Fear and Violence as Organizational Strategies: The Possibility of a Derridean Lens to Analyze Extra-judicial Police Violence

Srinath Jagannathan (), Rajnish Rai () and Christophe Jaffrelot ()
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Srinath Jagannathan: Indian Institute of Management, Indore
Rajnish Rai: Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Christophe Jaffrelot: SciencesPO

Journal of Business Ethics, 2022, vol. 175, issue 3, No 2, 465-484

Abstract: Abstract Governments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and normalize the discourse of majoritarian nationalism. In this study, we explore the public discourse of how the State and political actors repeatedly labeled a college-going student Ishrat Jahan, who died in a stage-managed police killing in India in 2004, as a terrorist. We draw from Derrida’s ethics of unconditional hospitality to show that while police violence is aimed at constructing safety for the cultural majority, in reality, it reveals discourses of anxiety and precariousness. The unethicality of police violence lies in the enlargement of recognition in vicariously blaming the person who has been killed for being involved in several terror attacks. We show that police violence is premised on the temporal structure of majoritarian nationalism, the prevalence of gender inequity, and the call to breach the secular framework of law.

Keywords: Derrida; Ethics; Hindu nationalism; Hospitality; Justice; Police violence; Terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-020-04655-6

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