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Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post–Cold War Era

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Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationship of justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book’s eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The introduction makes an important contribution toour understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book’s chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law.
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... Against this backdrop, more recent approaches have called for a new anthropology of justice that specifically deals with the justice of broader social, political and economic dynamics (e.g. Anders and Zenker 2015a;Brunnegger 2019a;Clarke and Goodale 2009;Johnson and Karekwaivanane 2018a;Wolf forthcoming). ...
... Mark Goodale and Kamari Clarke (2009) see a historical turning point at the end of the 1990s when justice became a central global ideological, yet empirically pluralized, ordering principle. The authors regard the central question of political-philosophical approaches to justice, namely what justice is, to be misleading (Goodale and Clarke 2009:5) because they are sceptical of 'any overly abstracted notion of justice' and instead 'envision a framework for understanding justice that is theoretically substantive enough to serve as a basis for institutional action, but which does not do conceptual violence to what the growing body of ethnographic research on normative practices reveals' (ibid.:5). ...
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This introduction to the special issue on 'Justice in the Anthropocene' is animated by the central intuition that the new anthropology of justice should be brought into closer conversation with current debates about the Anthropocene. Unpacking this assumption, we first discuss the potentials and limitations of recent anthropological engagements with justice, and develop an analytical definition of this key concept for both ethnographic and political use. We then turn to debates about the Anthropo-cene and propose disassembling the name-giving global subject of this new epoch-humanity-through a multidimensional justice lens. The third part highlights the mutual benefits of both debates, notably by jointly becoming attuned to the multidimensionality of conflicting concerns for justice and keeping in focus the different roles that various beings, human and non-human, potentially play here. In part four, we discuss the five contributions to this special issue, demonstrating the work of the proposed analytical concept in advancing our understanding of justice in the Anthropocene. Finally, we recapitulate the extended argument put forward in this text for an anthropological turn-or rather: a return leading to a new anthropology (not only) of justice in the Anthropocene, rediscovering and reclaiming the human as an indispensable category of analysis and action, promising useful political returns. [justice; Anthropocene; humanism; posthumanism; anthropological turn] This text, and the special issue it introduces, is animated by the central intuition that the promising development of a new anthropology of justice and the important contemporary debates about the Anthropocene in anthropology and beyond should be brought into closer conversation with each other and joined together. More specifically, we are interested in scrutinizing, on the basis of ethnographic case studies, how studying the Anthropocene benefits from using anthropological involvement with justice and how a new anthropology of justice can be further developed by engaging with concerns discussed with regard to the Anthropocene. In order to unpack and process this overall assumption, this text is divided into five parts. It starts by first discussing some of the potentials and limitations of new anthropological approaches to justice. Against this backdrop, it develops an analytical definition of justice as the precondition for studying ethnographically the multiple notions of justice that co-exist, are challenged and renegotiated, and thus evolve in numerous empirical settings. The second part shifts towards debates of the Anthropocene
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Peru's industrial mining sector is highly conflictual and characterized by social disputes. Many of these conflicts are fought not only in politics but also in the courts, as activists attempt to hold corporate and state actors liable for human rights violations. At the same time, they face an increasing criminalization of their protests. Law is thus both an emancipatory tool for activists to access justice and an instrument for political and economic elites to prevent social change. Based on ethnographic field work, Angela Lindt sheds light on various mining disputes in Cajamarca and Piura and examines the role of law in resolving these conflicts.
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This chapter is strictly linked to the previous. It sets out the methodology of legal intercultural translation/transaction by availing of an interdisciplinary approach that includes legal theory, anthropology and semiotics. More specifically, it proposes an intercultural use of national legal system provisions and a three-step method to translate/include habits from cultures other than the local and/or majority one. This approach puts aside the traditional inter-legal or inter-normative consideration of cultural differences and its tendency to rely upon comparative or international private law. The kernel of this methodology coincides with the triple assumption that (1) people are not norms or rules; (2) culture and more specifically the self-renewing life of culture does not coincide with legal systems, even if cultures produce legal and normative systems; (3) cultures belong to people rather than people to cultures. The translational inclusive methodology presented in this chapter develops through three steps: (a) Crossed Narratives and semantic Dis-compositions; (b) Crossed Cultural Contextualizations; (c) Intercultural Translation/Transaction based on the semantic backdrop expressed by legal rules. A particular emphasis is placed on the role of legal practitioners in the intercultural use of law and their timely support to allow individuals and groups from other cultures to give course to their creativity in view of the national legal system responses. Great significance is given to the interaction between anthropologists and legal practitioners in supporting clients belonging to minority cultures or religions. This chapter is intended to propose a strategy of cultural-legal inclusion different from both the multiculturalist legal approach (which usually culminates in the practice of cultural defenses, cultural tests, etc.) and the legal-pluralist one, focused on the creation of personal laws and jurisdictions. Legal multiculturalism, personal law pluralism, as well as any quasi-assimilationist and asymmetric interculturalism (such as the Quebecois’ way) are almost inevitably inclined to reify cultures and stimulate identitarian drifts. Conversely, the interdisciplinary approach to the inclusion of cultural differences presented in this chapter is ordered to foster an intercultural use of law—and especially human rights—as an interface of translation and an instrument to assure the social effectiveness of intercultural transformations.
