Beyond and Against the State: Anarchist Contributions to Human Rights History and Theory

Bray, Mark

doi:10.1353/hum.2019.0018

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Anarchists themselves agreed, at least in principle, that they were not citizenship material. Insofar as citizenship finds any place in anarchist ideology, it is typically only in the abstract, cosmopolitan sense of being a “citizen of the world.” For example, when the US government barred foreign‐born anarchists from becoming naturalised American citizens in 1906, Goldman (1906, p. 2) replied in her magazine Mother Earth , “Citizenship has no meaning to the [anarchists], since their ideal of human liberty and righteousness goes beyond the narrow bounds of nationality.” In 1917, Goldman's lifelong comrade and fellow deportee Alexander Berkman more bluntly defined a “loyal citizen” as one who was “Deaf, dumb and blind,” “patriotism” as “Hating your neighbor,” and “humanity” as “Treason to government.” 3 Turn‐of‐the‐century anarchist writings such as these frequently invoked “natural” or human rights that, as Mark Bray notes, “not only transcended the state and the realm of citizenship, but entailed their abolition” (Bray, 2019, p. 330). Nevertheless, anarchists were also cognizant of the practical utility of citizenship and the rights it afforded, and occasionally invoked its protections even as they denied the legitimacy of states' claims to bestow (or deny) those protections.…”

Section: Anarchist Conceptions Of the Nationalmentioning

confidence: 99%

National subjects and subversive subjectivity: Deportation and the paradox of the anarchist citizen in the era of theFirst Red Scare

Zimmer

2022

Nations and Nationalism

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According to the Westphalian system of international law, all people are meant to be citizens or subjects of territorially bounded and sovereign nation‐states, which in turn guarantee certain rights to, and impose certain duties upon, their members. Anarchism, by contrast, is predicated upon a rejection of the legitimacy of state sovereignty, and a refutation of the justness and practicability of representative government. Anarchists took individual and collective “self‐determination” to their logical extremes—and in the process confounded state legal regimes and bureaucracies that understood national belonging and individual rights only in terms of citizenship. From the perspective of the United States, alien anarchists “belonged” back in their countries of origin, but from those European states' perspective, anarchists had no place in their national communities. This article examines how both radicals and governments in the era of America's “First Red Scare” engaged with the rules governing the interstate system. As individual radicals, government functionaries, and international diplomats wrestled to define where anarchists belonged in the international order of nation‐states, the solutions they found simultaneously reinforced the boundaries of the Westphalian system and revealed contradictions and fissures within it.

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Section: Anarchist Conceptions Of the Nationalmentioning

confidence: 99%

National subjects and subversive subjectivity: Deportation and the paradox of the anarchist citizen in the era of theFirst Red Scare

Zimmer

2022

Nations and Nationalism

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“…In 1912, all anarchist groups actively contributed to the mass international campaign to stop Errico Malatesta's deportation from the United Kingdom (Di Paola, 2013, 144–153). These coordinated transnational campaigns and rituals, organised in a very similar way across the globe, created a sense of belonging and reinforced a transnational radical identity among cosmopolitan anarchist groups, including through the joint fight against oppression and affirmation of values that were perceived as universal (Bray, 2019). They both challenged nationalism and affirmed a transnational radical identity developed and disseminated through anarchists' counter‐cultural production.…”

Section: Performing the Subversion Of The Nationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914

Bantman

Paola

2022

Nations and Nationalism

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This article explores the anarchists' multilayered theoretical and practical engagement with the concepts and performance of nations, nationalism and national belonging, by applying the frameworks of banal nationalism (understood as an ideology) and everyday nationhood (the daily practices in which nation and nationhood are enacted) as analytical categories, to investigate the Italian and French anarchist exile groups in London between 1870 and 1914. Adopting these theoretical categories proves fruitful in probing the anarchists' perception and enactment of the idea of nation and national belonging, contributing to the literature on the relationship between pre-1914 socialist movements and (inter)nationalism and highlighting the specificity of anarchism therein. Using Fox and Miller-Idriss's four categories of everyday nationhood, we show that while the anarchists explicitly subverted the everyday performance of nationhood, redeploying it along internationalist lines, some forms of attachment to the national did endure and were in fact not always contradictory with anarchist internationalism.Looking at the exilic rituals of this intensely diasporic group thus complicates the simplistic but still pervasive view of a monolithic ideological internationalism and rejection of the national on the part of anarchists.

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“… 5. Although not even the rights discourse is inherently at odds with left-libertarianism, if rights are conceived as natural or universal rights whose realisation is understood to be best guaranteed in the absence of the state institution rather than through it (Bray, 2019). In this sense, right-based claims also can contain an anti-statist undertone. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)making the established-outsiders figuration in anti-racist and migrant rights activism

Kuukkanen

2022

Current Sociology

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The article discusses recent anti-racist and migrant rights activism in Finland with the help of Norbert Elias’ figurational sociology and the concept of the established-outsiders figuration. The mobilisation of ‘outsiders’ (racialised minorities and migrants) has reordered the contemporary field and challenged the ‘established’ majority activists to reflect on their own practices. Through combining figurational and cultural perspectives, I compare the extent to which established liberal and left-libertarian activists, with their distinct ideological positions, have succeeded in transforming the power ratio between themselves and the outsiders. This article advances the use of the established-outsiders conceptualisation in cases where the established support, in principle, the outsiders’ inclusion. This helps to shed light on both the more covert and subtle ways through which the established reproduce their power as well as their agency in dismantling the power disparity.

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Beyond and Against the State: Anarchist Contributions to Human Rights History and Theory

Cited by 5 publications

References 32 publications

National subjects and subversive subjectivity: Deportation and the paradox of the anarchist citizen in the era of theFirst Red Scare

National subjects and subversive subjectivity: Deportation and the paradox of the anarchist citizen in the era of theFirst Red Scare

Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914

(Un)making the established-outsiders figuration in anti-racist and migrant rights activism

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