria in bello.Amid all the furore, one small but possibly significant phenomenon has been a steady procession of erstwhile supporters of the war, now seeking to distance themselves from the whole operation. Some are now saying that they had been wrong to support it in the first place.This may indeed be the case. They might indeed have been wrong all along, for a whole variety of reasons, moral and practical. What, though, would be unfortunate would be if the misconduct of one operation meant that the whole question of wars of humanitarian intervention were to disappear from the philosophical and political agenda. Apart from anything else it would seem to blur any distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello.But more important, we still have to consider whether it might ever be morally imperative to invade another country to protect its people, and if so when. Such a consideration may never have been part of the traditional just war doctrine. But that doctrine was formulated in times very different from our own, times when neither communications nor state nor military power were anything like they are to-day.To put the matter bluntly: should we in the West be ashamed that we did little or nothing in Rwanda in the 1990s, say, even though Western interests were hardly affected by what was going on? We knew well what was going on, and we did nothing as hundreds of thousands were butchered. Would it be right or wrong for a coalition of states (any coalition) to intervene were such a situation to happen again? Or would the high probability that at least some of those the invaders thought they were liberating would come quickly to resent their ‘liberation’ be sufficient to rule out action of the part of those not directly affected?The sad truth is that we cannot rule out a situation like Rwanda arising again in various parts of the world. Sudan may be on the verge of such a catastrophe even at the time of writing. We need to be prepared philosophically as well as practically.

n July 1989, together with my husband David Hunter, I arrived in Cape Town to undertake masters’ studies in the School of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town. The programme was recommended to us by John de Gruchy whom we had met while students at an international Baptist seminary in Switzerland. The opportunity to live and study in South Africa at such a momentous time in its history was a great privilege, and an experience that significantly shaped our theological reflection and practice. We were able to participate in “the Struggle” in small ways: by attending protest rallies, funerals and prayer services; visiting prisoners on Robben Island and welcoming some upon their release; joining in Baptist Fellowship groups; and being present in the crowd welcoming Nelson Mandela in his first public appearance following his release (a notable highlight amongst my life’s experiences). We had deeply appreciated our studies, instructors and fellow students in the Baptist Seminary from which we had come to South Africa but studying in Switzerland had been a somewhat “ivory tower” experience, with very little interaction between our studies and the political and social context in our host country. Living and studying in Cape Town was an entirely different experience. There the context shaped both life and learning, and our lecturers and fellow students were exemplary models for theology engaging with the concerns of the day. We arrived not long after the release of the Kairos Document and were challenged by its expressed prophetic theology, where we found resonances with our own Australian context with its inherent disadvantage amongst its indigenous population. John de Gruchy’s writings on Bonhoeffer and the Anabaptist tradition were of particular interest for us as Baptist students and subsequently pastors. While in Cape Town we were involved with the Rondebosch Uniting Church where the De Gruchy family were members and we lived in a house belonging to John and Isobel. Although we only resided in Cape Town for 18 months, it was a time that made a huge impact on us, and the theological perspective embraced there continued to influence our life and work back in Australia in churches and theological institutions. In recent years I have shared another experience with John de Gruchy – that of grieving a loved one. Aside from the birth of our three sons, David’s death due to cancer in 2003 has been the event that has had the largest impact on my life. As so eloquently expressed in Led into Mystery, when one grieves the loss of a loved one, “the intellectual and existential dimensions of being human [are] brought together … in a new way.”1 Undoubtedly, sudden accidental death and slow deterioration due to disease affect those involved in different ways, yet there are universal dimensions to the death of a partner or close relative that create a sympathetic solidarity between those who have grieved such a loss. Moreover, watching someone one loves “struggle for the fullness of life” as they face the challenge of certain death gives a new dimension to the concept of “Humanity Fully Alive.” In the years that David lived with cancer he was also working on a PhD thesis entitled “Signs of Life” – a study of the sign narratives in the Gospel of John via the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. The title is indicative of his desire to find resources within the Scriptures for “living life well,” even when life was threatened by illness. My academic work has been focused on the Old Testament, so I have naturally turned to its pages to seek offerings from the intellect of our spiritual forebears in the light of my existential experience. As I have explored the various genres and perspectives offered by Old Testament writers another sentence from Led into Mystery has been the impetus for further reflection: “not everyone ‘owns grief’ in the same way.”2 It occurs to me that Old Testament responses to tragedy are examples of contextual theology at work, where each discrete theological perspective is a response to its own unique context.

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

