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Accepted Paper:

"Peace, not justice": debating the possible in Papua New Guinea  
Melissa Demian (University of St Andrews)

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses Papua New Guinea’s village courts as public forums in which moral possibilities unfold in open debate, in contrast with the metropolitan view that these courts have no role to play in the seeking of justice.

Paper long abstract:

Papua New Guinea has a very scant record of sustained collective political action, due at least in part to the country's renowned internal diversity and a certain politics of distrust that have developed since independence in 1975. Papua New Guineans tend instead to voice their hopes and concerns for the future in other public forums, such as in church - and in court, which at the village level is a public forum of the most openly accessible kind. But village courts are also highly constrained forums for action, in part because of their limited jurisdiction, but also because of the very low expectations of what is possible to do in these courts among the country's elites. In the words of one highly-placed legal official in PNG, village courts can only achieve "peace, not justice" - either because justice is unachievable in a setting as unstructured as the village court, or because rural Papua New Guineans have no concept of the just. It is the latter implication I take up in this paper, as the evidence from my own work in the village courts suggest that this is precisely where not only does something recognisable as "a public" manifest in PNG, but where notions of the good, the just, and the right are offered up for public debate and discussion. Rather than foreclosing on the possibility of justice, then, the village courts are one of the few successful institutions in PNG in which a just future is conceivable.

Panel Tem05
Righteous futures: morality, temporality, and prefiguration
  Session 1