Abstract
This article emerges from the anthropological fieldwork carried out in the eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2015 and in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation between 2006 and 2009. Both locales, at a time of the research, were marked by proximity of the ongoing armed conflicts, and were legally defined as the “Zones of Counter-Terrorism Operation”. The legal status of the Zones not only suspended a number of laws and created new forms of violence, but also coexisted with the sense of everyday life being “normal” in spite of immanent albeit usually covert violence of ongoing disappearances and torture. Moreover, sustaining the status of the zones necessitated the systematic production of terrorists that depended on the massive fabrications of legal cases that in their own right relied on confessions and signatures acquired under torture or, quite often, on the killing and kidnapping of young men to present them as exterminated terrorists. This article does not present a comparative study between Chechen and eastern Ukrainian armed conflicts. Instead, it engages ethnographically with the notion of bespredel, literally limitlessness, which in these post-soviet spaces define affective conditions of life and is evoked to designate the unjust or violent actions of state agents. The article insists that the modalities of legal operations cannot be adequately understood through the analytical concepts of the “state of exception” and “thanatopolitics”; such do not pay sufficient attention to the short circuits and affectivity of the power effects. Rather, the article asks what kind of corporealities and sensibilities are presupposed, effected or failed to be so under such circumstances.
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Notes
This article is prepared with the support of the European Social Fund under the No 09.3.3-LMT-K-712 “Development of Competences of Scientists, other Researchers and Students through Practical Research Activities” measure.
Federal Security Services (Bureau), Rus. Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. Russia’s main state security agency. Former KGB.
Wahhabit (pl. Wahhabity)—a general, usually disparaging, term in Chechnya and Russia evoked by politician and law enforcement agents to indicate a rebel or terrorist, at times a follower of radical political Islam understood as Wahhabism.
Struktury—Rus. literally “structures”, a common term that denotes any state institution, or number of them, which one way or another have to do with law enforcement and control but do not necessarily direct application of force, e.g. it applies to police, army, as much as to an administrative apparatus.
The events of bespredel, which I am describing here, could be employed to trace the formation of desire in the legal practices manifesting at the limits of articulation and barely representable corporeal experiences. These events are more excessive as well as less positively productive in the constitution of the subject than Foucault’s notion of apparatus would have it (e.g. Foucault 1980). They also speak less of social (legal) production stuck to desiring machines that produce and proliferates lacks, extracting and subsuming desires of the bodies in the process of subjectification as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) imagined, and more of the desiring legalities that dispenses desires of the subject altogether (cf. Smith 2007). Yet, as I indicated, this merits a separate inquiry and falls beyond the scope of this paper.
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Kvedaravicius, M. Carnal legalities: affective lives within zones of counter-terrorism operation. Subjectivity 11, 339–356 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0060-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0060-3