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    • Tag: resistance

    • India’s undeclared state of emergency

      Arvind Narrain: India’s Undeclared Emergency : Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, Chennai (Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited) 2021.

      “The Dual State” is being rediscovered. Ernst Fraenkel’s study of the Nazi state, written in Germany in 1938 and adapted while in exile in the US, offers an analytical tool for understanding current processes by distinguishing between the normative state and the action state. In Die Zeit, Heinrich Wefing refers to an essay by Aziz Huq, which applies Fraenkel’s concepts to the US under Trump. A Polish constitutional lawyer had already drawn Wefing’s attention to the “dual state” in order to understand the restructuring of the Polish state.

      In fact, the US under Trump is not the first in the shift that some describe as authoritarian and others as fascist. It does have a special charisma and therefore serves as a model for the new order elsewhere. But the US example also distracts attention from the more quotidian and familiar processes near us. In many ways, the measures taken by other governments, less spectacular and theatrical, can draw our attention to how the transformation into a dual state is taking place.

      Arvind Narrain, an Indian lawyer, employed the concept of the dual state in his book “India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance” to describe developments in contemporary India. India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi could be considered the most successful and internationally least problematized example of the establishment of a dual state.

      Narrain argues that India’s constitution has always combined both tendencies of the dual state, but that under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which has been in power since 2014, the prerogative state has increasingly overshadowed the normative state – made possible by laws such as the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), which expand executive powers, and executive measures that are increasingly exempt from judicial review.

      Narrain defines the concept of the prerogative state, following Fraenkel, as field within the state in which the executive acts without restrictions and outside or above legal constraints and constitutional processes. He sees the Indian prerogative state particularly in the use of (legal) preventive detention, in national security laws, and in extraordinary executive orders. The latter increasingly override judicial reviews of executive actions, but also fundamental safeguards in criminal law. The police carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions without any significant judicial control. The executive branch issues ordinances and administrative orders that circumvent legal safeguards. The reluctance of the judiciary to control such abuses leads to a situation in which institutions and individuals are subject to arbitrary state oppression. This establishes the prerogative state in Fraenkel’s sense.

      Narrain advocates a strategy of “constitutional resistance.” In 2021, he was still confident that citizens, civil society, lawyers, and democratic institutions could and would defend the normative state.

      Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dual state promises not only the dismantling of judicial review of executive powers, but also impunity for offenses and crimes committed by civil society actors, always and everywhere. In India, these include lynchings of Muslims and pogroms against them. The dual state is always a state of complicity. And it can certainly be democratic. The Indian example also points to this. There is no need for the Modi regime to abolish democracy, because the Indian dual state enjoys broad support among large sections of the population, which is also reflected in the elections. The authoritarian or fascist turn does not require a dictatorial form of government. This is precisely what makes Fraenkel’s concepts so relevant and important for the German and European present.

    • “Don’t Woman Life Freedom Us, You Murderers!”

      “Women, Life, Freedom” against the War. A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic, 23. Juni 2025, https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

      It has already been six weeks: In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched an attack on Tehran in violation of international law. Iran struck back within hours, firing missiles at dozens of military installations in Israel. The Israeli government justified the war by claiming that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear bomb – an unsubstantiated claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating since 1992. Nine days later, the US officially entered the war on Israel’s side. According to the US-based human rights organization Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), nearly 1,000 people were killed and over 3,500 injured in the Israeli attacks. In Iran’s attacks on Israel, 29 Israelis were killed and 172 injured. After twelve days, the war was temporarily ended with a ceasefire initiated by the US.

      We share here a statement by the collective Roja, which was originally published in Farsi on June 16 and translated into English a week later by the decentralized network CrimethInc. It is now available in many other languages, too. Roja is an independent internationalist collective of Kurdish, Afghan (Hazara), and Iranian feminists, based in Paris, that was founded in 2022 in response to the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran.

      The statement embeds the events of the war in the context of recent Iranian history, critically assesses the military interventions in the “War on Terror,” such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and insists that there is no such thing as a “just” war or justified bombing. With analytical clarity, Roja takes a stand against attempts at discursive appropriation from all sides. In the discussion about the so-called Twelve-Day War, supporters of the alleged “preemptive strike” who push the narrative of Israel’s self-defense and “regime change” in Iran are pitted against those who stylize the Islamic regime as an anti-imperialist resistance force to protect the Muslim peoples from Western superpowers. While monarchist groups justify civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage in the fight against the Islamic regime, the regime deliberately exploits the situation to repress political opponents and marginalized groups.

      Roja condemns Israel’s war and the US intervention just as strongly as it condemns the patriarchal-repressive regime of the Islamic Republic: “Genocidal imperialist projects will never liberate us, nor will patriarchal nationalist regimes protect us.” It recognizes that Israel’s war, which was supposedly directed only against Iranian nuclear facilities and regime officials, attacks the entire population of Iran and also and foremost the principles and actors of the women, life, freedom protests. In addition, it criticizes those who cannot differentiate between grassroots resistance movements and the actions of a state power, thereby rendering invisible decades of self-organization of the working class, to give one example.

      The collective does not relativize, but rather offers differentiated criticism of the governments of both countries: the Israeli government, which, according to renowned experts and human rights organizations, is currently committing genocide in Gaza and has been denying Palestinians self-determination for decades; and the Iranian government, which has been oppressing, persecuting, and executing opposition members, ethnic minorities, women, and many others for decades. Iran, Roja demands, must not be turned into a second Libya through external intervention, nor must it become the scene of renewed mass executions by the Islamic regime, as in the summer of 1988.

      By showing solidarity with grassroots resistance movements “from Kabul to Tehran, from Kurdistan to Palestine, from Ahvaz to Tabriz, from Balochistan to Syria and Lebanon,” the collective rejects all attempts to legitimize state warfare and external regime change efforts. Only resistance movements from below can achieve long-term change through political means.

      ↗ „https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

    • From bystander to accomplice

      Sarah Schulman: The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, New York (Penguin Random House) 2025, 320 pp.

      The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity is the latest book by Sarah Schulman, a US writer, educator, and activist, perhaps best known to the wider public for her monumental oral history of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Part political memoir, part manual, the book offers nuanced reflections on the practice of solidarity and features some highly quotable definitions such as: “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter,” and “Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams.” 

      While the book’s focus is on solidarity Palestine (a cause Schulman has been involved in since 2009), the author also draws on her broader activist, artistic, and teaching work, offering examples of solidarity in action, from clandestine reproductive rights activism to informal support groups formed within the exclusionary spaces of New York’s theater scene. Beyond her own experiences, Schulman finds valuable lessons in the work of Vivian Gornick, Wilmette Brown, and Jean Genet, among others.

      Embracing its inherent messiness, Schulman convincingly argues that ”solidarity is possible without ideological purity, without 100 percent didacticism of motive, and yet despite contradictions, it can still be important, evolve, and have an impact.” But perhaps the most important wisdom Schulman offers — rooted in decades of organizing and heartbreak — is her honest and lucid acknowledgment of the difficulty and necessity of coalition politics in solidarity work: “There is an unease in coalition because we sacrifice the very specific personal politics that none of us can achieve alone, for a more compromised collective. But without that flexibility, no movement building would be able to take place. It is the change, the peace, and the justice we seek that are more important than being right in our living rooms.” 

      ↗ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771411/the-fantasy-and-necessity-of-solidarity-by-sarah-schulman/