This special issue addresses the role of law in corporate accountability. Case studies reference people affected by asbestos in Italy, a coal company anticipating closure in Colombia, and both activists and human rights lawyers concerned with the impacts of mining in Ecuador. The afterword considers the significance of temporality in the law, including limits on retrospective claims and efforts to expand the prospective reach of both the law and state policy. It describes the perspectival character of the law in which the forum determines how the underlying facts are seen. It examines how responsibility, against a backdrop of distributed agency, is conceptualized by shortening or expanding chains of liability. It also points to the need for stronger connections between the anthropology of suffering and the discipline’s ethical turn. Finally, it suggests that the legal claims discussed here are aspirational in the sense of describing how the world ought to be.
{"title":"The Role of Law in Corporate Accountability","authors":"S. Kirsch","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.040206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.040206","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue addresses the role of law in corporate accountability. Case studies reference people affected by asbestos in Italy, a coal company anticipating closure in Colombia, and both activists and human rights lawyers concerned with the impacts of mining in Ecuador. The afterword considers the significance of temporality in the law, including limits on retrospective claims and efforts to expand the prospective reach of both the law and state policy. It describes the perspectival character of the law in which the forum determines how the underlying facts are seen. It examines how responsibility, against a backdrop of distributed agency, is conceptualized by shortening or expanding chains of liability. It also points to the need for stronger connections between the anthropology of suffering and the discipline’s ethical turn. Finally, it suggests that the legal claims discussed here are aspirational in the sense of describing how the world ought to be.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86217059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years, various transnational corporations (TNCs) have faced legal proceedings in their home states for human rights violations and environmental damage committed abroad. These transnational lawsuits are an attempt to overcome corporate impunity and establish transnational chains of responsibility. At the same time, the individual legal cases are marked by procedural and legal hurdles and may entail the risk of social costs for claimants. In this article, I explore what such transnational lawsuits can contribute from the perspective of social movements in the Global South. Taking the Monterrico case from Peru as an example, I discuss the expectations of human rights lawyers in such cases and the relevant legal mechanisms. By focusing on out-of-court settlements, I argue that, from the perspective of the Global South actors involved in the case study, adjudication and the related judicial practices are fundamental to making the law effective.
{"title":"Transnational Human Rights Litigation","authors":"A. Lindt","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.040204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.040204","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, various transnational corporations (TNCs) have faced legal proceedings in their home states for human rights violations and environmental damage committed abroad. These transnational lawsuits are an attempt to overcome corporate impunity and establish transnational chains of responsibility. At the same time, the individual legal cases are marked by procedural and legal hurdles and may entail the risk of social costs for claimants. In this article, I explore what such transnational lawsuits can contribute from the perspective of social movements in the Global South. Taking the Monterrico case from Peru as an example, I discuss the expectations of human rights lawyers in such cases and the relevant legal mechanisms. By focusing on out-of-court settlements, I argue that, from the perspective of the Global South actors involved in the case study, adjudication and the related judicial practices are fundamental to making the law effective.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84369956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses a spectacle, a wrestling match, that brings out the problem of violence against women and the role of activist organisations such as the Centro de Información y Desarrollo de la Mujer (CIDEM) to raise awareness among people and to influence the Bolivian state to change the gender of the law. In effect, it considers CIDEM’s vigilant role, by visualising cases of femicides in partnership with the press, is translated in wrestling matches. The article considers one such wrestling match I witnessed in El Alto, Bolivia, and argues that CIDEM’s vigilant role extends to overlooking and complementing the vigilant roles of the state and customary legal systems in El Alto that are unable to prevent femicides: women being killed by men because of their gender.
