Paper short abstract:

My contribution will consist in conceiving decolonial legal anthropology as a tool for enhancing the progressive potential of the law and amplifying subaltern voices.

Paper long abstract:

What are the affordances of decoloniality for legal anthropology? In this presentation, I draw on my experience (1) teaching legal anthropology to students destined to work for International Organisations and (2) researching international legal regimes to articulate some suggestions for decolonizing our sub-discipline and for increasing its political relevance in today’s world. I argue that the main contribution of anthropology to the study of international law lies in its capacity to capture power dynamics that are hidden from view by studies that merely focus on the flat surface of ‘black letter law’. If decolonization is primarily concerned with rethinking and reframing epistemologies that preserve the Europe-centered colonial lens, a decolonial legal anthropology could consist in systematically documenting the various ways in which justice seekers around the world are both constrained and empowered by international legal processes. In conversation with Third World Approaches to International Law, anthropologists can reveal how the colonial legacies of international legal regimes manifest in specific contexts and use their White privilege to amplify voices from the Global South who bear the burden of the inequalities that such regimes tend to perpetuate. They can also disclose the ‘cracks in the system’ that could be used to further advance the cause of progressive social movements. In short, I consider decolonial legal anthropology as a tool for enhancing the progressive potential of the law, magnifying subaltern voices while sensitizing decision-makers to the hierarchies that are often sustained in legal regimes that explicitly aim to achieve justice in the world.

Paper short abstract:

I discuss how the historically defined ontological human-nature relationship of small-scale fishing is at stake in claiming the moral rights of access to resources in Cap de Creus MPA against other maritime activities. This requires anthropologists' firm activism with the help of FAO SSF Guidelines.

Paper long abstract:

The socio-ecological embeddedness in Cap de Creus establishes fishing rights considering human-nature interdependencies throughout the time that articulates claims of tenure rights of the fishing communities against other maritime activities and environmental degradation.

The nuances of artisanal SSF are not reflected in legal texts that collide with social conceptions. While the legal conception includes certain techniques, a specific length, a net limit and fishing rights in certain maritime zones, artisanal fishing condenses different social representations according to the place associated with an expertise that entails a relationship with the natural environment linked to a common cultural substratum and that has passed from generation to generation.

Legal standardization in fishing regulation at the national or European level does not consider spatial, ecological and cultural specificities, resulting in a gap between legal norms and social practices adapted to environmental reality and cultural knowledge. This legal pluralism in the regulation and access to resources, coexisting in the same maritime space, highlights the "complex normative orders" composed of state (and supra-state) law, on the one hand, and customary law, on the other. I discuss how socio-cultural values embedded in this complex socio-ecological feedback, underpinned by the historically defined ontological human-nature relationship, are at stake in claiming moral rights of access to resources. This requires anthropologists' firm commitment, engagement and activism with the help of The FAO Voluntary SSF Guidelines. Guidelines that recognise small-scale fisheries’ tenure rights as a way to promote small-scale fishers’ stewardship over resources.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution reflects upon the lawsuit against the German Foreign Ministry for not returning Sudanese passports after the outbreak of war and thus capturing people in a warzone. It discusses the discrepancy between analyzing citizenship as practice and the superiority of citizenship as status.

Paper long abstract:

Shortly after the war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, the European states evacuated their citizens from Sudan. Various Western embassies were closed and evacuated – e.g., Germany, France, the UK, and the US – but kept the passports of Sudanese citizens who had before applied for visas and whose passports were stuck in the respective embassies. The passport holders were thus unable to cross the borders and caught in war. As an activist group, we campaigned against this procedure and pressed charges against the German Foreign Ministry.

This contribution reflects upon this lawsuit and the related process. After conducting one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, on Sudan’s revolutionary movement resisting the military coup d’état in 2021, I analyzed the resistance as practices of citizenship. By enacting rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, I thought the revolutionaries enacted citizenship against the military occupation that denied them these rights.

The events after the war outbreak shed new light on citizenship. Experiencing the already known superiority of neo-colonial power structures and the resulting global citizenship inequality made me question the analytical approach for my ethnography. How can we analyze the subversive power of citizenship as practice when it is citizenship as status that rules over the “naked life”? What is the Arendtian “right to have rights”, if even this most fundamental right is denied? And, most importantly, what can “engaged anthropology” do to challenge the global order of citizenship?

Paper short abstract:

Legal anthropology finds itself in a double bind: we seek both to distance ourselves from Eurocentric legal concepts and instead centre our work on emic notions of justice, and to find a common language with legal scholars and practitioners who deploy the law onto the social groups we work with.

Paper long abstract:

My intervention to this Roundtable seeks to reckon with the double bind that legal anthropology finds itself in: on the one hand, we seek to displace Eurocentric legal assumptions from our analyses and instead to engage with the notions of justice espoused by the people with whom we conduct our research. On the other hand, we aim for wider political relevance, especially among legal practitioners, even as our analyses question their assumptions. The first challenge is compounded by the fact that the people in the field might conflate law and moralities, especially when it comes to vernacular justice. I will exemplify this conundrum through my experience at a workshop on the topic of arranged marriages with judges from across Europe as part of a wider European Judicial Training Network conference. One of the debates was, for instance, whether matrimonial exchanges constitute a transaction, and if so, then is the spouse ‘sold’ into marriage? Moreover, is not the role of the legal system to prevent such transactions and ‘save’ young women from such marriages? The answers to these questions were anything but straightforward, but I’d like to argue that such debates, while uneasy, enable us to reflect on the two distinct emic notions of justice that shape our analyses, i.e., those of our research participants and those of legal practitioners who regulate their lives, and, further, on how we might render these notions mutually intelligible while also 'decolonizing' the field along with our analytical practices.

