Repressive State Apparatus Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
... State Apparatus ( RSA ) The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser ’s concept for what is known in contemporary political discourse as ‘hard power’, i.e. a form of power that operates by means of violence. It is usually accompanied by what Althusser termed the Ideological State Apparatus , which is a ‘soft power’ concept. The Repressive State Apparatus consists of the army, the police, the judiciary, and the prison system. It operates primarily by means of mental and physical coercion and violence (latent and actual). Further Reading: L....
interpellation Reference library
Dictionary of the Social Sciences
...hailed positions that person as a subject of legal discourses, penal institutions, and state power more generally. Interpellation, for Althusser, is the work of ideological and repressive state apparatuses . These include schools, the mass media, unions, the police, social services, and other institutions that produce certain forms of conformance and ultimately identity. The concept is elaborated in Althusser's influential essay “ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses ” ( 1971...
ideological state apparatus (ISA)
Dictionary of the Social Sciences
...state apparatus (ISA) A concept introduced by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in Lenin and Philosophy ( 1971 ). ISAs are those institutions and systems that legitimate and reproduce the state , above all by producing consent to the regime on the part of subordinated groups. For Althusser, religion, education, the legal system, mass culture, and the family are all ISAs—all buttress the ideology of the ruling class by naturalizing its privileges. ISAs are distinguished, however, from what Althusser called repressive state apparatuses (RSAs)....
Examining Education Reforms of India in the Matrix of Rights and Biopolitics Reference library
Jyoti Dalal
The Oxford Encyclopedia of School Reform
...state power under check while also creating the conditions for the state to legitimize itself as a democratic state. Governing the Population Through his groundbreaking work, Foucault ( 1982 , 1990 , 2004 ; Foucault et al., 1988 ) examined subject formation, pointing out that since the 16th century , a new political form of power developed, known as the state. 1 As against the earlier deductive, repressive monarchical power the state was interested in the life of its subjects so that its power could be consensual and productive. 2 The state was no...
Failed States and Conflict Reference library
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
...(2) massive movement of displaced persons; (3) vengeance-seeking behavior; (4) chronic human flight; (5) uneven economic development along group lines; (6) severe economic decline; (7) criminalization of the state; (8) deterioration of public services; (9) decline of the rule of law and widespread human rights violations; (10) the security apparatus acting independently; (11) factionalized elites; and (12) intervention of external actors. Each variable is scored from 0 (most stable) to 10 (least stable). The scores are then added together to produce a...
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo Reference library
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
...and human-rights movements of the mid-1970s. The experience of the mothers also challenged the myth that motherhood is safe from political repression. When the women stepped outside their traditional and preassigned gender roles, they faced the same viciousness of the repressive state apparatus as did male dissidents. Away from the public eye, military officials often used the most brutal tools of rape and torture on dissident women. In December 1977 , government forces “disappeared” the leading mother Azucena Villaflor along with eleven other activists. The...
Chile, Peace Movements in Reference library
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
...the poor, and communicate with international Church-related and secular rights organizations throughout the world. The Chilean arpilleras , wall hangings sewn by Chilean women depicting the life of the destitute, became a well-known standard suggesting both the repressive Chilean state apparatus and resistance to it by women organized by the Church in mutual support groups. Some activists participated in mítines relámpagos (lightning rallies) in which demonstrators denounced the government in ten minutes or less, the length of time it took the police to...
Latin America, Social Justice Movements of Reference library
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
...to retake their lands and expel the rich who exploited them, but a rebellion that consciously sought to move beyond the politics of modernity, of past national liberation movements, and of repressive “modernization” policies of Mexican governments. What distinguished the EZLN from its predecessors was that it did not seek power in Mexico City, nor did it call for state socialism. Throughout the 1990s its objective was to spark a broad-based movement for social justice in Chiapas and the rest of Mexico that would transform the country from the bottom up...
Terrorism and Counter-terrorism in Popular Culture in the Post-9/11 Context Reference library
Stephen L. Muzzatti
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture
...readings to popular-culture narratives, their overall framework for understanding the loose alliances between the conservative interests of the state and the culture industries is perhaps even more applicable today in an age of tremendously concentrated media ownership than it was when in was first authored. There is a long history of cooperation between the state (particularly its repressive apparatuses—the criminal justice system and the military) and the entertainment industry in the production of popular culture products. The military, spies, the...
Althusser and Structuralism in Communication Studies Reference library
Matthew S. May and Kate Siegfried
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...the relations of production ” ( Althusser, 2014 , p. 149). This emphasis on superstructural relations rather than mechanism of production offers an entry point not only for understanding institutional relations as perhaps most easily legible within the ideological and repressive state apparatus framework but also for understanding how the formation of subjectivities is itself a mechanism of social reproduction that contributes to what we experience as identity-bound effects such as raced and gendered divisions of labor. No other Marxist traditions have unpacked...
