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Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Downtown Cairo in 2024-25, this paper examines how the Egyptian state governs through an affective triangle of possibility, paranoia, and self-policing — rendering constant coercion unnecessary while inadvertently opening spaces for political memory to persist.

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This paper explores the affective dimensions of authoritarian governance in post-revolution Egypt. I draw on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in conducted in Downtown Cairo, between September 2024 and September 2025, and particularly on events that unfolded during the last months of my fieldwork, following the March for Gaza and overlapping with the remembrance of the Egyptian state's massacre of civilians in 2013. In this paper, I examine how the Egyptian security apparatus operates not primarily through disciplinary mechanisms or the constant deployment of coercive force, but through what I term an affective governance triangle of possibility, paranoia, and self-policing.

Possibility is rooted in the state's capacity for violence — detention, torture, enforced disappearance — entrenched through decades of emergency rule, military laws, and an unrestrained executive. This possibility materialises in everyday encounters through the figure of the reluctant informant: anyone could be one, but everyone might not be. The resulting uncertainty generates a paranoia that embeds itself in the rhythms of daily life, leading citizens to police themselves. The triangle is self-reproducing: self-policing reinforces the fear of what remains possible, sustaining the atmospheric conditions of its own perpetuation.

Yet, the very atmosphere the state cultivates generates conditions facilitating the emergence and of the collective and personal memories of the 2011 revolution and its violent aftermath, resisting the state's efforts at material erasure. I argue that ethnographic attention to atmosphere reveals both the quotidian workings of authoritarianism and the stubborn persistence of political memory.

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Based on the Arica Victims v. Boliden Mineral case, this paper examines how affective conditions were actively produced in the courtroom to shed light on intangible yet strongly felt dimensions of environmental suffering.

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In the mid-1980s, the Swedish mining corporation Boliden Mineral sent 20,000 tonnes of mining waste to Arica, the northernmost city of Chile. Allegedly, this material was to be treated by a local company specialised in metal recycling. Nevertheless, the recycling never began, and the material ended up abandoned in the middle of what became a densely inhabited residential area. Almost three decades later, 796 residents of this area filed a lawsuit against Boliden in the Court of Skellefteå, in northern Sweden. In particular, they argued that the pollution caused by the mining waste was a cause of anxiety and concern, which, in their view, entitled them to receive compensation from Boliden.

Based on records of the hearings held in Sweden, this paper examines how affective conditions were actively produced in the courtroom to render highly intimate and elusive forms of environmental suffering visible. Focusing particularly on the interactions between lawyers and witnesses, it analyses, first, how legal actors sought to enact an emotionally charged atmosphere as a strategy to reveal harms and causal relationships that escape scientific observation. Second, it shows how these efforts were eroded not just by Boliden’s defence strategies, but also by the very sociotechnical arrangements put in place to enable the claimants’ witnesses to deliver their testimonies.

Ultimately, this presentation seeks to connect the reflection on affective governance with questions of environmental justice by empirically illustrating how the grammar of emotions is mobilised to shed light on intangible yet strongly felt dimensions of environmental suffering.

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This ethnographic study explores Muslim women’s divorce experiences in Western Thrace, Greece, focusing on how an atmosphere of political hostility towards Muslim women affect their legal experiences and how women navigate and strategically use religious and state law to reshape life after marriage.

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Drawing on ethnographic data collected last summer in Thrace, Greece, from Muslim women and lawyers specialising in divorce cases, this presentation explores the limitations of authority and the strategies available to divorced Muslim women in western Greece within the context of politics, religion and gender. It outlines the historical conditions that transformed the Muslims of Western Thrace into a religious minority, ensuring their right to freedom of religion and the application of Sharia law, yet failing to guarantee equal access to education, justice, and employment — especially for women. How does an atmosphere of political hostility towards Muslim women affect their legal experiences? These structural inequalities significantly narrow the range of options available to women who wish to divorce within legal, community and social contexts. However, the paper also highlights how women navigate, negotiate and sometimes strategically utilise religious and legal frameworks to pursue divorce and reshape their lives after marriage.

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden and Norway in 2025, I investigate how atmospheres of hostility impact the experiences of access to justice for Muslim women and how atmospheres of solidarity emerge between the social practitioners and those women, amid legal failures in gender justice

Paper long abstract

Considering the rise of nationalisms and anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe, this paper examines how large-scale atmospheres of hostility toward minority communities in Sweden and Norway shape access to justice for Muslim women. It analyses how such contexts influence the relationships and services provided by social workers, legal advisors, and activists, who support women from Muslim communities. In doing so, the paper aims to portray how atmospheres of solidarity emerge between the social practitioners and women of Muslim background, even as legal systems often fail to achieve gender justice for minority groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Uppsala, Lund, Malmö, and Oslo between spring and autumn 2025, and in-depth interviews with 25 social practitioners, this paper examines how these social actors navigate the cultural, normative and legal specificities of religious minority communities while adhering to intersectional ideals of gender equality. The analysis also explores the potentials realised in these atmospheres of solidarity, where ideas of agency and authority are located within the in-between spaces of minority communities and majority society.

