Book contents
- Injury and Injustice
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- Injury and Injustice
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Injury and the Construction of Legal Subjects
- Part II Constructing Injury and Imagining Remedies
- Part III Inequality and/as Injury
- Chapter Ten Injury Inequality
- Chapter Eleven The Unconscionable Impossibility of Reparations for Slavery; or, Why the Master's Mules Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
- Chapter Twelve Inflicting Legal Injuries
- Chapter Thirteen The State as Victim
- Chapter Fourteen Law's Imperial Amnesia
- Conclusion
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- References
Chapter Thirteen - The State as Victim
Ethical Politics of Injury Claims and Revenge in International Relations
from Part III - Inequality and/as Injury
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2018
By
Book contents
- Injury and Injustice
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- Injury and Injustice
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Injury and the Construction of Legal Subjects
- Part II Constructing Injury and Imagining Remedies
- Part III Inequality and/as Injury
- Chapter Ten Injury Inequality
- Chapter Eleven The Unconscionable Impossibility of Reparations for Slavery; or, Why the Master's Mules Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
- Chapter Twelve Inflicting Legal Injuries
- Chapter Thirteen The State as Victim
- Chapter Fourteen Law's Imperial Amnesia
- Conclusion
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- References
Summary
In this chapter, Li Chen examines some of the injury claims of state actors in the recent history of Sino-foreign relations and other international contexts. He argues that claiming injury or victimhood has been unusually popular over the past few centuries among both dominated nations and dominant empires. The claim of injury or victimization provides a unique source of legal and moral legitimacy for states, especially for those struggling to justify their efforts to maintain power at home or to achieve imperial ambitions abroad. Chen's analysis draws critical attention to the power politics and discourses that have deemed certain injuries worth more recognition and retaliation than other injuries. This constructed hierarchy or gradation of injuries and rights to reparation and revenge has significantly contributed to the inequities and rampant violence that characterize the structure of modern international relations. Rethinking the under-analyzed victim politics may help us find more effective ways to end the vicious cycle of responding to injury and violence with more injury and violence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Injury and InjusticeThe Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress, pp. 293 - 316Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018
References
Acosta, J. D. ([1587] 1954a). “Parecer sobre la guerra de la China [March 15, 1587].” Pp. 331–4 in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Vol. 73, edited by Mateo, F.. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas.Google Scholar
Acosta, J. D. ([1587] 1954b). “Respuesta a los fundamentos que justifican la guerra contra la China.” Pp. 334–45 in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Vol. 73, edited by Mateo, F.. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas.Google Scholar
Anghie, A. (2004). Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Askew, J. (2004). “Re-visiting New Territory: The Terranova Incident Re-examined.” Asian Studies Review 28(4):351–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair, E. H., and Robertson, J. A. eds. (1903). The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, Vol. 6. Cleveland, OH: Arthur Clark Co.Google Scholar
Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror”, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan (2015). Washington, DC, Berlin, Ottawa: Physicians for Social Responsibility. www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf (last accessed: December 13, 2017).Google Scholar
Bourdon, L. (1960). “Un Projet d'Invasion de la Chine par Canton à la fin du XVI siècle.” Actas do III Colóquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros 1:97–121.Google Scholar
Bowlby, C. (2015). “The Palace of Shame That Makes China Angry.” BBC News, February 2. www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30810596 (last accessed: December 13, 2017).Google Scholar
Brown, W. (1995). States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Buruma, I. (2015). The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York: New York Review of Books.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (2006). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Chang, H. P. (1964). Commissioner Lin and the Opium War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Chang, I. (2014). The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, P. (2012). The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, L. (2016). Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, L. (2017). “Affective Sovereignty, International Law, and China's Legal Status in the Nineteenth Century.” Pp. 421–39 in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept, edited by Benite, Z. B.-D., Geroulanos, S., and Jerr, N.. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Clarke, R. A. (2004). Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Diamond, J. (2016). Trump: “We Can't Allow China to Continue to Rape Our Country”. CNN, May 2. www.cnn.com/2016/05/01/politics/donald-trump-china-rape/ (last accessed: December 13, 2017).Google Scholar
Doyle, J. P. (2005). “Two Sixteenth-Century Jesuits and a Plan to Conquer China: Alonso Sánchez and Jose de Acosta: An Outrageous Proposal and Its Rejection.” Pp. 253–73 in Rechtsdenken: Schnittpunkte West und Ost: Recht in den Gesellschafts-und Staatstragenden Institutionen Europas und Chinas, edited by Holz, H. and Wegmann, K.. Münster: LIT Verlag.Google Scholar