Paper short abstract:

The political discussion on the regulation of multinational enterprises to prevent the harmful impact of their activities in the Global South has faded into technicalities. Analyzing its consequences is a form of resistance to the instrumentalization of human rights standards by MNEs?

Paper long abstract:

Can adverse human rights impacts in extractive industries in host countries like Peru can be effectively addressed by mandatory human rights due diligence legislation (mHRDD) enacted by home countries like Germany?

Through legal ethnography my research aims to provide insights into what is transpiring within the corporate world in the process of complying with human rights standards such as the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Law (LkSG), as well as the responses of affected communities to these practices.

Based on the result of previous comparative research on mHRDD, I will delve deeper into how human rights are integrated into corporate practices and made functional to corporate objectives. What are the internal mechanisms that enable the instrumentalization of human rights standards by MNEs? How are these processes of instrumentalization contested by rights-holders in attempts to mobilize emancipatory aspirations of human rights? How do the technicalities of the LkSG contribute to expertise construction, shape global governance in value chains, and create knowledge relations (Latour 2004; Riles 2005; Valverde 2009)?

The puzzle holds a deeply personal dimension: How do I respond to questions about standards with emancipatory aspirations when I have directly witnessed the oppression these standards seek to mitigate? How is my identity as a Latin American migrant woman reinforced or re-defined in the task of analyzing human rights norms from the Global North with universal aspirations? Is my research project itself a form of resistance to (or activism against) the instrumentalization of human rights standards by MNEs?

Paper short abstract:

I share insights from feminist anthropology, including Strathern’s 1987 “awkward relationship” analysis, and my 40 years of research with self-identified Maasai communities in Tanzania, to explore the challenges and limits of decoloniality for “engaged” forms of legal anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Both “engaged” anthropology and calls to “decolonize” the field have longer histories that trace and reflect different (and sometimes competing) priorities, purposes, forms of knowledge creation, ethnographic modalities, and power relations. Recent (actually, renewed) mandates to “decolonize” the discipline of anthropology both complement and challenge some of the premises of engaged modes of anthropological research and scholarship, including the positionings of the researcher, relationships between the anthropologist and the communities with whom they work, preferred (even possible) ethnographic methods, theories of knowledge production, and forms of scholarly communication.

The tensions between calls to “engage” and “decolonize” are especially heightened in the subfield of legal anthropology, with its focus on rights and justice, power disparities, forms of advocacy and activism, the creation and contestation of norms, law as a weapon used by and against marginalized social groups, and other topics central to our comparative understanding of how power, difference, and justice function in the world.

I highlight these productive tensions and propose some theoretical and methodological ways forward, by drawing on insights from feminist anthropology (including Marilyn Strathern’s somewhat dated but still prescient analysis of the “awkward relationship” between feminism and anthropology) and experiences from my almost 40 years of research with self-identified Maasai communities in Tanzania, especially two recent legal anthropology book projects on indigenous advocacy and gender justice.

Paper short abstract:

Slovo Park's struggle for upgrades persisted despite legal victories. Exposing challenges, including a 2024 insight into romanticised community collaboration, my presentation navigates frictions in community, intersectionality, and activism, critically addressing community complexities.

Paper long abstract:

For two decades, residents of Johannesburg's Slovo Park endured government abuse, facing demolition and eviction threats. In 2014, with the support of the Slovo Park Community Development Forum and the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, the community forced the City of Johannesburg to apply for funding under the 2004 Upgrading of Informal Settlements Program. But despite the Johannesburg High Court ordering the grant application in April 2016 and the formal installation of electricity in 2018, little has changed for Slovo Park. During my research from 2022 to 2024, the community's struggle to secure upgrading funding persisted.

In a 2024 conversation with an attorney about the settlement's land history, the emphasis on community collaboration "every step of the way" was notable. While I generally advocate for a politically engaged approach rooted in ongoing community collaboration in research, this comment, coupled with my research observations, unveiled a specific notion of a community guided by ideas of connectedness, unity, and harmony. This raises questions: Who holds the authority to speak and make claims in community meetings, and who participates in the legal process? How do different citizenship or residency statuses, along with varying lengths of residence in Slovo Park, impact residents differently in the event of settlement upgrades?

Using Slovo Park as a case study, this presentation examines potential frictions in emphasizing community collaboration, intersectionality, and activist scholarship. This exploration does not undermine the necessity of these three practices but seeks to critically engage with the challenges that arise in addressing them.

Paper short abstract:

At a time when (liberal) law fails to deliver on its promises, this talk examines ways to aspire to justice beyond the procedural and carceral logics. I will draw on a decade of ethnographic research in Turkey on judicial activism in a variety of areas (human, digital, and environmental rights).

Paper long abstract:

The law has served as both a tool and a site for rights activism in response to state and corporate atrocities, ranging from human rights violations to invasive surveillance technologies to violent dispossession of human and non-human environments. At a time when many abolitionist, black, and brown scholars have criticized liberal law for failing to deliver on its promises, what does it mean to mobilize legal mechanisms to address injustices and build for just futures? This talk speculates about ways to aspire for justice beyond the procedural and carceral logics of legal mechanisms, which might eventually amount to a decolonial legal anthropology. In thinking about justice with and beyond the law, I will draw on my decade of ethnographic research in Turkey on judicial activism in various domains (human, digital, and environmental rights).