The introduction provides an indepth overview of the book's focus, theoretical orientation, critical methodology, significance, originality, and chapter synopisis. It begins by noting that while many analysts may have a sense that accusations initiate criminal matters, neither sociology, history, nor criminal law have focused critical attention on the socio-political forces which first select people to face criminal trials. This is in many the overlooked foundation of criminal law, and state criminalization. In an attempt at redress, examines though socio-political foundations by analyzing (criminal) cases a 'paradigmatic' examples of how criminalization begins. It does so by turning to a unique context and time -- Alberta, Canada circa 1874 –1884 –- where the Dominion of Canada deliberately formed a police force to enforce colonial law. Relying on Wittgenstein and Foucault, and 'law as performance' scholars it indicates how one might approach the idioms, powers, and performances through which pretrial criminal accusations translate social lore into law.

In this chapter we explore how to identify and select concepts from the work of political theorists, using Pierre Boudieu, Michele Foucault, and Jacques Lacan as examples. Starting with Foucault’s notion of discourse, we explore how scholars of environmental politics have adapted this term to develop an analytical framework that enables them to address their research puzzle and sites of study. We then use our study of IPCC and IPBES to recount how the scholarship of Bourdieu and Foucault has informed our individual study and how adopting key concepts from these theorists has enabled us to understand and explain the power asymmetries observed during intergovernmental meetings. However, there may come a point when the concepts adopted and applied, and the analytical approach developed from these, no longer provide adequate explanations for the observations made, and this may signal the need for combining different approaches or developing new concepts, as explored through the weighted concept. At the same time, the chapter reflects on why as a research community we are attracted to particular theorists – often dead, white, French, men – and the limitations this choice has the potential to impose and reproduce on present observation and analysis of global environmental politics.

The stabilization of drone programs and their implementation as part of the normal functioning of the state deserve much more attention than it has received, since the power it conveys goes far beyond prompt lethal strikes in foreign territories. The institutionalization of a drone program not only means that the extensive warfare that drones bring about is stable, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, because a drone program consists of the constant surveillance of populations "living under drones." Behavioral changes (in addition to the evident psychological ramifications) of populations living under drones have been proven, at both the individual and community level. This chapter makes clear that a transborder drone program cannot be viewed as occasional interventions in self-defense. Instead, through an institutionalized drone program, a state performs rituals of governance and sovereignty over the populations it monitors. The chapter conceptualizes the extension of state power over the populations of third states and explores what it means for the international legal order that the law is essential to such an extension.

This chapter examines the extensive influence of the thought of Michel Foucault on the development of the anthropology of ethics. In doing so it treats a classic question that has preoccupied biographers of Foucault and chroniclers of his philosophy, as well as both advocates and critics of the anthropology of ethics, namely the nature of the relationship between power and freedom. Siding with those who have seen more continuity than rupture in the shifts of emphasis within Foucault’s oeuvre, it argues that we should as far as possible seek to understand the different stages of Foucault’s work as complementary, rather than contradictory: as providing us with different viewpoints from which to view a context or question, rather than mutually exclusive descriptions.

This chapter examines Foucault’s theory of self-cultivation and its influence in anthropology. It considers the criticisms of atomistic individualism and social determinism that are often levelled at practices of self-cultivation and argues that practices of self-cultivation are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in which they find themselves. How far such efforts go, the form that they take, and the relationships in which they are embedded will be specific to particular lives, but focussing on practices of self-cultivation enables anthropology to account for the reflective efforts that people make to live well. Resisting interpretations of self-cultivation as entirely self-directed or socially determined collapses a second dichotomy prevalent in the literature, between those practices of self-cultivation found in ‘pedagogic’ ethical projects and those found in ordinary life. This chapter makes the argument that forms of reflective self-cultivation are found in the ‘midst’ of everyday practice to varying degrees, and in contexts of intense ethical training people remain vulnerable to moral plurality and the contingency of messy everyday life.

Virtue ethics has been a key concern of some important modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Anthropologists have disagreed strongly over whether the categories developed by such writers are useful or a source of ethnocentric distortion when applied to ethnographic and comparative work. This chapter argues for a middle course. Virtue seems to be a universal concern, but in order to understand it cross-culturally it will be necessary to develop a ‘virtue ethics as such’: an understanding that transcends the culture-bound assumptions of modern virtue ethicists. At the same time, those thinkers were concerned to escape from certain limited ways of thinking about ethics that have also stunted anthropological work on morality, so they may provide a uniquely useful starting point for our investigations. Having set this challenge, the chapter goes on to provide some preliminary thoughts on how an anthropology of virtue ethics as such could be pursued, considering concepts such as ‘exemplarity’ and ‘the fragility of the good’ from a comparative point of view, drawing on Confucian, Buddhist, and other traditions.

