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🪵 The Threshold

Best practices displace law yet also transform law itself as a Trojan horse.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, question, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@brown_undoing_2015, loc. 273

3 min read

Best practices displace law yet also transform law itself as a Trojan horse.

Evidence

While best practices may be “set forth by an authority, such as a governing body or management,” they embody precisely the consensus-developed directives with which neoliberal governance more generally aims to replace law, policing, punishment, and top-down directives. At the same time, best practices may incite or instigate certain legal reforms that would permit closer comportment between the law and business interests, and they also may entail or generate certain legal and ethical workarounds. Thus, while best practices often operate as replacements for law and regulation (not to mention for religion, tradition, or other forms of deliberation), while they are neoliberalism’s alternative to the state that it officially abjures, proof that we can be both ethical and efficient without external interference, they can also be the Trojan horse through which law and the political order it secures may be transformed for and by neoliberal reason. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 273

Categorization

  • QUESTION: Follows with an Iraq example — the mechanism of legal transformation through best practices deserves concrete tracing.
  • XREF: connects to: Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 669; I will then consider the demographic factors of fertility rates, age distribution, and migration. Much like conversion, white nationalists view high Muslim fertility rates as a form of jihad. White nationalists use violent rhetoric such as ‘literal baby boom’ (Steyn 2008, xviii) and ‘war of the wombs’ (Kilpatrick 2106, 131) to paint Muslim motherhood as weapon wielded against Western society. This concept of ‘baby jihad’ objectifies Muslim women as baby-producing machines. In turn, these babies will bring about the ruin of Western society through stealth jihad to implement Sharia law, amongst other things such as genital mutilation, rapes, and persecution of Christians. These fears are exacerbated by an aging European population in contrast to a young Muslim population. Finally, migration is viewed as another type of demographic weapon. White nationalists write of the ‘hijra’ as a form of stealth jihad (Corcoarn 2105b), a ‘Trojan horse’ (Solomon and Al Maqdisi 2009) to alter the demographic make-up of non-Muslim countries and implement Sharia law.; Corcoran describes hijra as the religious imperative of Muslims to wage “civilization jihad” against non-Muslim societies through immigration. She writes, “Jihad is a struggle against unbelievers. Immigration is a jihad on the West.” (2015b, ebook location 189). She also references Modern Day Trojan Horse by Sam Solomon and E. Al Maqdisi. In this book, the authors argue that immigration is the Trojan horse, and violent Muslims are deliberately sneaking into America to wage jihad.

Broader Connections

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