Paper short abstract:

My paper deals with the legality of extra-legal killings of alleged blasphemers in Pakistan, according to those who support both legal and extra-legal punishment of the blasphemers simultaneously. The paper highlights transcendental legality of extra-legal violence drawn from religious passion.

Paper long abstract:

My paper deals with legal and extra-legal punishment of alleged blasphemers in Pakistan. While death penalty to those accused of blasphemy is sanctioned by the state, there have also been several incidents of extra-legal violence against the accused. This paper is based on ethnographic study of Khatm-e-Nabuwwat Lawyers' Forum, a group of over eight hundred lawyers who provide free legal services for their dual mission: 1) To prosecute all cases of blasphemy in Pakistan and 2) Defend the murderers of alleged blasphemers, who took the "law" in their hands, in the courts. I investigate how these lawyers justify and support both the need for the anti-blasphemy laws (inherited from the British rulers and amended by military dictator Zia-ul-Haq), and the extra-legal killings of the blasphemers simultaneously. I contend that despite apparent contradiction, the supporters of strict anti-blasphemy laws in Pakistan do not see these two ways (legal and extra-legal) of dealing with alleged/perceived blasphemy as inherently contradictory or mutually exclusive; nor do they see extra-legal killings as simply the last resort due to their frustration with ineffectiveness of the legal system. Rather, they are driven by a different (more fluid and dispersed) understanding of legality, legitimacy, and sovereignty. They draw their sense of transcendental legality from religious passion, built upon the concepts of intuitive judgment (Maarifa) and devotional love (Ishq) for the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. Consequently, they see the punishment of a blasphemer outside the "law of the land" as supplementary rather than contradictory mechanism of delivering "justice".

Paper short abstract:

Acts of Parliament in Papua New Guinea appear to occupy a particular place in the legal imaginary of the country, where they are discussed in some circles as if knowledge of the Act alone could change intimate interpersonal behaviours, in this case, domestic violence.

Paper long abstract:

Acts of Parliament in Papua New Guinea appear to occupy a particular place in the legal imaginary of the country, where they are discussed in some circles as if knowledge of the Act alone could change intimate interpersonal behaviours. The law is conceived in certain discussions as if all of its interim "levels" are erased, and the Act alone is needed to mediate between the state and its citizens. This is particularly notable where an Act is popularly regarded as a moral corrective to social action.

In this paper, I discuss the apparent "scale collapse" that many of my Papua New Guinean interlocutors seem to be imagining when they talk about the law as a mechanism for behavioural change or even a kind of social engineering. Problems that one might imagine to be social, economic, or political in nature, are very frequently attributed to the legal domain in PNG - but the legal at a national level. For example, the Lukautim Pikinini (Child) Act 2009 and Family Protection Act 2013 are a pair of Acts that are frequently cited in policy circles and in community level "awarenesses" as items of legislation whose existence alone should be sufficient for people to change violent or abusive beahviour at the level of people's family relationships. No other statutes or decisions in the country's Supreme Court, are deemed necessary - or even of particular interest. "The Act is there," someone might say, "people just need to be more aware of it."

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how Indigenous Elders and respected persons negotiate the changing nature of bail, from an administrative process to a performance-based system, for Indigenous women in southeast Queensland Indigenous sentencing courts.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous women are increasingly overrepresented in Australia's criminal justice system. To address this overrepresentation, gender-specific bail programs operate in several Queensland Indigenous sentencing courts or Murri Courts. Indigenous sentencing courts are a specialist criminal law practice that involves Elders and respected persons in the sentencing process of Indigenous peoples. In Queensland, Murri Courts first began operating in 2002 in the jurisdiction of the Brisbane Magistrates Court, before expanding to 17 locations across the state. Despite the abolition of these courts in 2012, Murri Courts continued to operate in 13 locations under the name 'Indigenous Sentencing List', until the official reinstatement of these courts in 2016. To participate in Queensland Murri Courts, defendants were required to partake in several therapeutic bail programs before their sentence was finalised. The undertaking of therapeutic bail conditions reflects a wider conceptual shift in the legal system, where bail denotes a performance-based system, rather than an administrative process. This paper explores the role of one gender-specific bail program, Women's Yarning or Talking Circles, in one southeast Queensland Murri Court. Women's Yarning Circles aim to create a space outside of court proceedings where defendants and Community Justice Group members of the same gender can build a rapport. This paper argues that gender-specific bail programs recognise the intricacies of an Indigenous woman's intersectional identity and the diverse needs of each defendant that comes before the Murri Court. This paper also examines the role of Indigenous sentencing courts in settler-colonial countries.

