Combinations Book Launch

Join us for this informal, improvised conversation about a new book on democracy and the politics of nonviolence by Maurice Macartney.

Here's a summary of the key ideas:

Friend, enemy; loyalist, traitor: politics today seems caught in the grip of a binary reduction machine, bidding us set ourselves towards our neighbours as though we were already combined in, and owed allegiance to, mutually external, nameable collective entities - ‘communities’, ‘nations’, ‘races’ – denominations in general. 

Beginning with an examination of processes (‘routines’) of denomination in Northern Ireland, the author dips back into the era of Empire and enslavement to show that similar processes were at work then in ‘viceregally’ arranged structures for the authorisation and organisation of the violence of hostility and of indifference to the suffering of others.

He then brings the analysis up to date, arguing that the hostility of populism and the indifference of the global market overlap to intensify the violence unfolding today. 

Finally, taking seriously the Copernican revolution of nonviolence, for which the enemy is not ‘the enemy’, but violence itself, the book calls for a different kind of combination, for the coming together of a ‘community of others’, commoners on the one common, working, for all our differences, toward the democratic empowerment of everyone in the neighbourhood, in an equitable, sustainable, ‘neighbourhood democracy’ that would open beyond hostility, beyond denomination, beyond all boundaries.

Interested? Join us in 0G.074 in the Lanyon Building, Queen's University Belfast, Wednesday, 15 May, 6.00pm!