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F W Guest Memorial Lecture 1989: Commissions of Inquiry

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Abstract

Commissions of inquiry have long been a part of the machinery of government. In this lecture Sir Ivor examines the process of commissions of inquiry and their investigations. The lecture identifies the various forms of inquiry, their purpose (whether advisory or investigative), and explains their close relationship with the courts. Sir Ivor then turns to discuss his experience of inquiry processes in chairing three governmental inquiries: the Committee of Inquiry into Inflation Accounting, the Committee of Inquiry into Solicitors Nominee Companies, and the Royal Commission on Social Policy.

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The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.
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