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- Convenors:
-
Olaf Zenker
(Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
Jonas Bens (Universität Hamburg)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH103
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions on contested issues of justice in Africa, which aim at interrogating both the affective and emotional groundings of such senses of justice and the role that rural ("traditional") and urban ("modern") imaginations play in rooting such groundings in African space.
Long Abstract:
Recent scholarship on local contestations of justice in Africa, partly inflected by transnationally travelling discourses, has highlighted the need to interrogate both the specific normative framings of justice and the broader political, economic, social and cultural contexts, in which conflicts around senses of justice are enmeshed. Quite often, frictions within local (re)negotiations of justice have been framed in terms of divergent rural and urban imaginations, frequently mapped - both by local actors and observing researchers (e.g. Mamdani) - onto tensions between multiple traditionalities and modernities. While making crucial contributions regarding the in/commensurabilities of various justice formations, their affective and emotional dimension - that is, the realm of "sentiments of justice" - has typically been neglected. Yet these sentiments of justice are arguably crucial for the actual power of normative orientations to attract or antagonise actors, because such sentiments ground and orient perceptions of justice with an intensity, which is often hard to grasp or explain, but nevertheless very real in its consequences. Against this backdrop, this panel invites contributions on disputed issues of justice in Africa, which aim at interrogating both the affective and emotional groundings of such contested senses of justice and the role that rural ("traditional") and urban ("modern") imaginations play in rooting such groundings in African space.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Cases of paternity denial can evoke intense emotional responses in Malawian magistrates’ courts. This paper will explore the ways in which magistrates strive to cut through raised voices, tears, and frayed tempers in order to deliver ‘justice’.
Paper long abstract:
Cases of paternity denial can evoke intense emotional responses in Malawian magistrates' courts. From the child's purported parents and wider kin to the officials charged with assisting them in their dispute, no-one is immune to the emotional pull of the young child in need of nurture; the misery of the woman who hoped her partner would rejoice at the news of her pregnancy; the anger and betrayal of the wife whose husband is accused of fathering another women's child; or the sense of injustice carried by the man who believes himself to have been falsely accused of adultery. This paper will explore the ways in which magistrates strive to cut through raised voices, tears, and frayed tempers in order to deliver a form of justice that will, ideally, both meet with the approval of the disputants and satisfy the needs of the child. In the absence of resources for biomedical paternity testing, magistrates might employ "traditional" methods of testing for paternity and the viability of so called modern and "village" approaches feed into tense contestations over what constitutes a just response to the situation at hand.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores local dialogue spaces in Côte d’Ivoire and reveals how top-down justice can potentially facilitate local justice in post-conflict settings. The concept of dialogue as a tool for justice is critically examined and a framework of holistic humanising dialogue is proposed.
Paper long abstract:
Cote d'Ivoire, whose once-president Laurent Gbagbo is the first former head of state to stand trial at the ICC, provides critical insights into the interactions of both international and local justice in peacebuilding processes. While international interventions in Côte d'Ivoire have garnered attention, the Ivoirian political sphere has also been closely tied to 'street discussion spaces' (éspaces de discussion de rue), urban networks of community-level sites that both diffused political messages and incited actions. This paper draws from a 2014 qualitative study on dialogue in street discussion spaces, including 30 participant interviews and over 118 observation hours in 40 different spaces that draw out opinions on dialogue, justice and peace from both sides of the Ivoirian political divide.
Findings show that street discussion spaces engaged in peacebuilding activities through 1) creating associations to enact local development projects 2) employing and reinventing 'traditional' strategies of conflict resolution and 3) providing alternative spaces for learning and intergenerational interaction. However participants did not necessarily view their actions as contributing to peace or justice and felt that ICC judgement and public forgiveness by key politicians constituted the sole pathway to enduring peace. Drawing from Paulo Freire, Martin Buber and African humanism, the paper argues that 'local' peacebuilding and justice mechanisms that rely on community-based dialogue must not overlook the importance of 'top down' justice for local actors. A concept of humanising dialogue provides a framework that can link local dialogue and understanding with national and international justice processes.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research, the paper discusses experiences of dam-caused displacements in rural Sudan and explores how sentiments of justice/injustice are expressed in terms of international normative orders and calls for responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
With the support of foreign companies, the Sudanese government is currently pursuing to implement "high modernist" hydrological projects for the development of the Sudan. The dam-affected peasant communities in the northern Nile Valley were promised a better future in "modern cities" located in places far away from the Nile. While the people were struggling for just modalities of compensation and for receiving feasible resettlement options around the future lake, the river Nile was impounded and flooded the inhabited villages.
Confronted with destruction and crisis, the forcibly evicted inhabitants expressed their feelings of alienation, fear and anger at the dispossession and displacement in terms of human rights and calls for accountability.
The paper explores the political context and sentiments of injustice and the way how these are translated into claims of liability and compliance with internationally standardized norms of human rights and resettlement. Referring to "notions of responsibility" (J. Eckert 2016), I will argue that not only governments are regarded as responsible for harmful actions but also corporate actors. I will show that the search for justice, that is grounded in experiences of being drowned out, finally translated into legal action as form of protest. Together with a German NGO, representatives of the displaced people filed a criminal complaint against the managers of the German dam-building company in Frankfurt am Main.
Paper short abstract:
An insight into the “affective trajectories” through which Maasai express their unwillingness to accept climate change as a new hegemonic explanatory framework, reveals that – as they argue – it is not the climate they fear, but the politics of land perpetuated by the Tanzanian government.
Paper long abstract:
In the course of time, an array of transnational (development) discourses has travelled to Maasailand, ideas that have, in some way or another, played into conflicting ideas about justice that have often been underpinned by binary imaginations of "tradition" and "modernity". One such new travelling development discourse is the Adaptation to Climate Change Paradigm, which has sparked heated debates about justice, the value of different knowledge systems, and more crucially, about land rights. On the basis of fourteen months of fieldwork carried out among the Maasai in northern Tanzania, I wish to explore the conflicting "sentiments of justice" that are brought about by this new discourse between NGOs, the national government and the Maasai at the grassroots. While the Tanzanian government appeals to the industrialized world for international climate justice, the Maasai instead strive for national justice. An insight into the "emotional and affective trajectories" through which Maasai from the grassroots express their unwillingness to accept climate change as a new hegemonic explanatory framework, reveals that - as they argue - it is not the climate they fear, but the politics of land perpetuated by their own government.
Paper short abstract:
Memories of struggles, specifically those which have been defeated, might be passed down through generations. As young urban people in Burkina Faso were demonstrating in October 2014 in the name of Sankara, this panel invite to address the ways contentious memory has been passed on in Sub-saharan Africa.
Paper long abstract:
In "The Plebeian Experience » (2014), Breaugh relates how the popular memory, most of the times on the side of those who were defeated, has been passed on from generations to generations and has led to spontaneous uprisings that left their print in history.
Even though he has been murdered 30 years ago, Sankara remains a key figure of contentious politics and an active element in the production of collective memory (Lababre 2001). Young people who demonstrated in Ouagadougou in October 2014 against Blaise Comparore's project to run again after 27 years in office, had written on their placards "Sankara, Look at your sons. We carry on your fight". They mentioned also Norbert Zongo, a journalist of investigation murdered in 1998, even if none of them had read his articles neither taken part in 1998/2000's protests.
Burkina Faso's situation invites researchers to look at the paths contentious memory follows to remain vivid even in hostile conditions and how do they contribute to build a popular sense of justice. Which are the trails used by memory to stay alive? By which vectors, memory of the defeated struggles has been passed on to younger generations: family, media, music, school, militancy? What is its influence in contemporary social and political struggles?
If Burkina Faso has inspired this proposal, this panel intends to adopt a regional perspective. The historical figures of defeated struggles are numerous in Sub-Saharan Africa (Samory Touré, Ruben Um Nyobe, Patrice Lumumba…) (this paper has been developed in co-operation with Sylvie Capitant)