Hegemony in Marxist Traditions Reference library
Marco Briziarelli and Jeff Hoffmann
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...provided another important contribution to the exploration of hegemonic scenarios. He theorizes hegemony as the combination of ideological and repressive state apparatuses. While, for Althusser, repressive state apparatuses operate by means of violence, consisting of the army, the police, the judiciary, and the prison system; ideological state apparatuses operate through a level of consent. These apparatuses include media, school, religion, family, law, politics, economics, communication, and culture, and they function as powerful instruments of...
Public Pedagogy and Manufactured Identities in the Age of the Selfie Culture Reference library
Henry A. Giroux
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...the surveillance state and the demise of the public good along with those modes of solidarity that embrace a collective sense of agency. Surveillance and the Flight from Privacy Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life wielded by both the state and the larger corporate sphere. This merger registers both the transformation of the political state into the corporate state as well as the transformation of a market economy into a criminal economy. One growing attribute of the merging of state and corporate surveillance apparatuses is the increasing...
Challenges to Educational Leadership and Equity in México Reference library
Marta Sánchez
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Educational Administration
...1). In México, the press for standardized teacher evaluations backfired, even with, or perhaps because of, the use of state confrontation and force to compel teachers to participate in the evaluation ( Figure 4 ). The SNTE and the CNTE present competing understandings of what the relationship between schools, communities, and society should be and what leadership means. The SNTE is vested in party politics and ideologies of the state apparatus that perpetuate profound inequalities within Mexican society. At the same time, the SNTE’s ability exponentially to...
Criminal Governance in Latin America Reference library
Jorge Mantilla and Andreas E. Feldmann
The Oxford Encyclopedia of International Criminology
...a formal model to explain the logic of violence in criminal wars. According to Lessing, cartel–state violence is fundamentally driven by the nature and degree of state repression. When states decide to attack cartels with all their might, regardless of these groups’ behavior, cartels have no other choice but to defend themselves and strike back. Conversely, when states use force as a deterrent and condition their response to ANSAs’ behavior, keeping repressive force in reserve, ANSAs have an incentive to modify their behavior. In what becomes the central...
Neoliberalism and Communication Reference library
Peter K. Bsumek
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...is regulated by neoliberal biopolitics. On the other hand, they have explored how affect circulates to produce and reproduce neoliberal rationality. For example, Swenson ( 2013 ) , taking a cue from Althusser’s description of an ideological state apparatus (ISA), theorizes the emergence of an affective state apparatus (ASA), which regulates the social body by constituting, capturing, and circulating affect in order to produce subjects capable of engaging in the kinds of affective and communicative labor required by contemporary capitalism. Goodwin, Miller,...
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Communication Studies Reference library
Matthew Bost and Matthew S. May
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...flows and counterflows of bodies and capital, nongovernmental organizations, biomedical crises and environmental devastations, religious colonizers, and paramilitary groups that operate in conjunction with or, increasingly, in place of, the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the nation-state. We stop here but, by virtue of the crisis of institutions set in motion by the global generalization of market logic, the agents and agencies that make up the fabrics in the patchwork of empire are endless, for empire thrives on the continual management of the...
International Socialist Theory on Peace and War Reference library
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
...and state power as controlled by ruling political, social, economic, and military elites would always be a massive challenge. Most of the classic socialist internationalists also proposed a radical social alternative such as guild socialism, syndicalism, or anarcho-syndicalism, or a mixed economy, or a radical decentralized socialization of the economy (e.g., workers control). Where the movement was deeply divided was on the degree of state control needed by such forces for change, and the degree of violence tolerable in dealing with the repressive and...
Critical Cultural Approaches to Gender and Sex Reference library
Claire Sisco King
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...preexist them and thus become interpellated into various identity formations. Althusser also posited the existence of repressive state apparatuses (RSAs), which include government, law enforcement agencies, and the military; and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), which include educational systems, religious institutions, families, and mass media, as integral to the construction and regulation of social formations. While RSAs overtly use state power to maintain the dominance of the elite over working-class people, Althusser understood ISAs, not unlike Adorno...
Authoritarian Societies and Journalism Reference library
Marius Dragomir
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies
...the military dictatorship of 1976–1983 , the state deployed a socially pervasive censorship system to keep the population under control. This covered all sectors and institutions of the country from education to mass media. However, especially in its early stages, the regime relied not only on terror, but also on social support ( Aguila, 2006 ). South Africa during apartheid, from 1948 until the early 1990s, experienced a unique form of censorship implemented through a large and complex state apparatus. As in the Soviet Union, the South African censors...
Labor, Culture, and Communication Reference library
Steven K. May
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...of production. On the one hand, some institutions, which he calls “repressive state apparatuses,” are designed to coerce persons into acting in accordance with capitalist principles. Such institutions include the military, the police, and the judicial system. Althusser contends, though, that an economic system such as capitalism can reproduce itself more effectively if citizens more readily consent to it. For Althusser, this process occurs in and through “ideological state apparatuses,” such as family, schools, the media, and churches. Cultural practices...