本文分析了一场摔跤比赛的场面，这场比赛揭露了针对妇女的暴力问题，以及活动组织如Información y Desarrollo de la Mujer中心(CIDEM)的作用，以提高人们的意识，并影响玻利维亚国家改变法律的性别。实际上，它认为CIDEM的警惕作用，通过与媒体合作将杀害妇女的案件可视化，转化为摔跤比赛。这篇文章以我在玻利维亚的El Alto目睹的一场摔跤比赛为例，认为CIDEM的警戒角色延伸到忽视和补充El Alto的国家和习惯法系统的警戒角色，这些角色无法防止女性被杀害:女性因性别而被男性杀害。
{"title":"CIDEM’s femicide archive and the process of gendered legal change in Bolivia","authors":"Xandra Miguel-Lorenzo","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.070702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.070702","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses a spectacle, a wrestling match, that brings out the problem of violence against women and the role of activist organisations such as the Centro de Información y Desarrollo de la Mujer (CIDEM) to raise awareness among people and to influence the Bolivian state to change the gender of the law. In effect, it considers CIDEM’s vigilant role, by visualising cases of femicides in partnership with the press, is translated in wrestling matches. The article considers one such wrestling match I witnessed in El Alto, Bolivia, and argues that CIDEM’s vigilant role extends to overlooking and complementing the vigilant roles of the state and customary legal systems in El Alto that are unable to prevent femicides: women being killed by men because of their gender.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"75 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79256515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article follows a criminal investigation for recruitment of child soldiers, by asking the following questions: how does one find child soldiers? How does one bring them onto the judicial stage? The article explores the different moments that marked the investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor in the first case brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, that of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. After describing the successive stages of the investigation, the article analyses the conditions under which former child soldiers testified before the ICC. None of their nine testimonies was judged credible by the ICC Trial Chamber I. The different moments that marked these legal proceedings bring to light the instability of the category of child soldier and the uncertainty that regularly threatens the labour of judicial elucidation.
{"title":"Looking for the child soldier","authors":"M. Jakšić","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.070703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.070703","url":null,"abstract":"This article follows a criminal investigation for recruitment of child soldiers, by asking the following questions: how does one find child soldiers? How does one bring them onto the judicial stage? The article explores the different moments that marked the investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor in the first case brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, that of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. After describing the successive stages of the investigation, the article analyses the conditions under which former child soldiers testified before the ICC. None of their nine testimonies was judged credible by the ICC Trial Chamber I. The different moments that marked these legal proceedings bring to light the instability of the category of child soldier and the uncertainty that regularly threatens the labour of judicial elucidation.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86883256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Events like the COVID-19 pandemic can become what Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey have called ‘binding crises’: ‘events with the clarity and immediacy of a terrifying threat’ (2018: 12), impacting the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless – though unevenly. Binding crises of the past (like the 1842 Great Fire of Hamburg, the 1858 Great Stink in London and the 1896 Bombay plague) have led to ubiquitous reforms in sanitation and waste management practices, most notably landmark innovations in modern sewerage systems. In what follows, I draw on ethnographic research, conducted discontinuously over five years (2015–2019), around municipal solid waste management (MSWM), and the political ecology of informal plastic recycling in the city of Ahmedabad, India.1 I argue that the current pandemic may constitute such a binding event as freelance waste-collection networks are paralysed by the lockdown and ‘authorised’ modes of waste collection are prioritised, leading to a novel ‘infrastructuring’ of emerging relations between human bodies and wasted things.
