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In this commentary I engage with Coleman and Bassi's significant intervention 'Deconstructing Militant Manhood'. My intention is a further problematization of what they identify as the exclusionary orderings of powerful gendered and heteronormative scripts within left-political organizations that otherwise identify with a project of contesting the inequities associated with patriarchal modernity. I draw on Nietzsche in considering the production and exclusion of societal 'truths', and the (im)possibilities of 'speaking truth to power', when what is empowered is so precisely through dismissal of difference. I affirm the significant political project of 'becoming-other', as a multiplicity of choices that do not collude with contemporary onto-epistemological order, at the same time as noting the seeming impasse of identity politics in shifting the juggernaut of broader disciplining structures.

In a series of lectures in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault resurrected the Greek word for frankness or truth-telling-'parrhesia'-to investigate the inter-relationships and tensions that existed between freedom, truth-telling and political power. He concl

"French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is acting uneasily when it comes to contemporary politics. There is a sort of agitation in his work in relation to this question. At several places we read an appeal to deal thoroughly with this question and 'qu'il y a un travail à faire', that there is still work to do. From the beginning of the 1980s with the 'Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur le Politique' and the two books resulting out of that, until the many, rather short texts he published on this topic during the last years of the century, the question of politics crosses very clearly Nancy's work. He not only fulminates against the contemporary philosophical 'content' with democracy. Instead of defending a political regime, he wants to think the form of politics in the most critical and sceptical way. To Nancy, the worst thing we can do in thinking contemporary politics, is taking it for granted that we know what politics is about today, given the evidence of the global democracy. So to him, we almost have to be at unease when it comes to politics. On the other hand, in thinking contemporary democracy, the work of Claude Lefort is undeniably the main reference. Long before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the upsurge of an all-too-easy anti-Marxism, Lefort articulated in a nuanced way the formal differences between totalitarianism and democracy. According to Lefort, the specific 'form' of democracy is that it never becomes an accomplished and fulfilled form as such. In a certain sense, the only 'form' of democracy is formlessness, a form without form. In a democracy, the place of power becomes literally 'infigurable' as Lefort says. Democracy stands for formlessness or the relation to a void. Nancy objects so to say against a 'Leformal' conception of democracy - the empty place, the formless, the 'infigurable' or 'sans figure', the ever yet to come. … This conception of

This article challenges the optimism common to liberal IR and IL scholarship on the 'rule of law' in global governance. It argues that the concept of the 'rule of law' is often employed with sparse inquiry into the politics of its practical meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on liberal research that advocates the emergence of a 'global' judiciary, and the claim that judicial governance will marginalize state power and authority. Rather than employ a zero-sum conception of power, this article regards a prospective global legal system less as a constraint on state power and more as a rationale for rule 'through' law by vested actors. To make the argument, Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' is combined with Barnett and Duvall's notion of 'productive power' to denote how legal techniques of power are integral to the construction of social 'truth' and consequently the governance of conduct. This is further associated with Koskenniemi's critical scholarship on the power of law's perceived objectivity and universality. In this vein, the article questions how liberal scholars use the American judicial model (the Marbury ideal) to claim that an institutionalization of 'global' judicial authority can deliver the rule of 'no one' in global governance. A governmentality perspective is then applied which suggests that the lack of supreme constitutional rules at the global level makes judicial governance less a check than a means to propagate normative standards conducive to dominant state power.

Jia Qinglin, China's fourth-most senior official, demanded officials throw their weight behind the one-party state in an essay in the Party's main ideological journal "Seeking Truth" (Qiushi), which was reproduced on major web portals on Sunday.

The public demonstrations by Thailand's Red Shirts in early 2010 have been explained as a labour-based movement resisting Bangkok's entrenched elite, or as a mob mobilized by the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in order to destabilize the current government. This profile looks into the protests' origins and nature. It argues that there are elements of truth to both explanations, but also that the protestors adopted powerful forms of symbolism of poverty and victimhood to draw attention to their needs, and to delegitimize the force used against them. This symbolism allowed both Thaksin and the protestors to gain political ground.

Its preoccupation with ontology presents radical democracy with a thorny dilemma: how to combine commitment and affirmation with a distinctive emphasis on contingency and contestability. The article addresses this dilemma by engaging with three different perspectives. Ernesto Laclau's work shows the intrinsic constraints of ontology and the inadequacy of a simple distinction between ontology and ethico-political decision. Simon Critchley opposes tying radical politics to ontological prefiguration and argues for a particular ethico-political orientation. But ethics and politics come entwined with ontological assumptions, and the ethical direction of politics can be as restrictive as its ontological framing. William Connolly weds ontology and ethics to a sharp awareness of their contestability. But his approach does not reach deep enough. It is not alive to the contestability of the very recognition of contestability. To enhance openness and reflexivity, projects of radical democracy should combine a dimension of substantive, detailed accounts with a reflexive commitment to contestability, which disrupts, questions and renews the thicker descriptions in the name of democracy and truth.

Post-genocide Rwanda has become a 'donor darling', despite being a dictatorship with a dismal human rights record and a source of regional instability. In order to understand international tolerance, this article studies the regime's practices. It analyses the ways in which it dealt with external and internal critical voices, the instruments and strategies it devised to silence them, and its information management. It looks into the way the international community fell prey to the RPF's spin by allowing itself to be manipulated, focusing on Rwanda's decent technocratic governance while ignoring its deeply flawed political governance. This tolerance has allowed the development of a considerable degree of structural violence, thus exposing Rwanda to the risk of renewed violence.