Political Theory

H01(d) - The Politics of Policing and Pain

Date: Jun 12 | Time: 08:30am to 10:00am | Location: Zoom (see details/voir détails)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Sarah Hynek (Sheridan College)

Zoom Meeting Link | Meeting ID : 985 3372 9757 | Password: 529945

The Infliction of Harm to Police Officers During Political Protests: Alexis Bibeau (University of Virginia)
Abstract: Political protests and riots frequently involve violent confrontations between demonstrators and law enforcement officers. Research on violence during protests and riots suggests that police officers on the ground sometimes play a significant role in initiating or escalating such violent confrontations with demonstrators. In liberal democracies, demonstrators are almost systematically condemned by authorities and mainstream media, while generally inciting negative reactions among the public, when they use violence in confronting the police. However, most people—and political theorists among them—generally consider that sociopolitical circumstances characterized by severe and entrenched injustices and oppression may provide valid moral reasons for political resistance, most prominently to the state and those who act as its agents or representatives. What about harm inflicted by protesters to police officers during protests? Could there be reasons that would make it justified for demonstrators to use self-defense against police officers that initiate violence? This paper investigates the legitimacy of politically motivated harm against police officers in cases of violent clashes between protesters and police officers during protests and riots. I more precisely argue that police officers have special moral obligations, and this special status makes them potentially liable to being harmed in lieu of the state. This argument builds on the notion that there is a moral asymmetry between police officers and private citizens which plays a central justificationary role: police officers are legitimate targets for harm inflicted during political protests precisely because they are not the moral equals of ordinary citizens but official representatives of the state. Finally, I show how this argument is constrained by specific moral considerations, namely the fact (1) that demonstrators targeting police officers must have no obligation to obey the law; (2) that the protest in which those individuals participate must be motivated by strictly political reasons; and (3) that the harm inflicted to police officers in the context of this particular protest must be proportional to the requirement of protesters’ political purpose. This paper makes a central normative contribution to theories of political resistance, political violence, and defensive ethics.

A Brief History of the Philosophy of Pain and a Way Forward: Alejandra Vivas Suarez (University of Calgary)
Abstract: Within the history of Western political thought the question of the proper place of pain, loss, and suffering within a fulfilled human life has a marginal place. In this paper, I reconstruct two dominant models within this tradition for making sense of these experiences, one which I call “pragmatic” and, the other, “ethical”. The “pragmatic” model has its origins in Hobbes and Bentham, and at its core is an attempt to grasp individual experience as a form of “currency” to be exchanged for ones that are preferred, e.g., “fear” can be exchanged “security” but only at the cost of the “right of nature”. The limits of the pragmatic model, however, become especially patent in the experience of colonialism. Colonialism has proven that some sensibilities, including Indigenous ways of life, cannot simply be "exchanged" for a place in society without causing them to go extinct. In response to this problem, radical thinkers from Plato to Emma Goldman advocate for an "ethical" model, according to which human misery can never be compensated for; it being, in this sense at least, intractable. They advocate instead for a life often at odds with the collective, oftentimes at an extreme cost. I argue that these models' limitations point to the need for a new way forward. I call this third path the “generative” model. Rather than elevating pain, loss, and suffering to a “virtue” or itself containing a source of judgement about the good, I draw upon the eccentric philosopher, Marquis de Sade, who begins to demonstrate the possibilities for pain as the basis of relational and institutional transformation. The project aims to recuperate what previous models often construe as waste in order to sketch, incipiently, a new language for understanding the relationship between the individual and the collective.

Orderly Dispositions: Policing the Affective Economies of Racial Capitalism: Conor Bean (Johns Hopkins University)
Abstract: In this paper, I put forward an analytic I call ‘affective governance’ as a frame for theorizing how police participate in the strategic circulation of public affects. I argue that in the contemporary United States and Canada, strategies for governing affect are not universal and instead take on a stratifying function to reproduce hierarchical relations of race and class. In particular, policing capitalizes on feelings of insecurity among propertied whites to inculcate attachments to security practices, while leaving impoverished, often largely non-white communities to experience everyday precarity without recourse. This bifurcation of insecurity is compounded by strategies of policing that routinely seek to foster fear of police agents, both in everyday interactions with police and in moments of uprising against police violence. I begin by reading the work of Michel Foucault, Sara Ahmed, Stuart Hall, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore together to theorize the police as operating segregated affective economies of urban control and suspicion. I then contrast this framework with interpretive schema for theorizing policing descended from the work of Jacques Rancière and Louis Althusser to argue for the particular relevance of affect analysis for policing as distinct from aesthetic theory and theories of ideology. To illustrate my theoretical approach, I focus on two different examples of police power deployed in Chicago on a single day in 2020, contrasting police messaging downplaying seemingly routine lethal force used in a majority-Black deindustrializing neighborhood in comparison with fomenting moral panic around looting in the city’s wealthy central shopping district.