糖心TV

December 2025 marks 30 years since the death of Gillian Rose, who held the chair for social and political thought at the University of 糖心TV between 1989-1995. This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for Critical Legal Studies and Social Theory Centre, interrogates the political legacy of Gillian Rose鈥檚 works–from a historical and critical perspective–by focusing on her often neglected theorisation of the conjunctions between law, Marxism and sociology. Departing from recent revisitations of Rose鈥檚 thought, it takes as its central thread the theoretical and political implications of her decisive turn to law, asking whether this turn amounts to a break from her earlier, more Marxian, critical focus on sociological investigation into actuality, or whether it extends or revises this earlier work.

This question will be regarded not only as central to developing existing interpretations of Rose鈥檚 work, but also as a lens through which to engage with themes that are of pressing concern to contemporary critical theory, critical legal studies, and sociology. By bringing together scholars thinking with and against Rose in these areas, the symposium offers an opportunity to develop further the critical potentialities of her thought, as well as to reflect on its central tensions, contradictions and limitations.

The event will be held in the Wolfson Research Exchange (REx) on 3rd December 2025.

Abstract: Scholarship on impunity for collective violence mostly focuses on explaining those conflicts where political battle lines are clearly drawn, such as ethnic riots, electoral clashes, terrorism and civil wars. Those who get away with horrific acts of violence are often influential individuals, protected by powerful elites. Increasingly, however, ordinary individuals in developing democracies are getting away with a more quotidian form of violence: vigilante attacks against suspected thieves, blasphemers, sexual deviants and a host of other offenders. Long understood as the public鈥檚 reaction to inadequate provision of order by the state, two contemporary features of vigilantism warrant a new explanation. First, the use of mob violence to punish a widening scope of offenses is increasingly observed in states that have undergone rapid state-building in recent years. Second, vigilantism has evolved from society鈥檚 way of occasionally bypassing the state into a form of violent lobbying that seeks to reform it.

This talk examines the rise of vigilante violence as a function of ordinary citizens' ability to acquire impunity for highly public acts of violence. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence from contemporary Indonesia, I show how vigilantes develop collusive relationships with street-level police, amid the rapid expansion of the national police force. My research shows that contrary to existing explanations that explain impunity as the consequence of power, this study of everyday vigilantism shows how provision of impunity as a discretionary resource by the state's minor functionaries can help ordinary people acquire political capital. Finally, I contend that vigilantism across the developing world is flourishing not because the state is absent but because its growing presence can be leveraged by vigilantes, to protect them from the risks of engaging in mob violence.