This chapter proposes a new framework for the study of the categories of heresy and orthodoxy in medieval Islam. It engages with scholarship on these categories in the discipline of Islamic Studies and Religious Studies more broadly, arguing that orthodoxy and heresy should not be viewed solely through the prism of theology, which emphasises belief (doxa) and practice (praxis). Instead, it highlights the discursive formation of conceptions of orthodoxy and heresy. Heresy and orthodoxy are defined as shifting categories of denunciation and approval, which provides insights into the formation of orthodoxy as a contested process. This approach allows for a more detailed and complex typology of proto-Sunni movements in the eighth to eleventh centuries, admitting more variation than previous scholarship has allowed for.

Chapter 12 gives close attention to the idea of self that is situated at the intersection of Seneca’s literary ambitions and his lifelong interest in Stoic moral psychology. The main text is Letters on Ethics 84, with its extended comparison of reading and writing to the activity of bees. Reflecting on this image, Foucault in “L’écriture de soi” captured the essential idea that writing is for Seneca an act of self-constitution. Here, a philologically informed reading recovers further ideas. Seneca has in mind not the subliterary activities that Foucault envisioned, but a consciously aesthetic practice of creation for the reading public. Study (studium) depends on reading but comes to fruition in the crafting of the ingenium, the literary talent that is to be recognized by future generations; at the same time, it is also the training of one’s character, fitting it for moral action. In the metaphoric progression of the letter, Seneca melds Roman canons of literary achievement with Stoic notion of moral progress into a conception of a scripted and exteriorized self more tightly integrated, through art, than the biological self and capable of surviving the death of the body.

Schools reveal dominant modes of governance and legitimation. The production of lived citizenship in Egyptian schools reveals a mode of governance that I call “permissive-repressive neoliberalism” –deinstitutionalization and heightened violence in the context of privatization and austerity. This chapter considers how far these trends can be considered a reflection of neoliberalism as a global phenomenon and unpacks their implications for the functioning of schools as disciplinary institutions. It shows how schools reflect everyday legitimation by charting what school textbooks, rituals and narratives reveal about the production of imagined citizenship before and after 2011.

What happens to productive continence after the turn of the twentieth century? The medical profession ceased to mention it as belief in the dangers of sex (and indeed, many of its actual risks) began to wane; but it never quite disappeared from the popular imagination. The Conclusion asks in what further directions the book’s work could be taken and proposes a particular relevance to studies of artistic ethics outside of Decadent literature, for instance, in the work of Henry James and Ezra Pound. It suggests that a similar approach to other texts and discourses can complicate and revitalize our approach to Victorian sexuality.

The rise in prison populations in the 1980s coupled with the silencing of the voices of those in prison compromised the visibility of some Black writers. Writers who were not incarcerated began to write about the prison experience, especially in terms of its effect on families. Although that trend can be seen earlier and later, the neoconservative 1980s catalyzed the need for a new approach to Black prison writing that would enable prisoners’ stories to be told by family members. At the vanguard of that movement is John Edgar Wideman whose willingness to tell the story of his incarcerated brother changed the trajectory of contemporary African American literature and its intersection with prison writing. This chapter utilizes the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago in order to advance a broader literary/cultural critique. Foucault enables us to extend Wideman’s inquiry outward from prison into a series of institutions designed to preserve and promote the idea of racial hierarchy despite mythological national claims of opportunity, democracy, equality, and equal justice for all well after the abolition of slavery and the end of legal segregation.

