Ethnographic legal studies: reconnecting anthropological and sociological traditions

Legal anthropology and legal sociology have much in common. Traditionally, however, these approaches have tried to maintain disciplinary boundaries toward each other. Latest since the 1990s, these boundaries have become more and more porous and the academic practices of boundary-making do seem to convince practitioners of these fields less and less. The recent emergence of a subfield of the anthropology of the state situated at the interface of legal anthropology, legal sociology, ethnographic studies of bureaucracies and organizational sociology attests to this development. In this introduction, we propose to consciously transgress the traditional boundaries between legal anthropology, legal sociology and the anthropology of the state when it comes to the ethnographic investigation of official law. Based on the contributions to this special issue—consisting of empirical articles and commentaries—we map several avenues for boundary transgressions and the theoretical reconceptualizations these may engender. Among them are: looking at legal institutions of the state as practicing both informal formality and formal informality; moving from socio-spatial metaphors to investigating official law-places and -spaces as ethnographic objects; and studying norm-making within official law as a wider field of practice

The making of procedural justice: enacting the state and (non)citizenship

peer reviewedRecent advances in citizenship and migration studies have demonstrated the need to explore noncitizens’ social, political and legal relationships to the state in their own right. Such a rethinking inevitably requires analysing how both ‘citizenship’ and ‘the state’ are enacted and performed in the negotiation of substantive rights. This special issue follows an unexplored path by scrutinizing these interactions between ‘citizenship’ and ‘stateness’ in the domain of procedural law, procedural safeguards, and perceptions of procedural justice among a variety of actors. The contributions explore empirically how procedural rules are invoked, altered, disregarded, or reinvented in different sites of interaction, ranging from asylum determination and adjudication to immigration and municipal registration offices. This interactionist approach not only recasts procedural rules as an integral part of citizenship struggles, thereby shedding light on the co-constitution of state and noncitizenship, but also stresses the importance of nuanced analyses of the nexus between procedural and substantive rights

Witchcraft beliefs and practices in asylum adjudication. Impressions from a legal- anthropological collaboration in the framework of a judicial training

editorial reviewedThis chapter contributes to the debates on the role of anthropological expertise in legal practice from the point of view of one lawyer and one anthropologist by focusing on how judges approach fear of withcraft beliefs and practices in asylum decisions. It does so in two ways: firstly, by exploring a common range of issues in withcraft-related-violence claims from various jurisdictions, with particular attention to the (non-)use of anthropological expertise. Secondly, by making an argument for spaces of knowledge exchange between judges and anthropologists outside the framework of the actual decision-making in specific cases which is characterized by adversarial relations. To this end we provide insights from our experience of a judicial training as an alternative space for knowledge exchange and joint reflection

Contesting Postwar Mostar

This chapter employs negotiating agency on postwar Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina) to understand acts come about in its urban conflicts over peace(s). The first line of analysis uses a feature film about the city to explore the negotiation between Slavko (who wants to act in line with the coexisting peace) and a world that enforces the ethnonational—Bosniak and Croat—peace(s). The generated insights on how difficult it to pursue coexisting acts in an ethnonationalist world are then contextualised in non-fiction Mostar where two foci emerge: compliance with as well as resistance towards the ethnonational peace(s) by people supporting the coexisting one. The second line of analysis subsequently explores how the ethnonational grip on employment and the segregated education system drives people towards ethnonational acts while the third line of analysis explores how students at the Old Gymnasium as well as activists at Abrašević manage to negotiate coexisting acts