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This chapter addresses the thorny issue of how legal words and spatial experiences interplay. The topic is treated through the spectrum of human rights implementations and their semantic-spatial implications. This perspective allows for an immediate focus on the cognitive continuities that exist between categorical and spatial frames. When a subject (public or private) is entitled to enjoy a particular human right with respect to another, then they are entitled to a kind of practical substitution which, as such, implies a semantic and experiential shifting. The very possibility for shifting/displacement reveals cognitive continuities between word and space in the legal realm and experience. Moving from this view, the essay proposes a different approach to the relationships between legal words and space, assumed as a division of power by contemporary Legal Geography. The method used to define this perspective is precisely ‘Legal Chorology.’ The chapter will address its theoretical and practical implications in bridging and dynamically managing the diffraction between law and space. Legal reasoning is thus enhanced by using a semiotic perspective in the analysis of human spatial experience and cognition. The topics addressed range from a discussion of the intertwining of the human activity of categorization and the perception of space, to an assessment of the consequences that a chorological view can engender for classical legal issues such as inheritance law, urban law, contract law, and so on.
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This chapter addresses the intertwining between cultural categories and spatial mobility. It is a kind of synthesis of the results achieved in Chaps. 3 and 4, which will be rearticulated and reshaped in combination with a theory of intercultural globalization and its experience from below. The first axis for the analysis focuses on the interspatial blurring and blending produced by the translating of individuals through culturally plural circuits of state/territorial sovereignty. The second axis concerns intercultural translation intended as a place of convergence and condensation for the categorical features used by different cultures for marking space. This section will show how translating cultures by means of law’s spectrum could be equivalent and coextensive with translating different ‘spatialities’, and vice versa. Reaching this interlocutory target allows for the configuration of inter-spaces capable of working as a platform to assure the legal relevance of different culturally oriented subjective agencies. The theoretical toolkit to investigate these topics is ‘legal chorology,’ explained by these sequential steps: a. Legal chorology and a timely intercultural translation. b. Inter-spatial dynamics and the cognitive deficiencies of legal qualifications across cultures. Subsequently, the results of the above analysis are applied to a vision for a pluralistic legal approach conceived beyond the exclusive use of inter-normative devices and inter-legality.
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This chapter aims to show how the cultural incompleteness of Western secularization, with specific regard to legal categories, affects the neutrality of state law before religious and cultural minorities. In opposition to Schmitt’s focus on the public/institutional features of ‘Political Theology’, I examine the resilience of Christian moral theology inside the legal categories related to the quotidian life of people: property law, legal capacity, contract law, law of obligations, corporation law, market law, inheritance law, criminal law and specifically forms of crime and intentionality of criminal action, the idea and the justification of criminal sanctions, and so on. I call this area of Christian ethical and conceptual resilience ‘legal theology.’ On the following pages, I argue that the rationalization of Christian moral theology and its legal projections carried out through modernity has remained largely incomplete because it merely removed the theological garments from legal institutes leaving their semantic inner structure almost unaltered. Although modern secularization greatly impinged on the institutional public and political structures of the Ancien Régime, it nevertheless preserved the pre-existing grammar of legal subjectivity. Of course, this kind of resilience was very difficult to see because of the deep continuity between culture and legal imagery extant during the Middle Ages in Europe. The encounter with cultural Otherness and its alienating effects in a sense brings that religious resilience to the surface and, above all, makes visible the cultural relativity of the Western legal lexicon. If during the colonization era the unveiling action exerted by contact with Otherness was (relatively) silenced because of the imbalance of power and the imperialist attitude of the European colonizers, today things have changed. The spread of human rights ideals and the diffusion of democratic practices spur and legitimate cultural and religious minorities to make claims for their social and legal inclusion. The Non-Western non-Christian minorities struggle against the lack of neutrality of the Western national legal systems and their historically driven attitude to pass off their identity as universality. The specific purpose of this chapter is to argue that democratic reflexivity and responsiveness can only be assured within Western multicultural and multi-religious societies by means of a historical-semiotic rethinking of the secularization process (and, symmetrically, the attempts to transplant it in Non-Western countries.) In this vein, I propose the idea of an intercultural secularization, which is to be intended not so much as the achievement of a radical (impossible) neutrality of the legal grammar as rather the outcome of a polyphonic intercultural effort of translation/transaction among cultural and religious differences. In this sense, the secular ideal of a religiously neutral (nay: purely ‘rational’) state law should be replaced by the more modest aspiration to a legal apparatus, which might be at least equidistant from the different cultural and religious social actors. The final goal of this work of intercultural translation/transaction is the creation of an intercultural legal lexicon capable of overarching and reflecting, as a kind of semiotic dome, the dynamic interplay of cultural and religious differences that are always present in the social field of national states.