Introduction Nun habe ich Euch genug geschrieben, diesen Brief wenn sei [sic] lesen würden, dann würde ich den Genickschuß bekommen.Now I have written you enough, this letter if they would read it, I would get the neck shot. (M., all translations from German sources and quotations by the author) When the German soldier Otto M. wrote these lines from Russia to his family on 3 September 1943 during the Second World War, he knew that his war letter would not be subject to the National Socialist censorship apparatus. The letter contains, inter alia, detailed information about the course of the war on the front, troop locations, and warnings about the Nazi regime. M., as he wrote in the letter, smuggled it past the censorship via a “comrade”. As a German soldier, M. was a member of the Volksgemeinschaft—a National Socialist concept that drew a “racist and anti-Semitic borderline” (Wildt 48)—and was thus not socially excluded due to his status. Nevertheless, in the sentence quoted above, M. anticipates possible future consequences of his deviant actions, which would be carried out by “them”—potentially leading to his violent death. This article investigates how social and societal exclusion is brought forth by everyday media practices such as writing letters. After an introduction to the thesis under discussion, I will briefly outline the linguistic research on National Socialism that underlies the approach presented. In the second section, the key concepts of agency and dispositif applied in this work are discussed. This is followed by two sections in which infrastructural and interactional practices of exclusion are analysed. The article closes with some concluding remarks. During the Second World War, Wehrmacht soldiers and their relatives could not write and receive letters that were not potentially subject to controls. Therefore, the blunt openness with which M. anticipated the brutal sanctions of behavioural deviations in the correspondence quoted above was an exception in the everyday practice of war letter communication. This article will thus pursue the following thesis: private communication in war letters was subject to specific discourse conditions under National Socialism, and this brought forth excluding agency, which has two intertwined readings. Firstly, “excluding” is to be understood as an attribute of “agency” in the sense of an acting entity that either is included and potentially excludes or is excluded due to its ascribed agency. For example, German soldiers who actively participated in patriotic service were included in the Volksgemeinschaft. By contrast, Jews or Communists, to name but a few groups that, from the perspective of racist Nazi ideology, did not contribute to the community, were excluded from it. Such excluding agencies are based on specific practices of dispositional arrangement, which I refer to as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Secondly, excluding agency describes a linguistic practice that developed under National Socialism and has an equally stabilising effect on it. Excluding agency means that agents, and hence protagonists, are excluded by means of linguistic mitigation and omission. This second reading emphasises practices of linguistic construction of agency in interaction, which is described as interactional exclusion of agency. In either sense, exclusion is inextricably tied to the notion of agency, which is illustrated in this article by using data from field post letters of the Second World War. Social exclusion, along with its most extreme manifestations under fascism, is both legitimised and carried out predominantly through discursive practices. This includes for the public domain, on the one hand, executive language use such as in laws, decrees, orders, court hearings, and verdicts, and on the other hand, texts such as ideological writings, speeches, radio addresses, folk literature, etc. Linguistic research on National Socialism and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion has long focussed on the power of a regulated public use of language that seemed to be shaped by a few protagonists, most notably Hitler and Goebbels (Schlosser; Scholl). More recent works, however, are increasingly devoted to the differentiation of heterogeneous communities of practice, which were primarily established through discursive practices and are manifested accordingly in texts of that time (Horan, Practice). Contrary to a justifiably criticised “exculpation of the speakers” (Sauer 975) by linguistic research, which focusses on language but not on situated, interactional language use, such a perspective is increasingly interested in “discourse in National Socialism, with a particular emphasis on language use in context as a shared, communicative phenomenon” (Horan, Letter 45). To understand the phenomenon of social and societal exclusion, which was constitutive for National Socialism, it is also necessary to analyse those discursive practices of inclusion and exclusion through which the speakers co-constitute everyday life. I will do this by relating the discourse conditions, based on Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Confessions 194), to the agency of the correspondents of war letters, i.e. field post letters. On Agency and Dispositif Agency and dispositif are key concepts for the analysis of social exclusion, because they can be applied to analyse the situated practices of exclusion both in terms of the different capacities for action of various agents, i.e. acting entities, and the inevitably asymmetrical arrangement within which actions are performed. Let me first, very briefly, outline some linguistic conceptions of agency. While Ahearn states that “agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (28) and thus conceives agency as a potential, Duranti understands agency “as the property of those entities (i) that have some degree of control over their own behavior, (ii) whose actions in the world affect other entities’ (and sometimes their own), and (iii) whose actions are the object of evaluation (e.g. in terms of their responsibility for a given outcome)” (453). Deppermann considers agency to be a means of social and situational positioning: “‘agency’ is to