{"title":"COVID-19 as method","authors":"Tridibesh Dey","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.040106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.040106","url":null,"abstract":"Events like the COVID-19 pandemic can become what Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey have called ‘binding crises’: ‘events with the clarity and immediacy of a terrifying threat’ (2018: 12), impacting the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless – though unevenly. Binding crises of the past (like the 1842 Great Fire of Hamburg, the 1858 Great Stink in London and the 1896 Bombay plague) have led to ubiquitous reforms in sanitation and waste management practices, most notably landmark innovations in modern sewerage systems. In what follows, I draw on ethnographic research, conducted discontinuously over five years (2015–2019), around municipal solid waste management (MSWM), and the political ecology of informal plastic recycling in the city of Ahmedabad, India.1 I argue that the current pandemic may constitute such a binding event as freelance waste-collection networks are paralysed by the lockdown and ‘authorised’ modes of waste collection are prioritised, leading to a novel ‘infrastructuring’ of emerging relations between human bodies and wasted things.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74870687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Documents are part of interactive sociocultural worlds in which ethnographers can analyse topics such as power relations, social struggle, violence and secrecy. While they emerge from bureaucratic administration, apparently mundane and stagnant documents represent dynamic processes of decision-making, knowledge production and exclusion. I consider ethnographic research on documents and their production as one that offers significant insights into bureaucratic violence and the tensions between formality and informality in alternative dispute resolution in Virginia and the San Francisco Bay Area. This article discusses working with documents that are simultaneously bound by law and exist extra-legally. While documents are used to gain economic support, strengthen relationships between non-profit and government bodies, and evidence ‘success’, the processes have difficulties. The data demonstrate that bureaucratisation has resulted in cumbersome processes and expensive requirements that mirror the exclusion and power asymmetries of formal law itself.
{"title":"Documents and the bureaucratisation of alternative dispute resolution in the United States","authors":"A. Reinke","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.070701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.070701","url":null,"abstract":"Documents are part of interactive sociocultural worlds in which ethnographers can analyse topics such as power relations, social struggle, violence and secrecy. While they emerge from bureaucratic administration, apparently mundane and stagnant documents represent dynamic processes of decision-making, knowledge production and exclusion. I consider ethnographic research on documents and their production as one that offers significant insights into bureaucratic violence and the tensions between formality and informality in alternative dispute resolution in Virginia and the San Francisco Bay Area. This article discusses working with documents that are simultaneously bound by law and exist extra-legally. While documents are used to gain economic support, strengthen relationships between non-profit and government bodies, and evidence ‘success’, the processes have difficulties. The data demonstrate that bureaucratisation has resulted in cumbersome processes and expensive requirements that mirror the exclusion and power asymmetries of formal law itself.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78153365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As a much proclaimed ‘new normal’ accompanying the global pandemic, the suspension of certain rights to protect other rights returns our attention to notions of exceptions outside the law in terms of sovereign power and those hidden within the law, such as structurally embedded violations. The consent for the emergency rights accorded to the state to act for the greater protection and bio-survival of all occurs alongside certain contestations which also, in dramatic instances, include spaces for new protests against structural and physical violence on the person. The murder of George Floyd and the protests which followed signalled points of both convergence and dissonance in relation to the emergency rights of the state and the overlooking of other ‘less visible’ loss of rights.
{"title":"Exceptions and being human: Before and in times of COVID-19","authors":"Narmala Halstead","doi":"10.3167/jla.2020.040101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.040101","url":null,"abstract":"As a much proclaimed ‘new normal’ accompanying the global pandemic, the suspension of certain rights to protect other rights returns our attention to notions of exceptions outside the law in terms of sovereign power and those hidden within the law, such as structurally embedded violations. The consent for the emergency rights accorded to the state to act for the greater protection and bio-survival of all occurs alongside certain contestations which also, in dramatic instances, include spaces for new protests against structural and physical violence on the person. The murder of George Floyd and the protests which followed signalled points of both convergence and dissonance in relation to the emergency rights of the state and the overlooking of other ‘less visible’ loss of rights.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79903989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Belgium, depending on their immigration status, foreigners may be entitled to different forms of social assistance, ranging from emergency medical care to financial benefits. In a context where residence permits are constantly updated, re-examined or withdrawn by the administration, this article explores the ways in which welfare bureaucrats deal with irregular migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at welfare offices in French-speaking Belgium, this article shows that documentary practices in welfare bureaucracies have the effect of both restricting access to social assistance and aiding irregular migrants in bringing cases against the administration. This article thus also delves into the double-edged relationship of the social workers to the state by focusing on the competing norms and interpretations of law they encounter on a daily basis.