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This chapter deals with the contested universality of human rights from an intercultural point of view. Such a perspective conflates with the possible use of human rights discourse as a horizontal interface to translate different cultural subjectivities. Using this hermeneutical approach, spatial and semiotic proximities inherent to ‘multiculturality’ are capable of showing and triggering renewed geographical and semiotic configurations. ‘Legal chorology’ is the theoretical toolkit proposed here as a means of analyzing the emersion of new categorical and practical spaces of subjectivity. To demonstrate the practical implications of the dis-compositional analysis of cultural features in view of their intercultural translation, the chapter will illustrate a horizontal/metaphorical use of human rights applied to multi-cultural conflicts related to nuisance law and condominial microspaces of coexistence. The dis-compositional methodology is drawn from artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Paul Klee’s ‘figuration theory,’ paved the way to this ‘art’ of semiotic dis-composition and creative re-composition. For this very reason, the essay undertakes, in its central section, a sort of journey through the imaginative and theoretical territories of Klee’s ‘figurational’ thought. The theoretical challenge lies in showing jurists and politicians they have much to learn from the cognitive legacy of this great artist. This is because the intercultural conflicts that contemporary global society faces have primarily to do with—this is the central point—a form of cognitive unreadiness prior to rather than after conflicts of values.
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There is a common perception of reciprocity as a concept that is opposed to the communitarian interests that characterise contemporary international law, or merely a way of denoting reactions to unfriendly or wrongful conduct. This book disputes this approach, and highlights how reciprocity is instead linked to the structural characteristic of sovereign equality of States in international law. This book carries out an in-depth analysis of the concept of reciprocity and the elements that characterise it, before examining the various roles and articulations of reciprocity in a number of fields of public international law: the law of treaties, the treatment of individuals, the execution of international law, and the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals. In all these areas, it analyses both more traditional and more contemporary examples, to demonstrate how reciprocity is closely linked to the very structure of public international law.
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Modern law seems to be designed to keep emotions at bay. The Sentimental Court argues the exact opposite: that the law is not designed to cast out affective dynamics, but to create them. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork - both during the trial of former Lord's Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Netherlands and in rural northern Uganda at the scenes of violence - this book is an in-depth investigation of the affective life of legalized transitional justice interventions in Africa. Jonas Bens argues that the law purposefully creates, mobilizes, shapes, and transforms atmospheres and sentiments, and further discusses how we should think about the future of law and justice in our colonial present by focusing on the politics of atmosphere and sentiment in which they are entangled.
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This paper argues that a politics of scale plays a fundamental but uninterrogated role in internationalised criminal justice processes such as hybrid tribunals. Scale discourses—producing specific notions of “the international” and “the local”—are so naturalised in these endeavours that their regressive effects remain unacknowledged. Following Annelise Riles’ ground‐breaking analysis of the politics of scale in colonial law, and feminist critiques of scale discourse in accounts of globalisation and conflict, we think critically about “the international” and “the local” in a postcolonial and post‐conflict justice context. Using the case of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), we specifically examine the operation and effects of discourses of “international standards” and “local ownership”. We argue that denaturalising scale in international criminal justice would serve a wider project to decolonise international law and address the specific forms of disenfranchisement currently enacted by dominant “scales of justice”.
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