capture properties of the subject as agent, that is, its role with respect to the events in which it is involved” (429–30). This is done by linguistic attribution. Following Duranti, this analysis is based on the understanding that agency is established by the ascription of action to an entity which is thereby made or considered accountable for the action. This allows a practice-theoretical reference to Garfinkel’s concept of accountability and identifies agentive practices as “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical purposes” (7). The writing of letters in wartime is one such reflexive discursive practice through which agents constitute social reality by means of ascribing agency. The concept of semantic roles (Fillmore; von Polenz), offers another, distinctly linguistic access to agency. By semantic roles, agency in situated interaction is established syntactically and semantically. Put simply, a distinction is made between an Agent, as someone who performs an action, and a Patient, as someone to whom an action occurs (von Polenz 170; semantic roles such as Agent, Patient, Experiencer, etc. are capitalised by convention). Using linguistic data from war letters, this concept is discussed in more detail below. In the following, “field post” is considered as dispositif, by which Foucault means a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif]. The apparatus [dispositif] itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, Confessions 194) The English translation of the French “dispositif” as “apparatus” encourages an understanding of dispositif as a rather rigid structure. In contrast, the field post service of the Second World War will be used here to show how such dispositifs enable practices of exclusion or restrict access to practices of inclusion, while these characteristics themselves are in turn established by practices or, as Foucault calls them, procedures (Foucault, Discourse). An important and potentially enlightening notion related to dispositif is that of agencement, which in turn is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari and was further developed in particular in actor-network theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). What Çalışkan and Callon state about markets serves as a general description of agencement, which can be defined as an “arrangement of heterogeneous constituents that deploys the following: rules and conventions; technical devices; metrological systems; logistical infrastructures; texts, discourses and narratives …; technical and scientific knowledge (including social scientific methods), as well as the competencies and skills embodied in living beings” (3). This resembles Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Foucault, Confessions; see above), which “denotes a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements with neither an originary subject not [sic] a determinant causality” (Coté 384). Considered morphosemantically, agencement expresses an important interrelation: in that it is derived from both the French agencer (to construct; to arrange) and agence (agency; cf. Hardie and MacKenzie 58) and is concretised and nominalised by the suffix -ment, agencement elegantly integrates structure and action according to Giddens’s ‘duality of structure’. While this tying aspect certainly contributes to a better understanding of dispositional arrangements and should therefore be considered, agencement, as applied in actor-network theory, emphasises above all “the fact that agencies and arrangements are not separate” (Çalışkan and Callon) and is, moreover, often employed to ascribe agency to material objects, things, media, etc. This approach has proven to be very fruitful for analyses of socio-technical arrangements in actor-network theory and practice theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). However, within the presented discourse-oriented study on letter writing and field post in National Socialism, a clear analytical differentiation between agency and arrangement, precisely in order to point out their interrelation, is essential to analyse practices of exclusion. This is why I prefer dispositif to agencement as the analytical concept here. Infrastructural Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In the Second World War, writing letters between the “homeland” and the “frontline” was a fundamental everyday media practice with an estimated total of 30 to 40 billion letters in Germany (Kilian 97). War letters were known as field post (Feldpost), which was processed by the field post service. The dispositif “field post” was, in opposition to the traditional postal service, subject to specific conditions regarding charges, transport, and above all censorship. No transportation costs arose for field post letters up to a weight of 250 grams. Letters could only be sent by or to soldiers with a field post number that encoded the addresses of the field post offices. Only soldiers who were deployed outside the Reich’s borders received a field post number (Kilian 114). Thus, the soldiers were socially included as interactants due to their military status. The entire organisation of the field post was geared towards enabling members of the Volksgemeinschaft to communicatively shape, maintain, and continue their social relationships during the war (Bergerson et al.). Applying Foucault, the dispositif “field post” establishes selection and exclusion mechanisms in which “procedures of exclusion” (Discourse 52) become manifest, two of which are to be related to the field post: “exclusion from discourse” and “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). Firstly, “procedures of exclusion ensure that only certain statements can be made in discourse” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). This exclusion procedure ought to be implemented by controlling and, ultimately, censoring field post letters. Reviews were carried out by censorship offices (Feldpostprüfstellen), which were military units independent of the field post offices responsible for delivery. Censorship initially focussed on military information. However, “in the course of the war, censorship shifted from a control measure aimed at defence towards a political-ideological review” (Kilian 101). Critical remarks could be legally prosecuted and punished with prison, penitentiary, or death (Kilian 99). Hence, it is assumed that self-censorship played a role not only for public media, such as newspapers, but also for writing private letters (Dodd). As the introductory quotation from Otto M. shows, writers who spread undesirable information in their letters anticipated the harshest consequences. In this respect, randomised censorship—although only a very small proportion of the high volume of mail was actually opened by censors (Kilian)—established a permanent disposition of control that resulted in a potentially discourse-excluding social stratification of private communication. Secondly, the dispositif “field post” was inherently exclusive and excluding, as those who did not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft could not use the service and thus could not acquire agentive capacity. The “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73) was achieved by restricting participation in the field post system to members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Since agency is based on the most basic prerequisite, namely the ability to act linguistically at all, the mere possibility of exercising agency was infrastructurally restricted by the field post system. Excluding people from “agency-through-language” means excluding them from an “agency of an existential sort” (Duranti 455), which is described here, regarding the field post system, as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Interactional Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In this section, I will elaborate how agency is brought forth interactionally through linguistic means on the basis of data from a field post corpus that was compiled in the project “Linguistic Social History 1933 to 1945” (Kämper). The aim of the project is an actor-based description of discursive practices and patterns at the time of National Socialism, which takes into account the fact that society in the years 1933 to 1945 consisted of heterogeneous communities of practice (Horan, Practice). Letter communication is considered to be an interaction that is characterised by mediated indexicality, accountability, reflexivity, sequentiality, and reciprocity (Dang-Anh) and is performed as situated social practice (Barton and Hall). The corpus of field letters examined here provides access to the everyday communication of members of the ‘integrated society’, i.e. those who were neither high-ranking members of the Nazi apparatus nor exposed to the repressions of the fascist dictatorship. The corpus consists of about 3,500 letters and about 2.5 million tokens. The data were obtained by digitising letter editions using OCR scans and in cooperation with the field post archive of the Museum for Communication Berlin (cf. sources below). We combine qualitative and quantitative methods, the latter providing heuristic indicators for in-depth hermeneutical analysis (Felder; Teubert). We apply corpus linguistic methods such as keyword, collocation and concordance analysis to the digitised full texts in order to analyse the data intersubjectively by means of corpus-based hermeneutic discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). However, the selected excerpts of the corpus do not comprise larger data sets or complete sequences, but isolated fragments. Nevertheless, they illustrate the linguistic (non-)constitution of agency and thus distinctively exemplify exclusionary practices in field post letter writing. From a linguistic point of view, the exclusion of actors from action is achieved syntactically and semantically by deagentivisation (Bernárdez; von Polenz 186), as will be shown below. The following lines were written by Albert N. to his sister Johanna S. and are dated 25 June 1941, shortly after the beginning of the German Wehrmacht’s military campaign in Russia (Russlandfeldzug) a few days earlier. Vor den russ. Gefangenen bekommt man einen Ekel, d.h. viele Gefangene werden nicht gemacht.One gets disgusted by the Russian prisoners, i.e. many prisoners are not made. (N.) In the first part of the utterance, “mitigation of agency” (Duranti 465) is carried out using the impersonal pronoun “man” (“one”) which does not specify its referent. Instead, by means of deagentivisation, the scope of the utterance is generalised to an indefinite in‑group of speakers, whereby the use of the impersonal pronoun implies that the proposition is valid or generally accepted. Moreover, the use of “one” generalises the emotional expression “disgust”, thus suggesting that the aversive emotion is a self-evident affect experienced by everyone who can be subsumed under “one”. In particular, this includes the author, who is implicitly displayed as primarily perceiving the emotion in question. This reveals a fundamental practice of inclusion and exclusion, the separating distinction between “us”/“we” and “them”/“the others” (Wodak). In terms of semantic roles, the inclusive and generalised formal Experiencer “one” is opposed to the Causative “Russian prisoner” in an exclusionary manner, implicitly indicating the prisoners as the cause of disgust. The subsequent utterance is introduced by “i.e.”, which marks the causal link between the two phrases. The wording “many prisoners are not made” strongly suggests that it refers to homicides, i.e. executions carried out at the beginning of the military campaign in Russia by German troops (Reddemann 222). The depiction of a quasi-universal disgust in the first part establishes a “negative characterization of the out-group” (Wodak 33) which, in the expressed causal relation with the second phrase, seems to morally legitimise or at least somehow justify the implied killings. The passive form entirely omits an acting entity. Here, deagentivisation obscures the agency of the perpetrators. However, this is not the only line between acting and non-acting entities the author draws. The omission of an agent, even the impersonal “one”, in the second part, and the fact that there is no talk of self-experienceable emotions, but war crimes are hinted