Enns, D. (2012). The Violence of Victimhood. College Station, TX: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Eykholt, M. (2000). “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre.” In The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Fogel, J. A.. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Eze, C. (2011). Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Fanon, F. ([1961] 1963). The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Farrington, C.. New York: Grove.Google Scholar
Fanon, F. ([1952] 2008). Black Skin, White Mask, new edition translated by Philcox, R.. New York: Grove.Google Scholar
Ferguson, D., ed. (1902). Letters from Portuguese Captives in Canton, Written in 1534 and 1536, Vol. 30. Bombay: Education Society's Steam Press.Google Scholar
Gelber, H. G. (2004). Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals: Britain's 1840–42 War with China, and Its Aftermath. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Giroux, H. A. (2004). The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm, 2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.Google Scholar
Greenberg, K. J. (2016). Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State. New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar
Grotius, H. (2005 [1625]). The Rights of War and Peace. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Grotius, H. (2005 [c. 1604]). Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, translated by Williams, G. L.. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Hevia, J. L. (2003). English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Jensen, S., and Ronsbo, H. (2014). Histories of Victimhood. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jin, G., ed. (2005). Xifang Aomen shiliao xuancui (Western Historical Sources on Macao in the 15th–16th Centuries). Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe.Google Scholar
Lee, H. (2008). “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan; Or, How to Enjoy a National Wound.” Modern China 35(2):155–90.Google Scholar
Lim, L. (2014). The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Liu, L. H. (2009). “Injury: Incriminating Words and Imperial Power.” Pp. 199–218 in Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon, edited by Gluck, C. and Tsing, A. L.. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Marx, K. (1857a). “The Case of the Lorcha Arrow.” The New York Daily Tribune, June 23.Google Scholar
Marx, K. (1857b). “Parliamentary Debates on the Chinese Hostilities.” The New York Daily Tribune, March 16.Google Scholar
Mayers, W. F. (1901 [1877]). Treaties Between the Empire of China and Foreign Powers: Together with Regulations for the Conduct of Foreign Trade, Conventions, Agreements, Regulations, etc. and the Peace Protocol of 1901, 3rd edn. Shanghai: North-China Herald Office.Google Scholar
Miller, M. C. (2013). Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Moyn, Samuel. (2010). The Last Utopian: Human Rights in History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, J. (2006). The Politics of Victimhood and Its Internal Exegetes: Terror Victims in Israel. History and Anthropology 17(4):355–68.Google Scholar
Ollé, M. (2000). La invención de China: percepciones y estrategias filipinas respecto a China durante el siglo XVI. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Pagden, A. (1995). Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Pagden, A. (2003). “Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Europe's Imperial Legacy.” Political Theory 31:171–99.Google Scholar
Parker, G. (2000). The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Rice, J. (2012). Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Seidler, V. J. (2013). Remembering 9/11: Terror, Trauma and Social Theory. London: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Shan, L. (2005). “Implicating Colonial Memory and the Atomic Bombing: Hayashi Kyoko's Three Short Stories.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 27. (Online Version of the Paper Presented at the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in 2005).Google Scholar
Stoler, A. L. (2006). “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty.” Public Culture 18(1):125–46.Google Scholar
Stoler, A. L. (2009). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sykes, C. J. (1992). A Nation of Victims: The Decay of American Character. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Vattel, Emer de. ([1758] 2008). The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Victoria, F. d. ([1557] 1917). De Indis et de ivre Belli Relectiones, Being Parts of Relectiones Theologicae XII, translated by Bate, J. P., edited by Nye, Ernest. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington.Google Scholar
Wang, J. (2015). Unequal Treaties and China. Hong Kong: Enrich Professional Publishing.Google Scholar
Wang, Z. (2012). Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Wheaton, H. (1845). History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America: From the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Washington, 1842. New York: Gould, Banks and Co.Google Scholar
Williams, R. A. (1992). The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wong, J. Y. (1998). Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–60) in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Yang, D. (2000). “The Challenge of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry.” Pp. 133–80 in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Fogel, J. A.. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Yoneyama, L. (1997). “Memory Matters: Hiroshima's Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity.” In Living With the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, edited by Hein, L. and Selden, M.. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Publishers Inc.Google Scholar
Yoneyama, L. (1999). Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Zhang, H., Deng, H., and Zhao, Y. (2001). Guochi baitan (A Hundred Talks on National Humiliation). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar