Law as an anti‐value: Justice,violence and suffering in the logic of becoming (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropologists are chronologically only the latest to have adopted justice (and injustice) as an object of (critical) inquiry. Even among anthropologists, however, the radical critical cry that law is the instrument par excellence of control and repression, has today fallen out of fashion. Starting from the Afghan case, in this paper I reflect on law as a potential source of violence and as an anti‐value – in the sense of being in antithesis with accepted social values – in the contemporary global scenario. My focus here is neither on the uses that can be made of law nor on the outcomes of its interpretation and application. Rather, I am interested in what law can generate when it betrays social values and sentiments of justice.     

Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese American Internment During World War II

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘enemy aliens’, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors’ claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

‘Generous Amazons Came to the Breach’: Besieged Women,Agency and Subjectivity during the French Wars of Religion

Gender studies of violence have forced scholars to rethink the association of femininity with ‘vulnerability’ and the objectivisation of women as mute victims of organised violence and oppression, incapable of agency. Recent debates about the role women and homosexuals should play in military systems in the United States and other countries have sparked a renewed interest in exploring historical contexts of the relationships between gender and organised violence. If we consider violence as a performative act, whole new dimensions of gendered aspects of the history of violence and warfare emerge. In this article, I intend to draw on my research on gender, honour, and violence during the French Wars of Religion to explore the roles played by Protestant and Catholic women in southern France during siege operations. These besieged women acted to support their coreligionists by participating in the conflicts as healers, suppliers and even combatants. Besieged women were considered ‘vulnerable’ in sieges, yet their involvement in siege operations challenged contemporary gender stereotypes, threatened social norms and opened new potential cultural possibilities for these women. I hope to show how the discourses on violence, bodies, revolt and religion shaped the tough choices that confronted these women as they participated actively in civil violence. The besieged women in southern France, I believe, are key to understanding the dynamics of gender and warfare and the ways in which women have actively participated in violence – especially in cases of civil violence where the status of the body politic was thrown into question.     

The diversity of identity: youth participation at the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In recent years, the transitional justice field has become increasingly concerned with ensuring meaningful participation from a wide range of actors. In response, a burgeoning scholarship has emerged, which aims to understand the interests and needs of these stakeholders, most notably women and children. Noticeably absent from this research is an examination of youth interests as distinct from children’s. Instead, the conflict identities of youth are most often conceived as inextricably tied to those of children. As a result, the narrow victim/perpetrator binary remains the dominant identity construction employed for understanding their involvement in conflict and transitional justice processes. Drawing on the case of the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article reveals that youth are more than passive subjects in the reconciliation process. It demonstrates that the interactions of youth with truth and reconciliation commission processes allow youth to exercise agency, and thus challenge the dominance of the victim/perpetrator identity construct. The article thus proposes an alternative way of framing youth participation, whereby the identities of youth in transitional contexts are represented as diverse and malleable.     

Reconciliation—No Pasarán: Trauma,Testimony and Language for Paul Celan

This article intervenes in the project of theorizing the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice with the suggestion that (a) more attention be paid to subjective experiences and discursive sensitivities affected/shaped by the trauma of historical violence and injustice, and that (b) the constitutive as well as potentially subversive working of these experiences and sensitivities be recognized. It focuses specifically on Paul Celan (1920–1970), a Jewish-Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor, proposing a reading of his work that connects aspects of the poetic, the traumatic and the peripheral that are relevant to political theories of reconciliation and justice. Celan's work is shown to problematize the dominant understandings of communal temporality that are encoded in the reconciliatory transitional project. This temporality approximates a linear and progressive motion: the transitional community (a) leaves behind the legacies of the “violent past” and (b) imagines (and moves towards) its future as an emancipative movement positioned beyond the constraints of the historical violence and injustice. In Celan's work, however, the traumatized subject's experience of temporality is understood metaphorically as an impossible passage. In contrast to the linear and progressive unfolding of the collective imaginary, the movement within a passage is repetitive, elliptical and, quite literally, aporetic (impassible). There is no guarantee of a successful passing through; instead, within the passage, Celan's traumatic and poetic subject encounters the abysmal. This basic contrast suggests that a critical theory of reconciliation should not only account for the fragility of human life in relation to historical violence, but respond to the constant proximity of violence within the reconciliatory project itself.     

Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails

In this paper I ask how might environmental justice studies scholarship be recast if we consider the phenomenon of environmental injustice as a form of criminalisation? In other words, since environmental injustice is frequently a product of state‐sanctioned violence against communities of colour, then what are the implications of reframing it as a practice of treating those populations as criminally suspect and as deserving of state punishment? Moreover, how are the targets and survivors of environmental injustice/racism enlisted in generative ways that resist that criminalisation and support abolition? I answer these questions through a consideration of how struggles inside and outside of carceral spaces represent urgent and timely opportunities to rethink the possibilities of environmental justice theory and politics by linking them to practices and visions of abolition ecology and critical environmental justice.     

The aftermath of an election crisis: Kenyan attitudes and the influence of individual-level and locality violence

How does violent conflict affect social and political attitudes? To answer this question I pair Kenyan survey and violence data for the time period following the country's December 27th 2007 national election. I find that respondents who personally experienced electoral violence are less likely to express certain forms of inter-personal and institutional trust than those individuals who did not. The association is not universally powerful, however. First, noteworthy differences emerge between populations who relocated as a result of post-election conflict and those who did not. Differences between these groups suggest that internal migration in the wake of tragedy influenced the Kenyan social landscape. In addition to personal exposure to electoral conflict, I test how local level violence may indirectly condition Kenyan political attitudes. Across all models, individual-level exposure to violence has the most consistent influence upon opinions, although district level effects emerge in analyses without survey respondent ethnicity controls. This finding suggests that living in a setting of regional insecurity does not have as important an effect on certain political views as personal victimization.     

Destabilizing homonormativity and the public/private dichotomy in North American lesbian domestic violence discourses

Developing and circulating community-based educational materials and offering workshops are common feminist approaches to addressing violence in lesbian relationships. This article explores the racialized exclusions in the public/private dichotomy in community-based educational discourses about ‘lesbian domestic violence’. An examination of community-based educational materials and interviews with lesbian and queer feminist educators illustrates how the public/private dichotomy produces exclusions and makes certain forms of violence enacted on certain bodies unthinkable and unintelligible. While these discourses challenge heteronormative constructions of violence, they have relied on a simple conceptual framework that has had the effect of promoting a dominant narrative or regime of truth privileging white, middle-class lesbian experiences. This article seeks to destabilize homonormative constructions by arguing for an anti-colonial feminist spatial analysis of violence in same-sex/gender relationships.     

‘Peace begins at home’: Geographic imaginaries of violence and peacebuilding in northern Uganda

While there is an acknowledgment of the importance of geographic and historical context in contemporary feminist scholarship on the relationship between domestic violence and warfare, there remains an assumption that mainstream narratives will tend to separate these forms of violence or, if connections are acknowledged, warfare will be given primacy. Based on ethnographic research in northern Uganda, I demonstrate how the presence of Orientalist narratives of violence in peacebuilding programs disrupts these assumptions by not only drawing connections between domestic violence and warfare but prioritizing domestic violence. I argue that these narratives of violence, and their associated geographic imaginaries, contribute to uneven geographies of intervention – geographies in which racialized bodies and intimate spaces are associated with war and thereby seen as appropriate sites for peacebuilding. By engaging with peacebuilding programs as sites of geopolitical negotiations in which variously scaled actors are vying for position in the post-war landscape, I argue that the tendency for peacebuilding programs to focus on a singular site of intervention – ‘the Acholi home’ – says less about the centrality of this site to the creation of peace than it does about the centrality of this site in maintaining the networks of mutual legitimization amongst peacebuilding partners.     

Addressing structural violence through US reconciliation commissions: The case study of Greensboro,NC and Detroit,MI

Across the United States, communities encumbered by violence, economic injustice, legacies of oppression and continued social, economic, and political marginalization are increasingly turning toward truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) to address and remedy persistent inequality. While modeled after the international truth movement, TRCs in the United States are often not state-sanctioned and characterized by fundamental differences that beg the question: How are peace and justice dialectically linked to, and flow from geographic specific understandings of violence? Drawing from the TRC experiences of Greensboro (NC) and Detroit (MI), this paper examines the way communities that were burdened with a history of violence are turning toward TRCs as viable vehicles for addressing violence and inequality in contemporary US society. This paper furthers our understanding of the geographic ruptures violence creates in communities and the often hidden realities that the legacy and memory of violence has for oppressed people in the United States.     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

In spite of years of efforts in Turkey to reform the police, including an increase in budget allocations for ‘democratic policing training’, ‘capacity building programmes’ and ‘non‐lethal technologies and tools’, police violence persists. How might we conceptualize the relationship between the upsurge of police violence and such investments? In this article, the author suggests that instead of taking ‘reform’ or ‘transformation’ discourses at face value, we look at some of the ways in which police violence is reformatted through the very tools, discourses and idioms of police reform itself. The article draws on 18 months of fieldwork research on police and security in Turkey, where the author observed the on‐site implementation of police reforms in several venues: police academy classes, practical training programmes that also involved ‘international’ security experts, and local police stations and neighbourhoods. The article examines how the processes of reforming expand the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what these reforms were supposed to restrain.     

Reclaiming the social body through self‐directed violence: Seeking anthropological understanding of Suicide attacks (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Suicide bombings receive tremendous attention in the media and are a central aspect of the Western public's imagination of terrorism, yet anthropology has remained relatively silent in debates around this form of violence. Drawing on constructs central to anthropology, namely embodiment and agency, I suggest that when political and structural violence threatens the body and thus the identity of both individual and group, this force can be ultimately rejected and the body can be ‘reclaimed’ through self‐directed violence. In trying to explain the horror that this act generates in the West the article introduces a new element central to anthropology ‐ namely pollution ‐ that has not previously been examined in discourse around suicide bombing. This is a theoretical piece that tries to problematize the role of the body, as a physical entity central to this ‘act’ and offers some questions and potential hypotheses for further research.     

Situating Justice in the Environment: The Case of BHP at the Ok Tedi Copper Mine

The rubric of sustainable development has now gained wide theoretical and political acceptance in the global community. However, after the Rio Declaration, each nation must now confront the specific question of how to decide between those industries and activities that are sustainable and those that are not when conflicting social and ecological interests are at stake. Any fundamental change to resource allocation will have social distributional consequences, and the issue of justice therefore becomes a critical element of any sustainability formulation. This paper contributes to this debate by exploring the potential for a politically grounded theory of justice in and to the environment. More specifically, we argue for a situated analysis that nevertheless retains the postulate of a neo-Kantian universal ethic as the foundation for global institutions that could integrate and safeguard the principles of justice and ecological responsibility underpinning most notions of sustainability. We show this by locating the question of justice in a particular conflict of interest, that between the Australian mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary, Ltd., and the traditional landowners of an area on the Ok Tedi river in Papua New Guinea.     

Surviving in the margins of a genocide case in the making: recognizing the economy of testimony at stake in research on political violence

ABSTRACT

In this article, we aim to draw attention to the hopes, frustrations and disillusions that so-called ‘transitional justice’ projects produce in drastically poor, war-torn, historically marginalized but politicized Indigenous communities. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research we conducted separately between 1982 and 2010 in Guatemala and Mexico, we describe the ways in which the world came to know about Finca San Francisco’s massacre, committed by the Guatemalan army on 17 July 1982, as part of its scorched earth policy. We then look at the various forms of reparations its survivors have been the subject of. In so doing, we focus more specifically on how the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), the non-governmental human rights organization that was behind the Ríos Montt genocide case, mobilized Finca San Francisco’s massacre survivors to become participants in the trial. After examining how the survivors of Finca San Francisco responded to CALDH’s mobilization efforts, we reflect on the kind of ‘gift’ these survivors expected in return for their stories of annihilation and destruction. Our goal is to bring to light the ‘economy of testimony’ that human rights activists, journalists or social scientists become entangled in once they ask genocide survivors to testify about the brutal deaths of their loved ones.     

Indigenous Legal Principles: A Reparation Path for Canada’s Cultural Genocide

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Canada’s justice system and the lawyers that operate within it are ill prepared to comprehend or reconcile the relationship between colonial legal systems and indigenous systems of law. They do not get training in indigenous law, so vital to crafting appropriate reparations for the wrongs justified by colonial practices and prejudices, and that could open doors to reconciliation and healing. The example used in this article to illustrate how the two systems of law could successfully interact is the historic Indian Residential School Settlement – the largest settlement in Canadian history, almost entirely based on Indigenous law and legal theory, and harmonized in part with principles of the common law of tort. The Indian Residential School Settlement proves that in post-colonial societies western frameworks lack the tools necessary to remediate injuries motivated by systemic discrimination, which, in this case, was cultural genocide. Different perspectives and legal theories are necessary to craft appropriate reparations and the processes used to achieve them. Unless indigenous laws, traditions, and practices are central to the design and implementation of reparations, state responses to the cultural genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples in Canada will not open pathways to either healing or reconciliation.