at in a passive sentence, suggest the exclusion of oneself as a joint agent of the indicated actions. As further data from the corpus indicate, war crimes are usually not ascribed to the writer or his own unit as the agents but are usually attributed to “others” or not at all. Was Du von Juden schreibst, ist uns schon länger bekannt. Sie werden im Osten angesiedelt.What you write about Jews is already known to us for some time. They are being settled in the East. (G.) In this excerpt from a letter, which Ernst G. wrote to his wife on 22 February 1942, knowledge about the situation of the Jews in the war zone is discussed. The passage appears quite isolated with its cotext in the letter revolving around quite different, trivial, everyday topics. Apparently, G. refers in his utterance to an earlier letter from his wife, which has not been preserved and is therefore not part of the corpus. “Jews” are those about whom the two agents, the soldier and his wife, write, whereas “us” refers to the soldiers at the front. In the second part, agency is again obscured by deagentivisation. While “they” anaphorically refers to “Jews” as Patients, the agents of their alleged resettlement remain unnamed in this “agent-less passive construction” (Duranti 466). Jews are depicted here as objects being handled—without any agency of their own. The persecution of the Jews and the executions carried out on the Russian front (Reddemann 222), including those of Jews, are euphemistically played down here as “settlements”. “Trivialization” and “denial” are two common discursive practices of exclusion (Wodak 134) and emerge here, as interactional exclusion of agency, in one of their most severe manifestations. Conclusion Social and societal exclusion, as has been shown, are predominantly legitimised as well as constituted, maintained, and perpetuated by discursive practices. Field post letters can be analysed both in terms of the infrastructure—which is itself constituted by infrastructuring practices and is thus not rigid but dynamic—that underlies excluding letter-writing practices in times of war, and the extent to which linguistic excluding practices are performed in the letters. It has been shown that agency, which is established by the ascription of action to an entity, is a central concept for the analysis of practices of exclusion. While I propose the division into infrastructural and interactional exclusion of agency, it must be pointed out that this can only be an analytical distinction and both bundles of practices, that of infrastructuring and that of interacting, are intertwined and are to be thought of in relation to each other. Bringing together the two concepts of agency and dispositif, despite the fact that they are of quite different origins, allows an analysis of exclusionary practices, which I hope does justice to the relation of interaction and infrastructure. By definition, exclusion occurs against the background of an asymmetrical arrangement within which exclusionary practices are carried out. Thus, dispositif is understood as an arranged but flexible condition, wherein agency, as a discursively ascribed or infrastructurally arranged property, unfolds. Social and societal exclusion, which were constitutive for National Socialism, were accomplished not only in public media but also in field post letters. Writing letters was a fundamental everyday media practice and the field post was a central social medium during the National Socialist era. However, exclusion occurred on different infrastructural and interactional levels. As shown, it was possible to be excluded by agency, which means exclusion by societal status and role. People could linguistically perform an excluding agency by constituting a division between “us” and “them”. Also, specific discourses were excluded by the potential control and censorship of communication by the authorities, and those who did not suppress agency, for example by self-censoring, feared prosecution. Moreover, the purely linguistic practices of exclusion not only constituted or legitimised the occasionally fatal demarcations drawn under National Socialism, but also concealed and trivialised them. As discussed, it was the perpetrators whose agency was excluded in war letters, which led to a mitigation of their actions. In addition, social actors were depreciated and ostracised through deagentivisation, mitigation and omission of agency. In extreme cases of social exclusion, linguistic deagentivisation even prepared or resulted in the revocation of the right to exist of entire social groups. The German soldier Otto M. feared fatal punishment because he did not communicatively act according to the social stratification of the then regime towards a Volksgemeinschaft in a field post letter. This demonstrates how thin the line is between inclusion and exclusion in a fascist dictatorship. 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Probably the most (in)famous Australian teenager of recent times, now-17-year-old Kim Duthie—better known as the “St Kilda Schoolgirl”—first came to public attention when she posted naked pictures of two prominent St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) players on Facebook. She claimed to be seeking revenge on the players’ teammate for getting her pregnant. This turned out to be a lie. Duthie also claimed that 47-year-old football manager Ricky Nixon gave her drugs and had sex with her. She then said this was a lie, then that she lied about lying. That she lied at least twice is clear, and in doing so, she arguably reinforced the pervasive myth that women are prone to lie about rape and sexual abuse. Precisely what occurred, and why Duthie posted the naked photographs will probably never be known. However, it seems clear that Duthie felt herself wronged. Can she therefore be held entirely to blame for the way she went about seeking redress from a group of men with infinitely more power than she—socially, financially and (in terms of the priority given to elite football in Australian society) culturally? The many judgements passed on Duthie’s behaviour in the media highlight the crucial, seldom-discussed issue of how problematic behaviour on the part of women might reinforce patriarchal norms. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the context of a spate of alleged sexual assaults committed by elite Australian footballers over the past decade. Given that representations of alleged rape cases in the media and elsewhere so often position women as blameworthy for their own mistreatment and abuse, the question of whether or not women can and should be held accountable in certain situations is particularly fraught. By exploring media representations of one of these complex scenarios, we consider how the issue of “complicity” might be understood in a rape culture. In doing so, we employ Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential concept of the “grey zone,” which signifies a complex and ambiguous realm that challenges both judgement and representation. Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,” Patriarchy and the Problem of Judgement In his essay titled “The Grey Zone” (published in 1986), Levi is chiefly concerned with Jewish prisoners in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who obtained “privileged” positions in order to prolong their survival. Reflecting on the inherently complex power relations in such extreme settings, Levi positions the “grey zone” as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: a realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. [The ‘grey zone’] possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (27). According to Levi, an examination of the scenarios and experiences that gave rise to the “grey zone” requires a rejection of the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of “friend” and “enemy,” “good” and “evil.” While Levi unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should suspend judgement of victims who were entrapped in situations of moral ambiguity and “compromise.” However, recent scholarship on the representation of “privileged” Jews in Levi’s writings and elsewhere has identified a “paradox of judgement”: namely, that even if moral judgements of victims in extreme situations should be suspended, such judgements are inherent in the act of representation, and are therefore inevitable (see Brown). While the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections must be kept in mind, the corruptive influences of power at the core of the “grey zone”—along with the associated problems of judgement and representation—are clearly far more prevalent in human nature and experience than the Holocaust alone. Levi’s “grey zone” has been appropriated by scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies (Petropoulos and Roth xv-xviii), philosophy (Todorov 262), law (Luban 161–76), history (Cole 248–49), theology (Roth 53–54), and popular culture (Cheyette 226–38). Significantly, Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, “Groping through Gray Zones” 3–26) has recently applied Levi’s concept to the field of feminist philosophy. Indeed, Levi’s questioning of whether or not one can—or should—pass judgement on the behaviour of Holocaust victims has considerable relevance to the divisive issue of how women’s involvement in/with patriarchy is represented in the media. Expanding or intentionally departing from Levi’s ideas, many recent interpretations of the “grey zone” often misunderstand the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections. For instance, while applying Levi’s concept to the effects of patriarchy and domestic violence on women, Lynne Arnault makes the problematic statement that “in order to establish the cruelty and seriousness of male violence against women as women, feminists must demonstrate that the experiences of victims of incest, rape, and battering are comparable to those of war veterans, prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp inmates” (183, n.9). It is important to stress here that it is not our intention to make direct parallels between the Holocaust and patriarchy, or between “privileged” Jews and women (potentially) implicated in a rape culture, but to explore the complexity of power relations in society, what behaviour eventuates from these, and—most crucial to our discussion here—how such behaviour is handled in the mass media. Aware of the problem of making controversial (and unnecessary) comparisons, Card (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 515) rightly stresses that her aim is “not to compare suffering or even degrees of evil but to note patterns in the moral complexity of choices and judgments of responsibility.” Card uses the notion of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” citing numerous examples of women identifying with their torturers after having been abused or held hostage over a prolonged period of time—most (in)famously, Patricia Hearst. While the medical establishment has responded to cases of women “suffering” from “Stockholm Syndrome” by absolving them from any moral responsibility, Card writes that “we may have a morally gray area in some cases, where there is real danger of becoming complicit in evildoing and where the captive’s responsibility is better described as problematic than as nonexistent” (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 511). Like Levi, Card emphasises that issues of individual agency and moral responsibility are far from clear-cut. At the same time, a full awareness of the oppressive environment—in the context that this paper is concerned with, a patriarchal social system—must be accounted for. Importantly, the examples Card uses differ significantly from the issue of whether or not some women can be considered “complicit” in a rape culture; nevertheless, similar obstacles to understanding problematic situations exist here, too. In the context of a rape culture, can women become, to use Card’s phrase, “instruments of oppression”? And if so, how is their controversial behaviour to be understood and represented? Crucially, Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” were primarily motivated by his concern that most historical and filmic representations “trivialised” the complexity of victim experiences by passing simplistic judgements. Likewise, the representation of sexual