Neal Andrew

This author's articles

• Conference Report : The social, legal and political challenges of counter-terrorism

  23 July 2007
  Workpackage 1 organised a one-day workshop in London to bring together practitioners and academics from multiple disciplines including law, government, international relations, political science, sociology and media studies. The aim was to discuss recent transformations in the field of counter-terrorism and their social, legal and political implications. It was attended by 40 people from universities and institutions across the UK and Europe. The day was organised around three thematic panels on the legal implications of counter-terrorism and extraordinary rendition for the EU; the political-theoretical implications of recent transformations in counter-terrorism and practices of exceptionalism; and finally on the social implications of counter-terrorism with regard to the media, globalisation and human rights.

• Workshop programm : The social, legal and political challenges of counter-terrorism

  23 July 2007
  Recent years have seen rapid innovations in the practices, principles and critiques of counter-terrorism. This workshop will bring academics and practitioners together to discuss the social, legal and political implications of the changing field.

• Society Must Be Defended, or, the Archaeology of the Exception

  6 September 2005
  Andrew Neal spoke about different theoretical approaches to the problem of ‘exceptionalism’, which is the problem of exceptional practices legitimated by exceptional events/situations. As such, he dealt with Carl Schmitt, ‘securitization theory’, and finally the work of Michel Foucault, using the latter to provide a critique of the first two and sketch an alternative. Carl Schmitt poses the problem of the exceptional limits of law, politics, liberalism, and predictability regarding the future in order to argue for the necessity of exceptional sovereign power.

• Society Must Be Defended, or The Archaeology of the Exception

  14 June 2005
  Andrew Neal spoke about different theoretical approaches to the problem of «exceptionalism», which is the problem of exceptional practices legitimated by exceptional events/situations. As such, he dealt with Carl Schmitt, «securitization theory», and finally the work of Michel Foucault, using the latter to provide a critique of the first two and sketch an alternative.

• WP1: The New State of Exception: The Political and Social Implications of Globalized Insecurities

  19 April 2005
  This workpackage draws on political and cultural theory, international relations, and criminology to develop an innovative theorisation of the nexus between security and liberty and its application to the European context. It specifically responds to characterisations of contemporary security practices in terms of «the state of exception», the spatio-temporal re-articulation of the exception in political practice, and the political and social implications of this re-articulation.

• Foucault Discipline and Punish quotes

  12 April 2005
  This document assembles and analyzes various quotes of contemporary relevance from Foucault’s "Discipline and Punish". Adapted from Andrew Neal, "Foucault in Guantanamo".

• Foucault in Guantanamo: National, Sovereign, Disciplinary Exceptionalism

  12 April 2005
  The exception and exceptionalism are not the same thing. Carl Schmitt’s right-wing stitch-up is to suture together the ‘real possibility’ of the exceptional event with the exceptional sovereign response to the actual event, conflating the two. Typically, the idea of an event invokes a temporal sequence of event-response, action-reaction. But the prerogative of Schmitt’s sovereign to decide on the exception inverts this sequence. The conflation of declaring the exceptional event on the one hand, and responding to the exceptional event on the other, effaces the event qua independent causal event, the event-in-itself. Schmitt uses the ideaof the exception to demonstrate the necessity of the exceptional sovereign response. Yet the institutionalised prerogative sovereign decision on the exception precedes the event, and is only justified by the event’s theoretical ‘real possibility’.

• Neal Andrew : Curriculum Vitae

  12 April 2005
  Andrew Neal is a Researach Associate for CHALLENGE workpackage 1 in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is working on a research monograph for Routledge on subject of "Exceptionalism and the politics of liberty and security". He is also editing a book with Michael Dillon (Lancaster) for Palgrave called "Foucault on Politics, Society and War".

• Review of the literature on the «state of exception» and the application of this concept to contemporary politics

  3 March 2005
  This paper seeks to make a sustained theoretical intervention into the critical-theoretical debate that has been emerging around the terms ‘exception’, ‘state of exception’, and ‘exceptionalism’. Here we will enquire into the concept of ‘exceptionalism’ as a means of critically engaging with the sovereign declaration and enactment of ‘exceptions’ to legal, political, social, historical and cultural norms, typically in the name of security imperatives or a ‘state of emergency’.