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The paper explores how legal aides in Indonesia effectively manipulate atmospheres in police and court situations to support clients of patriarchal violence in the thicket of affective governance. It shows how aides’ affective practices open legal possibilities that otherwise remain inaccessible.

Paper long abstract

Saving medical evidence, going to the police to file a charge, and giving testimony at a court hearing is extremely stressful for women affected by patriarchal violence. It can result in secondary trauma in the affected person due to disbelief, victim-blaming, and repetitive confrontation with violent experiences. The process can leave victims in an uncanny and ambiguous state in often patriarchal-woven atmospheres, displayed in the selective enforcement.

Atmospheres at the court and police are not just subjectively experienced by those involved, but also effectively manipulated by legal pendamping (aides) in favor of their clients to make conflicting dynamics (un)experienceable and to successfully support them. Therefore, legal pendamping perform a central role in the prosecution process in Indonesia. They fluently move between the spaces of the crisis center, clients’ homes, and legal institutions to sense, mediate, and curate atmospheres of safety before, during, and after victim interviews and testimonies.

The paper draws on 6 months of ethnographic research at a women’s crisis center in Central Java, Indonesia. It examines pendamping’s subjective experiences of police atmospheres through the lens of their affective labor, which requires them to feel, observe, and effectively act upon the situation to create a (harmonious) condition in which clients can break the taboo and give evidence. The paper explores how aides’ affective practices open new legal possibilities in a deeply rooted patriarchal system by owning cultural atmospheric concepts such as harmony, adding to their female agency.

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This paper examines democracy as a practice constituted through conflict, affect, spatial struggle, and gendered embodiment. I show how affective governance by the Austrian state and broader political atmospheres create unequal access to democracy’s material-semiotic resources.

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Based on ethnographic research in Vienna, this paper examines democracy as a practice constituted through conflict, affect, spatial struggle, and gendered embodiment. It focuses on gatherings and campaign events of the far-right party FPÖ (Freedom Party Austria) and their youth organisation, as well as counter-protests against the FPÖ and the Identitarian Movement by Antifa groups. How do these groups experience antagonism and render it productive? How does the Austrian state shape antagonism through affective governance? I show how antagonistic communities and practices take shape through affective atmospheres, embodied and gendered practices, and physical claims to urban public space. Yet, antagonism is experienced and mobilised differently depending on one’s proximity to state power: while supporters of the FPÖ tend to experience antagonism as exhilarating and pleasurable, Antifa groups often perceive it as surveilled, and constrained. The FPÖ mobilises antagonism through confidence, joy, and coercion, whereas Antifa activists rely on secrecy, mutual care, and humour. Hence, I contribute to anthropological scholarship on antagonistic emotions beyond anger, contempt, and resentment (Leser and Spissinger 2020; Luger 2024; Katja et al. 2022; Crano 2022; Kisić-Merino 2025), and on the fraught relationship between democracy and the state (Adebanwi 2022; Greenberg 2014; Spencer 2007; Muehlebach 2012; Wedeen 2008). I analyse how political groups enact antagonism through the collective creation of affective atmospheres. Furthermore, I show how affective governance by the Austrian state and broader political atmospheres – structured by genealogies of policing and far-right normalisation – create unequal access to democracy’s material-semiotic resources.

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Based on ethnographic research in Limassol, this paper examines the Planning Amnesty as a case of atmospheric governance, showing how shared expectations, tolerance, and anticipation shaped everyday state–citizen relations long before legal formalization.

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This paper examines how political and legal authority in the Republic of Cyprus is experienced, negotiated, and reshaped through everyday atmospheres that emerge in mundane encounters with the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Limassol, the paper focuses on the so-called Planning Amnesty, a legal exception that retrospectively legalized widespread informal building practices. Rather than treating the amnesty as a top-down policy decision, the paper approaches it as the outcome of an atmospheric form of governance that preceded formal legalization. Based on ethnographic observations of everyday interactions and bureaucratic settings, the paper traces how atmospheres of tolerance, anticipation, arbitrariness, and tacit permissiveness came to structure state–citizen relations long before the amnesty was officially enacted. Citizens learned to sense these atmospheres and to act within them through practical mastery: knowing when rules could be bent, when enforcement was unlikely, and when patience or inaction would eventually be rewarded. These competencies were not articulated as political claims or acts of resistance, but emerged through repeated exposure to affective cues, material arrangements, and culturally intimate understandings of how the state operates. The paper argues that such atmospheres function as techniques of governance by shaping expectations and coordinating behavior without explicit directives. The Planning Amnesty did not merely respond to widespread informal practices but formalized an already existing, licit regime. The paper contributes to debates on law and citizenship, showing how political and legal authority is enacted through ordinary encounters rather than solely through institutions, laws, or exceptional political events.

