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- Convenors:
-
Jessica Cooper
(University of Edinburgh)
Tobias Kelly (University of Edinburgh)
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- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What happens to our understanding of responsibility when we think through notions of complicity?
Long Abstract:
Scholarship across political anthropology has engaged the concept of responsibility as a local and analytical concept that stitches together legal and moral systems (Cooper 2018; Dave 2014; Davis 2012; Jain 2006; Kelly 2011; Lambek 2010; Nelson 2009; Trinka and Trundle 2014; Wright 2018). Much of this work focuses on responsibility as a form of liberal governance and ideology; a precisely demarcated set of individualised causal relations through which the potentiality of justice under liberal law emanates. Ethnographic work has also shown the vast complexities of negotiations around the meaning of responsibility in different contexts. But what happens to our understanding of responsibility when we think through notions of complicity: a sense of our mutual involvement with others in the perpetration of harm? This panel asks what forms of ethical relation might overlap and depart from an analytical and empirical focus on responsibility. It offers a consideration of complicity as an ethical, social and political relation that can run through, across or adjacent to claims of responsibility. We ask what ethical imperatives and relationships are brought into view when we foreground complicities across different scales? What are the limits of a concept like complicity? And how might turning to complicity help us to make better sense of the everyday negotiation of ethics and politics across ethnographic sites?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper critically examines three different ways Norway’s responsibility for refugees stranded in Greece has been framed by volunteers demanding political action: 1) a liberal cosmopolitan discourse, 2) a national exceptionalism discourse, and 3) a more vaguely articulated complicity discourse
Paper long abstract:
As Trnka and Trundle (2017) observe, claims of absence or lack of care regularly become the basis for attributions of particular forms of responsibility, namely blame and culpability. However, when it comes to refugee advocacy, such claims have a tendency to deflect these concerns, by erasing the political and historical linkages between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and neglecting complex questions regarding activists’ personal entanglements with the border regime. This paper draws on my doctoral fieldwork, where I followed a Norwegian volunteer organisation working in refugee camps in Greece, across time and space, and at home and abroad, for more than eighteen months. The paper examines volunteers’ efforts to extend or “scale up” (Ben-Yehoyada, 2016) their care for refugees in Greece by appealing to the Norwegian state’s responsibility to help and, specifically, evacuate children and families from the notorious Moria camp on Lesvos island. Focusing on the volunteers’ political campaigns and testimonies, I outline three different, but partly overlapping, ways in which Norway’s responsibility for refugees in Greece is framed and articulated: 1) a liberal cosmopolitan discourse, 2) a Norwegian exceptionalism discourse (Gullestad, 2006; Loftdottir and Jensen, 2012), and 3) an emerging, and more vaguely articulated, complicity discourse. The paper analyses the moral and political assumptions and effects of these discourses, paying specific attention to their various entanglements with hegemonic national narratives and “the politics of pity” (Arendt). I conclude by reflecting on my own difficulties navigating this discursive terrain as a scholar seeking to engage with both academic and public audiences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the way the compromised and compromising circumstances of prisons in the south present tough challenges for reformers and researchers drawing us into relations of structural and sometimes personal complicity and knocking us off balance.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, drawing on almost two decades of work studying prisons and prison reform practices in so-called developing countries, I explore the potential of the concept ‘compromised circumstances’ to help illuminate the dilemmas and contradictions associated with changing prisons and preventing torture. The focus is on the way the compromised and compromising circumstances of prisons present tough challenges for reformers and researchers drawing us into relations of structural and sometimes personal complicity and knocking us off balance. Research conducted in and around prisons in the global south presents a harsh, stark, troubling image of the circumstances confronting would-be reformers. Climates of misery, political contestation, secrecy, varying degrees of deprivation, stuckness, exhaustion and foreboding are a poor match for the imaginary abstractions and reductive understandings about knowledge, rules and professionalism that often inform reform interventions. I will consider how, confronted by embedded practices of mundane violence and punishment under conditions of poverty and socio-political volatility and conflict, tried and tested modes of intervention cannot be expected to work as effectively as they are imagined to under conditions of liberal democratic peace and welfare. While rights and health-based entry points to the prevention of torture (and prison reform more generally) plausibly make sense under certain optimal circumstances, when confronted by the compromised circumstances of many prison climates something else may be called for. What that something is remains an open question that calls for collective imagination and a rethinking of notions of responsibility, accountability, independence and complicity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the strategies of lawyers and activists struggling to render accountable the EU and Italy for policies of ‘contactless’ refoulement of migrants in the Mediterranean. It explores the juridification of notions of ‘enabling’ harm creation beyond immediate causation.
Paper long abstract:
The EU’s support to the Libyan Coast Guard (LYCG) and Libyan authorities in the realm of migration control has enabled the establishment of a regime of ‘contactless’ control of European authorities over migrants fleeing from Libya. The ‘contactless’ nature of this externalization of control designates the fact that the delegation of the actual ‘handling’ of migrants on their journey also enables an externalization of liability. The difficulties of demonstrating effective control as well as the limits of European jurisdiction render Human Rights claims for these types of violations challenging. Through the description of the struggles of lawyers attempting to address Italian and EU responsibility in relation to crimes committed by the LYCG and injustices endured by migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, this paper discusses their turn to argumentations of administrative and financial complicity of Italy and the EU for their support to the LYCG. I examine two claims: one made to the European Court of Auditors for the mismanagement of EU Funds for their support to ‘Integrated Border Management in Libya’ and another, made to the Supreme Administrative Court in Italy for the misuse of development funds for the enhancement of Libyan authorities’ capacity to intercept migrants at sea. I argue that the multiplication of legal spheres in which attempts to address the nefarious consequences of Europe’s externalization of migration control, is part of a growing trend to put the role of ‘enabling’ (rather than direct causation) at the center of political debates on allocations of responsibility for harm creation.