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This paper presents the first stage of my major new research project that aims to understand diverse contemporary Arab understandings of the rule of law and their implications for political liberalization in the Middle East. I hope this project will contribute to the almost complete lack of systematic comparative study of the idea and ramifications of the rule of law in the Middle East. This paper begins this large effort through a focused study which attempts to ascertain to what extent two competing recent legalist influences have helped shape Arab debate on political change. On the one hand, written laws and published work that embrace the language of human rights have been associated with pressures for or progress in Arab political liberalization. On the other hand, the recent American invasion and occupation of Iraq has amplified common populist fears among some Arabs casting suspicion on legal or political ideas linked with the West, such as the contemporary rule of law. Thus, the success in the 1990s of indigenous Arab human rights movements provides an example of internalization of some aspects of the rule of law, while Washington's recent military assertions in the region highlights the formidable sources of interference and distraction to the autonomous growth of contemporary Arab ideas of legalism and democracy. My paper builds on a prior, published study of the local adaptation of human rights in Moroccan and Tunisian societies by using more recent materials and looking more specifically at the connection between human rights language, local law and political change. I argue that the relatively unproblematic adaptation and local cooption of human rights norms suggests a model for gradual autonomous political liberalization that faces great challenge, but not necessarily defeat, by the more dubious legalism and political liberalism of recent American Arab involvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Philippines and U.S. colonial empire as an example, this paper will show the ways that law serves as a vehicle for colonial hegemony, how the role of law is strictly connected to the construction of the state, and the way that law is also inseparable from issues of family, oligarchy, and social inequality. The Philippine and U.S. example will be related to the situation in other countries, especially in Asia, and different methods of colonial domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Bush administration through two lenses: one developed by Marx in his analysis of the rise of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and the other Hans Mommsen's analysis of the happenstantial construction of Hitler's dictatorship. The essay moves through a look at the coup of 22 November 2000 and then proceeds to look at the analogous dynamics of the Reichstagsbrand/Ermaechtigungsgesetz and 9/11-USA Patriot Act.Next, the essay examines the role of sovereignty in states of exception and the role of the decider, as developed from the Weimar Constitution's Art. 48 and Carl Schmitt to John Yoo. Finally, the essay touches upon the ironic and pernicious role of radical human rights discourses in abetting an imperialist agenda. The essay concludes by considering whether the legal, moral, political, and social construct of the West, which the US has shared with Europe for over half a century, has now come to an end in an era of unchallenged, if ineffective, American hegemony. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As scholars from diverse disciplines have argued, we are experiencing the emergence of a new emotional economy (see L. Berlant, F. Jameson, K. Woodward). Victim Impact Statement guidelines illustrate this new politics of affect: they privilege overtly emotional exchanges in "official" institutional settings, and they exemplify those institutions' growing practice of advancing explicit instructions for appropriate emotional expression. As such emotional exchanges clash with the veneer of rationality on which jurisprudence is founded, they reveal vexing affective politics. This essay draws from research in contemporary emotion culture to analyze how Victim Impact statement guidelines enact specific forms of emotional hegemony—the processes through which the epistemic potential of emotion is regulated (see A. Jaggar). In examining Mississippi and Virginia's Victim Impact Statement instructions as examples of "emotional heuristics," this essay will contribute to our understanding of new emotional economies when real lives and healing are at stake. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]