Prologue: Sovereign Aesthetics
Introduction
Part I: Affective Sovereignty
1. Atmospheres of Sovereignty
2. Switching Sovereign Genres
3. Playing for Hearts and Minds
4. The Government of Temper
5. Excursus 1: Affective Life
Part II: The Apparatus of Public Order
6. The Sovereign Peace
7. Signs Taken for Sovereignty
8. The State of Unrest
9. Psycho-Affective Public Order
10. The Coloniality that Remains
11. Excursus 2: An Affective Theory of Public Order
Part III: The Crowd and the People
12. Affective Patterning
13. A Somnambulist or Turbulent People
14. The Crowd as Political Technology
15. Securing the People
16. Excursus 3: Crowds and Populace
Part IV: The Enmity of Unrest
17. The Surprise of Unrest
18. What Violence Might Assemble
19. Enmity and the Atmosphere of Violence
20. Excursus 4: The State of Unrest
Conclusion: Notes from the Tumult
Biography
Illan rua Wall is Reader at the University of Warwick Law School, UK.
"Throughout 2020 and into 2021, dissent has increased around governmental strategies and their concomitant police powers. To understand these events and their governance, we need a careful, creative and intelligent book such as Law and Disorder." – Alison Young, University of Melbourne, Australia (Social and Legal Studies, 2021)
"We emerge from the book all the richer for having been immersed in this eloquent and imaginative account of the theorist as flaneur of crowded spaces." – Emilios Christodoulidis, University of Glasgow, UK (Law & Literature, 2021)
"For those readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading Illan rua Wall’s highly original brand of critical legal theory: you are in for a real treat. Paradoxically, this jostling theoretical maelstrom of a book makes you sit still in wonder. By turns funny, erudite, playful and intensely creative on every single page, this is a masterful account of atmosphere, of the politics of the crowd, and of sovereignty." – Ben Golder, University of New South Wales, Australia
"Law and Disorder is many books. It is a theory of protest, an exploration of the shifting affects of crowds, a methodological weapon and a moving manual for resistance. It explores the subversion of sovereignty as well as the ways that it makes itself present. It is best read with an openness to the political quality of Wall’s writing and its destabilising reimagining of possibilities." – Carolina Olarte, University of the Andes, Bogota, Colombia
"This is a rare feat of a book, managing to be both politically rousing and affectively engaging, both revolutionary and quietly eavesdropping on the world’s goings-on. Illan rua Wall has produced a text of deep sensitivity, enabling us to rethink the atmospheric affects of public order as an integral part of the sovereign mechanism; placing crowds and protest at the core of the affective life of the populace." – Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster, UK
"From order to disorder, from the sovereign to the crowd, from constituted to constituent. This is the disorderly order of resistance Law and Disorder analyses and performs. Wall’s book is a scholarly achievement, a manual for dissidents and an almanac of warnings for the state. Apollinaire created the calligram, poems that illustrate their meaning. Wall has created the (dis)ordergram: a book that performs the disorder of order." - Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
