Short Abstract

This panel explores how atmospheres shape political and legal processes. We investigate recent ethnographic work on affective governance and invite papers that analyse how atmospheres are created, maintained, and transformed in contemporary sites of political and legal contestation.

Long Abstract

In recent years, political and legal anthropologists have begun to expand the scope of what constitutes the field of politics and law. Beyond the study of discourses, institutions, and practices, anthropologists increasingly speak of politics and law in terms of ‘affect’ and 'atmosphere'. They study how people subjectively experience political and legal situations, and how these experiences are shaped by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation.

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are more than the sum of their parts, yet they profoundly shape how people think, speak, and act in political and legal contexts. From courtrooms to protest sites, from bureaucratic offices to border zones, atmospheres govern how bodies arrange themselves and perform – or fail to perform – in these spaces.

This panel aims to explore how atmospheres function as a form of governance in contemporary political and legal life. We are particularly interested in how atmospheres are created, maintained, and transformed in contexts marked by political polarisation, democratic backsliding, or the erosion of the rule of law. How do specific atmospheres enable or constrain political and legal agency? How can ethnographic methods help us analyse these often intangible yet powerfully felt dimensions of political and legal processes?

We invite papers that empirically explore the atmospheric dimensions of politics and law through an ethnographic lens, examining sites of contestation, reconciliation, or transformation where atmospheres play a crucial role in shaping political and legal realities.