assault cases in the Australian mass media has often left much to be desired. Representing Sexual Assault: Australian Football and the Media A growing literature has critiqued the sexual culture of elite football in Australia—one in which women are reportedly treated with disdain, positioned as objects to be used and discarded. At least 20 distinct cases, involving more than 55 players and staff, have been reported in the media, with the majority of these incidents involving multiple players. Reports indicate that such group sexual encounters are commonplace for footballers, and the women who participate in sexual practices are commonly judged, even in the sports scholarship, as “groupies” and “sluts” who are therefore responsible for anything that happens to them, including rape (Waterhouse-Watson, “Playing Defence” 114–15; “(Un)reasonable Doubt”). When the issue of footballers and sexual assault was first debated in the Australian media in 2004, football insiders from both Australian rules and rugby league told the media of a culture of group sex and sexual behaviour that is degrading to women, even when consensual (Barry; Khadem and Nancarrow 4; Smith 1; Weidler 4). The sexual “culture” is marked by a discourse of abuse and objectification, in which women are cast as “meat” or a “bun.” Group sex is also increasingly referred to as “chop up,” which codes the practice itself as an act of violence. It has been argued elsewhere that footballers treating women as sexual objects is effectively condoned through the mass media (Waterhouse-Watson, “All Women Are Sluts” passim). The “Code of Silence” episode of ABC television program Four Corners, which reignited the debate in 2009, was even more explicit in portraying footballers’ sexual practices as abusive, presenting rape testimony from three women, including “Clare,” who remains traumatised following a “group sex” incident with rugby league players in 2002. Clare testifies that she went to a hotel room with prominent National Rugby League (NRL) players Matthew Johns and Brett Firman. She says that she had sex with Johns and Firman, although the experience was unpleasant and they treated her “like a piece of meat.” Subsequently, a dozen players and staff members from the team then entered the room, uninvited, some through the bathroom window, expecting sex with Clare. Neither Johns nor Firman has denied that this was the case. Clare went to the police five days later, saying that professional rugby players had raped her, although no charges were ever laid. The program further includes psychiatrists’ reports, and statements from the police officer in charge of the case, detailing the severe trauma that Clare suffered as a result of what the footballers called “sex.” If, as “Code of Silence” suggests, footballers’ practices of group sex are abusive, whether the woman consents or not, then it follows that such a “gang-bang culture” may in turn foster a rape culture, in which rape is more likely than in other contexts. And yet, many women insist that they enjoy group sex with footballers (Barry; Drill 86), complicating issues of consent and the degradation of women. Feminist rape scholarship documents the repetitive way in which complainants are deemed to have “invited” or “caused” the rape through their behaviour towards the accused or the way they were dressed: defence lawyers, judges (Larcombe 100; Lees 85; Young 442–65) and even talk show hosts, ostensibly aiming to expose the problem of rape (Alcoff and Gray 261–64), employ these tactics to undermine a victim’s credibility and excuse the accused perpetrator. Nevertheless, although no woman can be in any way held responsible for any man committing sexual assault, or other abuse, it must be acknowledged that women who become in some way implicated in a rape culture also assist in maintaining that culture, highlighting a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity. How, then, should these women, who in some cases even actively promote behaviour that is intrinsic to this culture, be perceived and represented? Charmyne Palavi, who appeared on “Code of Silence,” is a prime example of such a “grey zone” figure. While she stated that she was raped by a prominent footballer, Palavi also described her continuing practice of setting up footballers and women for casual sex through her Facebook page, and pursuing such encounters herself. This raises several problems of judgement and representation, and the issue of women’s sexual freedom. On the one hand, Palavi (and all other women) should be entitled to engage in any consensual (legal) sexual behaviour that they choose. But on the other, when footballers’ frequent casual sex is part of a culture of sexual abuse, there is a danger of them becoming complicit in, to use Card’s term, “evildoing.” Further, when telling her story on “Code of Silence,” Palavi hints that there is an element of increased risk in these situations. When describing her sexual encounters with footballers, which she states are “on her terms,” she begins, “It’s consensual for a start. I’m not drunk or on drugs and it’s in, [it] has an element of class to it. Do you know what I mean?” (emphasis added). If it is necessary to define sex “on her terms” as consensual, this implies that sometimes casual “sex” with footballers is not consensual, or that there is an increased likelihood of rape. She also claims to have heard about several incidents in which footballers she knows sexually abused and denigrated, if not actually raped, other women. Such an awareness of what may happen clearly does not make Palavi a perpetrator of abuse, but neither can her actions (such as “setting up” women with footballers using Facebook) be considered entirely separate. While one may argue, following Levi’s reflections, that judgement of a “grey zone” figure such as Palavi should be suspended, it is significant that Four Corners’s representation of Palavi makes implicit and simplistic moral judgements. The introduction to Palavi follows the story of “Caroline,” who states that first-grade rugby player Dane Tilse broke into her university dormitory room and sexually assaulted her while she slept. Caroline indicates that Tilse