Paper short abstract:

The appropriation of formal law for dispute resolution among Urarina people of Amazonian Peru is examined, with a view to understanding how the very idea of the law comes into being in a so-called stateless society.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the appropriation of formal law for dispute resolution among Urarina people of Amazonian Peru. Until recently, conflicts of interest were typically resolved through the relocation of one or more parties, sometimes accompanied by overt or covert forms of violence. Over the past decade or so, however, sedentarisation and the delegation of judicial power to local authorities have encouraged people to seek restitution through legal as much as extra-legal avenues, especially through the formal denunciation or denuncia, which people deploy using the logic previously reserved for shamanic vengeance. This implies, among other things, an attempt to use law as an offensive weapon and a concerted effort to undermine the emergence of a unicentric power system. Popular recourse to legal techniques has nevertheless tended to formalise and institutionalise moral obligations, such as those associated with marriage; it has also given rise to an incipient tension between formal, state-sponsored or "ordinary" justice on the one hand, and so-called "communal" or indigenous justice on the other. I argue that an examination of this ostensible tension, and the efforts of local judges to mediate it drawing on generic principles such as "rationality" and "proportionality", provides insight into the ways in which the very idea of law comes to be understood in a context in which moral norms and expectations of conduct have been subject to very little elaboration or enforcement.

Paper short abstract:

In November 2015 the first conviction in Australia for 'female genital mutilation', or 'fgm' by an ethnic minority community, was handed down in the Supreme Court of NSW. This paper will focus on the law, justice and mutilation in the context of women's rights, multiculturalism and globalisation.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2015 the first conviction in Australia for 'female genital mutilation', or 'fgm' by an ethnic minority community, was handed down in the Supreme Court of NSW. In the case known as Magennis and Vaziri, three people were convicted of the crime of 'female genital mutilation': the mother, the midwife and the local Imam of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community. This conviction remains legally controversial, and is currently subject to appeal. Although it is unlawful in Australia to legislate in relation to particular people or groups of people, Australia's colonial history constantly reminds of repeated and painful targeting of Indigenous people, while contemporary global security concerns exhibit the sweeping effects of law and policy that permits policing of 'others'. The criminalisation of 'female genital mutilation' in all Australian States and Territories targets particular practices, but these practices are attributed to particular communities. The practices are often presumed to be Islamic and also associated erroneously with cultures or a religion that apparently sanctions the abuse of women and children through 'honour killings', 'forced marriages' and the 'mutilation' of women and girls. The law and its application and interpretation in this, and similar cases internationally, have turned on the word 'mutilation.' Drawing on the history of this legislation in Australia and the case referred to, this paper will focus on the law, justice and mutilation in the context of women's rights, multiculturalism and globalisation.

Paper short abstract:

Women in Vanuatu offer complex and nuanced understandings about the operation of women’s raets over land, demonstrating ‘vernacular’ translated, local meanings of ‘rights’. Rather than posit a set of ‘rights’ this paper explores local women’s agency in land dealings in Vanuatu so as to clarify how these ‘grounded raets’ operate for women.

Paper long abstract:

Women in Vanuatu offer complex and nuanced understandings about the operation of women’s raets (rights in Bislama) over land, demonstrating ‘vernacular’ translated, local meanings of ‘rights’ based on local relational identities, for this reason I have termed them ‘grounded raets’. Women’s land raets and agency must be interpreted with reference to power relationships, decision making and the gendered exercise of property rights and chiefly authority over landscapes. Practices of land leasing show that the agency of local women is actively contoured by interpretations of kastom, as well as the idea of land as property owned and leased by a masculine possessive individual.

Grounded raets for women are informed by ideas of appropriate kastom practice as the ‘ways of ples’, as well as to embodied and genealogical claims to ples. These vernacular ideas of raets do not equate with Western, liberal claims to equality that inform discourses around individualised human ‘rights’. Rather than posit a set of ‘rights’ this paper explores local women’s agency in land dealings in Vanuatu so as to clarify how vernacular land raets, or ‘grounded raets’, operate for women.