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This paper analyzes how, just before EU accession, Polish media discourses criticized sexual harassment legislation aimed at preventing a hostile workplace atmosphere, paradoxically accusing these regulations of destroying the atmosphere at work.

Paper long abstract

In the wake of Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004, the Polish labor code was amended to include a definition of sexual harassment. According to this definition, it is illegal to create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive atmosphere of a sexual nature or related to an employee's sex. However, in the Polish press discourse, the anti-sexual harassment laws were often blamed for ruining the atmosphere at work. This paper combines historical anthropology, discourse analysis, affect theory, and studies on postsocialist transformation in East Central Europe to describe how the legislation against sexual harassment was criticized for creating an unnatural or paranoid atmosphere in the workplace. It examines how differences in sensitivity to sexual harassment were constructed through the intersecting processes of psychologization, gendering, and nationalization. American and feminist hypersensitivity was blamed for triggering a moral panic and paranoid fears of unfounded accusations – an affect that did not align with hegemonic masculinity and was therefore projected onto women or objectified as an atmosphere. By examining paranoia as both an epistemological practice and an atmosphere, the paper describes the politics of sensibilities within the discourse on sexual harassment that emerged from translating the EU directive on equal treatment for men and women into local law, as well as the accompanying fear that anti-discrimination policies would threaten national autonomy.

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This paper analyses UK port returns as a form of affective governance. Drawing on interviews with EU citizens refused entry after Brexit, it shows how legal procedures and border spaces produce atmospheres of stress, humiliation and deterrence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how affective atmospheres are produced, sustained, and mobilised in contemporary border governance, focusing on the UK practice of port returns – the refusal of entry at ports of arrival (typically airports) followed by enforced departure. In recent years, political and legal anthropology has emphasised the role of affect and atmosphere in shaping how people subjectively experience political and legal situations. We bring this sensibility to the study of port returns by foregrounding the atmospheres of refusal encounters, understood not only as emotional reactions of individuals but as collective, situational affects embedded in legal-bureaucratic processes.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with Romanian and Polish citizens disproportionately subjected to port returns after Brexit, as well as testimonies from civil society observers, we show how port return spaces – from airport holding rooms to interrogation zones – give rise to pervasive atmospheres of stress, uncertainty, humiliation, indignity and anger. These atmospheres are not incidental but are constitutive of how port return is felt, enacted, and contested in border zones, shaping people’s sense of agency and belonging.

We argue that port returns exemplify affective governance in which legal procedures and spatial organisation co-produce atmospheres aiming at deterring mobility. Negative emotions produced at the airport contribute to momentary disempowerment of border-crossers and acceptance of the return procedure. This practice ties into neoliberal migration governance by fully shifting the responsibility onto the individual, filtering out those who otherwise would be deportable in the UK, and disciplining their future mobility in a cost-efficient manner.

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This paper examines how intergenerational silence among Sudeten German refugee families shapes contemporary European imaginaries. It shows how inherited atmospheres of displacement and forgetting influence perceptions of Europe’s political and legal futures.

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This paper explores how intergenerational silence among Sudeten German refugee families shapes contemporary European imaginaries, focusing on the atmospheric dimensions of displacement and political belonging. European integration has long relied on affective atmospheres that privilege unity while marginalizing disruptive histories. Such atmospheres of selective remembering and forgetting do not simply frame political narratives—they govern which experiences become speakable, legitimate, or politically actionable.

Drawing on ethnographic research with second- and third-generation descendants of Sudeten German refugees expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II, the paper examines how these families inhabit and reproduce atmospheres of silence surrounding their past. In East Germany, socialist narratives dissolved refugee experiences into a homogenized collective identity, while in West Germany, initial recognition gradually shifted into an atmosphere in which refugee claims were treated as politically inconvenient. Across both contexts, affective governance worked to mute memories of loss, flight, and contested belonging.

For younger generations, these inherited silences create an ambivalent sense of Europe: not simply a space of integration, but an affectively charged landscape marked by unresolved displacement and uneven legal protections for those who fall outside dominant narratives. By analysing how such atmospheres are created, sustained, and subtly transformed within families and political discourse, the paper highlights the role of affect in shaping legal and political possibilities.

