Talal Asad
Definition.com
Just war is not merely an expression of organized violence, but that powerful nations are able to decide for themselves whether an event is to be treated as a 'war crime'.
Definition.com
The State is an autonomous structure that regulates, represents, and protects a community of citizens when they are at war.
Definition.com
Statistics is associated with a zeal to reform society, how to grasp a complex and changing whole from the knowledge of parts.
Definition.com
Suicide bombing is an act of 'passionate identification' and an unbearable intimacy shared in the final moments of individuals.
Definition.com
Suicide bombing is, as a phenomenon, less about why suicide bombers commit suicide bombing than about why we are so fascinated with it.
Definition.com
Terrorism is an idea whose pervasiveness is the achievement not so much of the individual militant who attacks particular targets as it is of the government (legislators, bureaucrats, police, and judges), civil society (including scientist, lawyers, intellectuals and the media) and the market (the sale of technology and expertise).
Definition.com
Terrorism is, for the U.S., a concern extending well beyond al-qaida. It involves creating structural, and hence, permanent, institutions for constructing 'threat', for identifying the source of said 'threat', and responding to it as a vulnerability in modern society.
Definition.com
Terrorism is, in the form of suicide bombing, an act of 'passionate identification' - the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments.
Definition.com
Tradition is not an essentialized repudiation of change but as a socially organized mode of transmitting knowledge and power.
Definition.com
Tradition is not something a man can learn... not a thread he picks up when he feels like it... any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.
Definition.com
Translation is a process whereby weaker third world nations are more likely to submit to forcible translation distortions than the other way around.