left when he “picked up that [she] was really stressed.” Following this story, the program’s reporter and narrator Sarah Ferguson introduces Palavi with, “If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.” As has been argued elsewhere (Waterhouse-Watson, “Framing the Victim”), this implies that Palavi is partly responsible for players holding this mistaken view. By implication, she therefore encouraged Tilse to assume that Caroline would want to have sex with him. Footage is then shown of Palavi and her friends “applying the finishing touches”—bronzing their legs—before going to meet footballers at a local hotel. The lighting is dim and the hand-held camerawork rough. These techniques portray the women as artificial and “cheap,” techniques that are also employed in a remarkably similar fashion in the documentary Footy Chicks (Barry), which follows three women who seek out sex with footballers. In response to Ferguson’s question, “What’s the appeal of those boys though?” Palavi repeats several times that she likes footballers mainly because of their bodies. This, along with the program’s focus on the women as instigators of sex, positions Palavi as something of a predator (she was widely referred to as a “cougar” following the program). In judging her “promiscuity” as immoral, the program implies she is partly responsible for her own rape, as well as acts of what can be termed, at the very least, sexual abuse of other women. The problematic representation of Palavi raises the complex question of how her “grey zone” behaviour should be depicted without passing trivialising judgements. This issue is particularly fraught when Four Corners follows the representation of Palavi’s “nightlife” with her accounts of footballers’ acts of sexual assault and abuse, including testimony that a well-known player raped Palavi herself. While Ferguson does not explicitly question the veracity of Palavi’s claim of rape, her portrayal is nevertheless largely unsympathetic, and the way the segment is edited appears to imply that she is blameworthy. Ferguson recounts that Palavi “says she was able to put [being raped] out of her mind, and it certainly didn’t stop her pursuing other football players.” This might be interpreted a positive statement about Palavi’s ability to move on from a rape; however, the tone of Ferguson’s authoritative voiceover is disapproving, which instead implies negative judgement. As the program makes clear, Palavi continues to organise sexual encounters between women and players, despite her knowledge of the “dangers,” both to herself and other women. Palavi’s awareness of the prevalence of incidents of sexual assault or abuse makes her position a problematic one. Yet her controversial role within the sexual culture of elite Australian football is complicated even further by the fact that she herself is disempowered (and her own allegation of being raped delegitimised) by the simplistic ideas about “assault” and “consent” that dominate social discourse. Despite this ambiguity, Four Corners constructs Palavi as more of a perpetrator of abuse than a victim—not even a victim who is “morally compromised.” Although we argue that careful consideration must be given to the issue of whether moral judgements should be applied to “grey zone” figures like Palavi, the “solution” is far from simple. No language (or image) is neutral or value-free, and judgements are inevitable in any act of representation. In his essay on the “grey zone,” Levi raises the crucial point that the many (mis)understandings of figures of moral ambiguity and “compromise” partly arise from the fact that the testimony and perspectives of these figures themselves is often the last to be heard—if at all (50). Nevertheless, an article Palavi published in Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (19) demonstrates that such testimony can also be problematic and only complicate matters further. Palavi’s account begins: If you believed Four Corners, I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with… what annoys me about these tags and the way I was portrayed on that show is the idea I prey on them like some of the starstruck women I’ve seen out there. (emphasis added) Palavi clearly rejects the way Four Corners constructed her as a predator; however, rather than rejecting this stereotype outright, she reinscribes it, projecting it onto other “starstruck” women. Throughout her article, Palavi reiterates (other) women’s allegedly predatory behaviour, continually portraying the footballers as passive and the women as active. For example, she claims that players “like being contacted by girls,” whereas “the girls use the information the players put on their [social media profiles] to track them down.” Palavi’s narrative confirms this construction of men as victims of women’s predatory actions, lamenting the sacking of Johns following “Code of Silence” as “disgusting.” In the context of alleged sexual assault, the “predatory woman” stereotype is used in place of the raped woman in order to imply that sexual assault did not occur; hence Palavi’s problematic discourse arguably reinforces sexist attitudes. But can Palavi be considered complicit in validating this damaging stereotype? Can she be blamed for working within patriarchal systems of representation, of which she has also been a victim? The preceding analysis shows judgement to be inherent in the act of representation. The paucity of language is particularly acute when dealing with such extreme situations. Indeed, the language used to explore this issue in the present article cannot escape terminology that is loaded with meaning(s), which quotation marks can perhaps only qualify so far. Conclusion This paper does not claim to provide definitive answers to such complex dilemmas, but rather to highlight problems in addressing the sensitive issues of ambiguity and “complicity” in women’s interactions with patriarchal systems, and how these are represented in the mass media. Like the controversial behaviour of teenager Kim Duthie described earlier, Palavi’s position throws the problems of judgement and representation into disarray. 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