Foregrounding these atmospheric histories of displacement offers new insight into the crisis of memory at the heart of the European project and its implications for imagining more inclusive political futures.

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Hostile bodily gestures by migration agency officers shape suspicion in asylum appeal hearings. These affective practices have the potential to influence credibility assessments and unsettle the room, and they contribute to an understanding of how atmospheres govern asylum adjudication.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how hostile bodily language by litigating officers from the Swedish Migration Agency functions as and becomes a tool of migration governance in asylum appeal hearings in the Swedish Migration Courts. Drawing on ethnographic observations and building on Bens’ concept of the courtroom as an affective arrangement (2018), I explore how atmospheres of suspicion are produced through embodied, affected practices such as chair-rocking, rolling of eyes, tapping of pens, and strategic glances at judges. These gestures, whilst perhaps easily dismissed as isolated or deviant ‘lapses’ in professionalism, can shape the conditions under which appellants must perform credibility, narrowing and unsettling the space for testimony.

I argue that these behavioral displays contradict the purpose of a court hearing: ensuring due process and avoiding making the “wrong mistake” of denying a legitimate asylum claim (Cameron, 2018). Judges’ inaction in the face of these disturbing displays, as well as the lack of public scrutiny due to asylum hearings often happening behind closed doors, signals which actors are punished for expressing themselves freely, and which are not. Obtaining hearing access as a researcher further reveals how credibility is managed affectively: researchers must perform professionalism to be allowed, whilst the migration agency have enormous “leeway”.

These dynamics reflect broader shifts in asylum governance, intensified by pressures to expedite cases. The paper contributes to anthropological debates on atmospheres and affective governance by demonstrating that credibility is shaped not only through testimony but also through the affective environment of suspicion that permeates asylum adjudication.

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The paper examines three sites within the Supreme Court of India's complex to postulate and explicate the impact of the atmospheric conditions surrounding the bar and bench on judicial law-making and constitutional adjudication, drawing on ethnographic observation and exploration.

Paper long abstract

Stephen Legg, in his various works on the Indian colonial and postcolonial law-making and structuring, provides due emphasis on the atmospherics and geospatial organisation of spaces to examine their impact. For him, then, the atmosphere of London not only impacted the members in terms of their fashion choices but also modulated their actions and conversations. Based on the ideas and conceptual formulation of Legg, the paper looks at the atmosphere of the Supreme Court of India’s complex situated in the heart of New Delhi, the capital city. The atmospherics intervention is multi-faceted, and this paper highlights how this atmosphere, of the complex, in terms of physical geography, climate, political hotspots, discourse, shaped the conversations, mindsets and understandings of law inside the complex and in the courtrooms as a result. The law made and dictated in these courtrooms is not then based on the content and facts of the matter, but the atmospheric conditions that surround bar and bench. The paper works through ethnographic observation and exploration of four sites - Chief Justice's Court, Court Number 3, Supreme Court Bar Association Library 1, and the Food Street to note the conversations, political temperature and resultant combined force of these atmospherics to explicate the impact of atmosphere.

The paper highlights how the architecture, infrastructure, and material composition, among other facets of atmosphere, impact the functioning of India’s Apex Court, more often than the legal anthropologists and theorists recognise, therefore, magnifying the ‘atmosphere of the complex’ in the gaze of legal research.

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This paper analyses Georgia’s autocratic transition, in which legality becomes a governing agent by producing an atmospheric lawscape that generates an affective force of law, chasing and surrounding citizens and enclosing protest and social life.

Paper long abstract

Since 2024, after two decades of democratic transition of post-Soviet Georgia, the country has undergone a rapid shift toward an autocracy, erasing the legal architecture of democratic governance through the totalizing presence of legality itself - a process described as autocratic legalism (Scheppele 2018). An obsessive overproduction of laws targeting citizens, protest movements, and civil society organizations has transformed social life into a visible atmosphere of lawscapes (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015). Here, the erosion of democracy does not entail the disappearance or absence of law, but its arbitrary, parasitic, and performative restructuring into the semiotics of power and control. This engineered atmosphere of lawscape produces the affective force of law as it travels through streets, protest sites, homes, and bodies, surrounding rather than confronting. Law chases by enclosing, generating an atmosphere in which legality becomes unavoidable and omnipresent. Bodies do not merely encounter the law; they become its carriers through which legality is enacted and made visible. The law does not exist without these bodies, relying on their movements, anticipations, and fears to sustain its presence.

Drawing on long-term ethnography into protest policing, court monitoring, legislative mobilizations, and their affects, I argue that through writing, unwriting, and rewriting, law becomes both the site and the machine of a spectacular and public project of democratic ruination. Here, law does not cease to exist; rather, it governs through its performative and atmospheric presence, through which legality is learned, feared, and navigated.