Foucault problematizes the relationship between knowledge and power in ways that more traditional epistemology has not, with power always already shaping what we consider knowledge. To capture the nexus between power and knowledge, he introduces the term “episteme.” The significance of an era’s episteme is easiest to see in terms of what it does to possibilities of self-knowledge. Therefore I pay special attention to this theme by way of introducing the theoretical depth of Foucault’s notion. I then develop Foucault’s ideas further, specifically for digital lifeworlds. With this vocabulary in place, I introduce the notion of “epistemic actorhood” that lets us capture the place of an individual in a given episteme. It is in terms of this place that we can turn to the notions of epistemic rights and epistemic justice. Epistemic actorhood comes with the four roles of individual epistemic subject, collective epistemic subject, individual epistemic object, and collective epistemic object. Using this vocabulary we can then also articulate the notions of an epistemic right and of epistemic justice and develop them in the context of digital lifeworlds. Digital lifeworlds engage individuals both as knowers and knowns in new ways. The framework introduced in this chapter captures this point.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

From the late eighteenth century, various sections of Iranian society, particularly the court and the elites, developed an acquaintance with European and American cities, their social lives, and spaces through direct visits, postcards, geographical texts, pictures, and other means of knowledge transfer. The analysis of Iranians’ wonder-like appreciations of Western cities helps to illustrate how this novel spatial knowledge determined the future of Iranian cities. This chapter suggests that the post-1870s spatial transformations of Tehran had been incubated in Iranian society – at least among the elites and the Qajar court – for decades. I argue that these transformations were the outcome of the gradual formation and development of a spatial discourse, rather than an abrupt change and a sudden disjuncture from the past. By adopting the Foucauldian conception of discourse, this chapter focuses on Iranians’ acquaintance with European cities, their social lives, and social spaces. The exposure to new ideas was not limited to the political landscape and had an impact on various aspects of Iranian society. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the growing relationship between Iran and European countries generated new forms of knowledge and transferred them to Iranian society. From culinary culture to the establishment of a new educational system, and from painting and theater to industrial and monetary organizations, various aspects of this impact have been investigated before.

This chapter situates the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald within Foucault’s paradigm of biopolitical war, which is torn between a concern with State racism and a concern with extinction. Sebald’s work is often considered in relation to World War II and the Holocaust, in other words, in relation to State racism. The chapter seeks to shift this frame of reference toward the Cold War and the reality of Mutually Assured Destruction, which are important concerns in Sebald’s oeuvre as well. This invites us to consider Sebald as an author engaged not only with State racism but also with what Foucault calls “the atomic situation.” Specifically, the chapter considers the use of lists in Sebald’s work not only as a memorial effort in response to the destruction of World War II but also as an effort to record all of life in anticipation of its disappearance. Finally, it shows that such a use of the list exceeds Sebald’s fiction and can be found in a range of related contemporary fiction and theory. Today, in the Anthropocene, the biopolitical war exceeds the issue of State racism and includes that of extinction, human and otherwise – including the extinction of literature itself.

This chapter is dedicated to the theory of selfhood Cicero presents in the De officiis: each person being a player of four personae. The allegory of four dramatic roles or masks (from the Greek prosopon) is borrowed from the Stoic Panaetius, whose ethical theory adapts the stringent demands of the sage to a morally imperfect and multifarious public. He who wishes to progress, Cicero explains, must play the roles of reason, of nature, of fortune, and, finally, the role “we ourselves may choose sets forth from our will” (quam personam velimus, a nostra voluntate proficiscitur). In this final treatise, the will comes most clearly into view as a mental capacity and rational force. I argue that when read in conjunction with related uses of voluntas and persona in other texts, Cicero’s will serves a recursive purpose within each of the other personae. Whether in actualizing reason, refining our inborn qualities, or navigating the forces of necessity and civic duty, voluntas creates a dialectic of actor and mask from which emerges a conscious moral self. Though the will develops richly as a moral faculty and principium individuationis in the hands of later thinkers, its terrestrial purposes disappear as divine ones take hold.

This book interrogates justifications, techniques and legal forms that arose in the past and continue to resonate in the international regime to protect foreign investment. What is striking is how past practices resemble suppositions relied upon at present by investment law’s norm entrepreneurs. This matrix of practices is characterized as ‘alibis’ in so far as they provide cover for a set of international investment law rules and institutions that are increasingly difficult to defend. The method employed conjoins discursive practices with understandings about power, expressed in legal-institutional and processual forms. It is analogous to what Foucault describes as ‘archaeology’ which, when partnered with ‘genealogy,’ produces something akin to dispositif: an ensemble of discourse, institutions, legislation and ‘authoritative phenomena’, incorporating ‘the said as much as the unsaid’. By uncovering investment law’s normative ends, and connecting them to this indefensible past, the book reveals how investment law aims to dampen the political aspirations of states and citizens of the Global South. The object of the book is to imagine new ways forward that are less ruinous to those left outside of investment law’s solicitude.