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Paper short abstract:

Drawing from courtroom ethnography, this paper analyses how activists seek to transform the (legal) structure of feeling around Palestine in Berlin. "History" becomes the mediator of tensions between law and legitimacy, between the need to resist imperial-colonial violence and the legality thereof.

Paper long abstract:

In August 2020, a Palestinian and two Israeli-Jewish anti-colonial activists were taken to the criminal court of Berlin, Germany, for disrupting an event with a member of the Israeli Knesset, they deemed complicit in the 2014 military assault on Gaza. Attempting to subvert the logic of the court, the three defendants declared that they stood in front of the judge “as the accuser, not the accused” (Mondoweiss, 2019), turning the court into a stage of their own, with the purpose to address Israeli human rights violations and Germany’s complicity in them. Indeed, whatever the verdict of the judge, the People’s Tribunal that took place simultaneously, already declared “History” to be the ultimate authority over the legitimacy of their actions.

This presentation draws from courtroom ethnography of the trial of the #Humboldt3 to analyse how the three activists seek to transform the structure of feeling around Palestine, from the geopolitical location of Berlin. ‘History’ becomes the mediator of the tension that arises between ‘law’ and ‘legitimacy’, between the need to resist imperial-colonial violence and the legality thereof; one that People’s Tribunals grapple with (Çubukçu 2018), while at the same time affirming the activists’ transcendental moral position (Scott 2020). As such, the two courts in Berlin can provide an insight into how activist navigate and hope to transform the meaning of law and legitimacy in the present, within the grand durée of History.

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Paper short abstract:

In 2001 magical-religious witches in the United Kingdom celebrated the 50th anniversary of the repeal of archaic witchcraft legislation as an enabling moment for modern witchcraft. This ethnographic paper examines how legal acts can be shaped retrospectively to generate world-making.

Paper long abstract:

It is a matter of the historical record that the last vestiges of punitive legislation against witchcraft in the United Kingdom was removed from the statute books on June 22 1951. Remaining anxieties about the need to protect the population from dishonest fortune-tellers were allayed by a brand new law, the Fraudulent Mediums Act. In the summer of 2001 practitioners of modern magical-religious witchcraft traditions celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of this event. Many saw it as an enabling moment that had allowed witchcraft to emerge from the shadows, although it is arguable that its significance is retrospectively shaped. In this ethnographic paper I show how the creation of a key event for modern witches in 2001 provides an illustration of the role of law in world making. It is a marker for an event that created the conditions for the birth of a modern movement; it provides a pivotal moment between an unsubstantiated deep history and a richly recorded recent one; and provides the framework for witchcraft as a modern new religious movement framed through legal-rights discourses.

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Paper short abstract:

While unpacking the ontological assumptions entrenched to the imperatives for attributing 'legal personhood' to water and the specificities of 'worlding' that emanates from it, this paper alludes to the possibilities of going beyond it by way of attending to the dynamics of relational intra-action.

Paper long abstract:

Within the broader corpus of 'rights of nature' discourses and the emerging paradigm of 'earth jurisprudence', there has been a significant thrust on bestowing 'legal personhood' to rivers and other waterbodies. This proposed paper seeks to unpack the nuances entailed in the intent and implications stemming from the very enterprise of attributing 'legal personhood' to water. Indeed, the politico-legal imaginary of 'rights' and 'legal personhood' calls for a specific kind of 'worlding'; however, the personification of water is not new as rivers have long been viewed as 'living being' in several of the indigenous cosmologies. Nonetheless, the codification of 'personhood' in formal terms certainly open up a problem-space for analyzing the onto-epistemic embedding of legal discourses. At the ontological plane, the modernist juridical frame of 'personhood' invokes the imaginary of an individuated and seemingly 'independent' legal subject, thus any attempt of fitting the aqueous ecology into the given scheme fails to account for the porousness and permeability that remains at the heart of our inter/intra-connected existence as watery beings. While problematizing the assumptions entrenched to the imperative for taking a recourse to 'rights' and promulgation of 'legal personhood', this paper alludes to far more radical possibilities that can be unleashed by way of reckoning and redeeming a conscious gaze towards our inevitable porosity as watery beings. Expanding the legal imaginary by way of forging plurilogue among and across diverse onto-epistemological framings of watery embodiment lays the ground for pluriversal worlding of the 'hydrocommons' thriving upon intra-actional relationalities.

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Paper short abstract:

There is no ready-made path towards abolition or any other form of liberation. This paper compares the practices of activists from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas with the practices of 2020 protests in the U.S. to discuss the problems of (and continued desire for) a global how-to model of abolitionism.

Paper long abstract:

There is no ready-made path towards abolition or any other form of liberation. Attempts at creating a “how-to” scholarship for social change, such as the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, have been critiqued as a form of performative activism that superficially insulates privileged communities and talks down to marginalized communities. The question, then, is: how do scholars facilitate and encourage the practical deconstruction of unjust systems across the globe without re-creating a hegemonic vernacular? For example, abolitionist models found in the U.S. and elsewhere, such as defunding or abolishing the police, may have implications for Brazil’s unique problem of demilitarizing the police. Rather than being authorized by local municipalities like in the U.S., Brazil’s federally funded military police would require nothing short of a constitutional amendment to disrupt the problematic hierarchy of tactics that is responsible for thousands of police-caused homicides each year. Furthermore, Brazil’s antiprohibicionistas (or anti-prohibitionist) movement is focused on the backdoor solution of legalizing all drugs rather than outright police abolition and piecemeal drug legalization found in the U.S.. This paper compares the practices of activists from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas with the practices of activists who participated in 2020 racial justice protests in the U.S. to discuss the problems of (and continued desire for) a global how-to model of abolitionist mobilization.

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Paper short abstract:

With growing global interaction and artistic creativity, intellectual property law, based on national legislation, remains of limited benefit for many social actors. The paper discusses the impact of uncommoning that encourages legal uncertainty but also innovative practices despite obstacles.

Paper long abstract:

Imitation is often at the beginning of creativity and innovation, especially when creativity is considered a practice of commoning through which social actors provide for their products’ collective consumption and use. From a legal point of view, however, the resulting work is considered either the exclusive property of a creator, or this individual is accused of having committed theft of someone else’s intellectual property. This process of uncommoning, also called judicialisation, is justified by the classical assumption that its legal proprietors have invested time, energy and means in their creation and remuneration will be an incentive for further creativity. It ignores that all creations are based on existing work.

In this paper I argue that the daily practices of local actors are more complex than the legal regulations provide for. Rather than building on the binary of law and free creative activity, or otherwise, structural constraints versus individual agency, I understand what happens here as the social interaction of various competing stakeholders involved in an arena of interests. Some stakeholders pursue their interests more successfully than others and even influence law makers, some lose, while others creatively appropriate regulations to invent new genres or find their own more flexible ways of managing their projects. This paper draws from ethnographic research on intellectual property in Sino-Malian private business cooperation, and more recently on music in Nigeria, and African activities in Asian countries at the interface of mutual trust, inspiration, and cooperation in spaces beyond the immediate focus of intellectual property law.