{"title":"Writing for difference audiences","authors":"Sophie Andreetta","doi":"10.3167/jla.2019.030206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2019.030206","url":null,"abstract":"In Belgium, depending on their immigration status, foreigners may be entitled to different forms of social assistance, ranging from emergency medical care to financial benefits. In a context where residence permits are constantly updated, re-examined or withdrawn by the administration, this article explores the ways in which welfare bureaucrats deal with irregular migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at welfare offices in French-speaking Belgium, this article shows that documentary practices in welfare bureaucracies have the effect of both restricting access to social assistance and aiding irregular migrants in bringing cases against the administration. This article thus also delves into the double-edged relationship of the social workers to the state by focusing on the competing norms and interpretations of law they encounter on a daily basis.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84671899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This postface links the contributions to this special issue to wider concerns in the anthropology of bureaucracy and the history of this disciplinary subfield. Anthropologists focus on documentary practices: how documents are produced, how they are being used (not always in the sense originally given to them by the producers), how they might be ‘brokered’ and how they are being contested – mostly by the production of other documents. The postface points to the epistemological implications of an anthropology of bureaucracy, under the term of ‘complicit positioning’, and argues for acknowledging the double face of bureaucracy and paperwork, as a form of domination and oppression, as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails.
{"title":"Postface","authors":"Thomas Bierschenk","doi":"10.3167/jla.2019.030207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2019.030207","url":null,"abstract":"This postface links the contributions to this special issue to wider concerns in the anthropology of bureaucracy and the history of this disciplinary subfield. Anthropologists focus on documentary practices: how documents are produced, how they are being used (not always in the sense originally given to them by the producers), how they might be ‘brokered’ and how they are being contested – mostly by the production of other documents. The postface points to the epistemological implications of an anthropology of bureaucracy, under the term of ‘complicit positioning’, and argues for acknowledging the double face of bureaucracy and paperwork, as a form of domination and oppression, as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"69 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86443574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I am grateful (once more) for the attention Don Gardner has paid to my work, in particular to arguments pertaining to individuality and its relation to the aspirations of the social sciences. Let me begin with overlaps he sees between us: (a) prevailing images of what anthropology needed to be, historically (in order to be an adequate science) have led to too great an emphasis on developing taxonomies of cultural variation, along with the generalising and essentialising descriptions this entailed; (b) some of social science’s taken-for-granted vocabulary (such as ‘role’ or ‘status’) hampers our understanding of the nature of human agents and the springs of that agency; (c) questions of will and freedom, choice and moral responsibility are subtle and important; engaging with these is a necessary step for strengthening the social sciences, which cannot escape their philosophical roots. Notwithstanding, Gardner would take me to task for my understanding of causation, for not adopting a reasonable view on the hoary issue of ‘free will’ and for not taking account of post-genecentric accounts of human-evolutionary process.
{"title":"The grey zone, distortion and the ownership of causation","authors":"N. Rapport","doi":"10.3167/jla.2019.030107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2019.030107","url":null,"abstract":"I am grateful (once more) for the attention Don Gardner has paid to my work, in particular to arguments pertaining to individuality and its relation to the aspirations of the social sciences. Let me begin with overlaps he sees between us: (a) prevailing images of what anthropology needed to be, historically (in order to be an adequate science) have led to too great an emphasis on developing taxonomies of cultural variation, along with the generalising and essentialising descriptions this entailed; (b) some of social science’s taken-for-granted vocabulary (such as ‘role’ or ‘status’) hampers our understanding of the nature of human agents and the springs of that agency; (c) questions of will and freedom, choice and moral responsibility are subtle and important; engaging with these is a necessary step for strengthening the social sciences, which cannot escape their philosophical roots. Notwithstanding, Gardner would take me to task for my understanding of causation, for not adopting a reasonable view on the hoary issue of ‘free will’ and for not taking account of post-genecentric accounts of human-evolutionary process.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78891995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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