Paper short abstract:

Asking conceptual questions emerging in the global south, this presentation explores how and to what extent we may speak of exchange relations in northern criminal justice; what role violence or threat plays in and what resources are exchanged inside the criminal justice system.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I want to explore how and to what extent violent exchange relations are critical to criminal justice processes across the global north and south. I understand violent exchange as the use or threat of violence in order to force people into situations in which they need to exchange resources. While this is often spoken of as extortion, that is seldom just about eliciting resources through force. Often, it involves the production of spaces and temporalities of exchange. Having explored such violent exchange relations in the global south (South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya and the Philippines) for several years, a number of questions and theoretical propositions have emerged. In this presentation, I will attempt to apply the conceptual lens to empirical material from the US and Denmark. In the global north, criminal justice is often perceived to be rule-based, that is non-arbitrary. However, it seems clear that informality and exchange relations often find their way into the system. Hence, the paper asks about how and to what extent we may speak of exchange relations in northern criminal justice; what role violence or threat play in criminal justice and what resources are exchanged inside the criminal justice system.

Paper short abstract:

Closer attention to tribute may help us reach an understanding of how the state is reproduced both as a system and an idea.

Paper long abstract:

In an Shenzhen former rural village, the school's transfer to the state following urbanisation is locally interpreted as both an expropriation by the state and a gift to the state. I make two related points: the main point is that closer attention to tribute may help us reach an understanding of how the state is reproduced both as a system and an idea; my secondary point is that the distinction between government and state plays an important role in understanding how state power is conceived of as non-negotiable and at the same time, contestable within its own limits.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores policing relations between hawkers and Inspectorate officers in central Nairobi with an attention to intimacies. It discusses how violence is embedded in exchange relations between officers and hawkers, and how we might understand state-formation in this light.

Paper long abstract:

News media in Kenya regularly features reports about the violent relationship between illegalized street hawkers in central Nairobi and the County Inspectorate officers tasked with policing them. Pictures of burning vehicles, streets covered in tear gas, and officers in riot gear are accompanied by variations over the same urban myth of two figures locked in eternal battle: the ruthless, bribe-greedy County officer pitted against the cunning hawker, always ready to run. In this ethnographically informed presentation, I argue that violent clashes such as those reported in the media arise out of a policing relationship that in other respects is marked by forms of intimacy. These include neighborly intimacy, mediated through gift exchange relations that regulate hawkers' and officers' shared use of the inner city. They include hawkers' embodiment of the policing they are subject to, an intimate implication of the other in one's movements, and they include officers' responding to moral claims in their encounters with female hawkers who carry young children. Using intimacies of policing as a vantage point from which to see periodical eruptions of violence in officer-hawker relations, the paper discusses how violence can be implicated in exchange relations, and how we might understand state-formation in such relations. This discussion brings together economic anthropology literature, such as Strathern's notion of "compelling" in gift exchanges, with Africanist literature on state-formation working through personal relationships, such as Roitman's discussion of the "frontier".

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a case study of Bolivia's coca growers' unions and its relationship with the ruling MAS party, this paper provides important perspectives on the anthropology of the state by ethnographically capturing processes of localised state formation and their precarious forms of legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

Bolivia's Movement for Socialism (MAS) party has its roots in the Chapare coca growers' unions. Evo Morales, coca grower and former President (2006-2019), is currently in exile in Argentina. In power, in line with its international obligations, the MAS government had to restrict coca and cocaine production, activities that represent the coca growers' main sources of income. For the coca growers this constitutes a moral betrayal. This is because local conceptions of democracy are rooted in the principal that leadership should remain collective, deferential, and directly accountable: leaders must 'lead by obeying. The coca growers' disillusionment with the MAS, and their shift from a language of solidarity to one of dictatorship, shows that authoritarianism is not an essential feature of a particular system or people -but rather has to be understood as the result of a negotiated process between government and grassroots movements. As such it provides important perspectives on the anthropology of the state by ethnographically capturing processes of localised state formation and their precarious forms of legitimacy.

Paper short abstract:

The partial outsourcing of services to the voluntary sector produces allegiances which break down distinctions between state and non-state actors. The state simultaneously comes into being and ceases to exist. Refugee service provision also troubles presumed connections between state and nation.

Paper long abstract:

The troubled connections of service delivery for refugees in Portugal, characterized by the partial outsourcing of services to the voluntary sector, produce shifting allegiances on all sides which break down the sharp distinction between state and non-state actors. The challenges are similar to those of playing cards: the search for clarification regarding the rules of the game and how to apply and manipulate them, the need for individuals - who may be adversaries in one round but partners in the next - to keep a constant eye on each other. The expectation of the same standard of public services for all and the desire for trust and coherency, result in responses that attempt to hold the automated state, runaway and defiant refugees and an overburdened and underfinanced third sector to account. Claims to rights and privacy are met with legal restrictions upon obligations to provide, demands for accountability and intrusion into personal matters; expectations of detached professionalism, on the other hand, sit uneasily with personal desires for human inter-subjectivity and the assertion of freedom of movement is met with the threat of loss of rights. These and other exchanges elucidate the centrality of brokerage for understanding how the state comes into being and ceases to exist from one moment to another, according to shifting subjectivities and allegiances. They take place within a wider context in which the idea of the state persists, although refugee service provision also troubles the presumed connections between state and nation.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the intersection of local caste politics with everyday state practices and finds that it reproduces dominance and exclusion, creates policy-practice gaps but also opens up spaces for confrontation, assertion and the reconstitution of politics, practices & state-society boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork with lower level state functionaries of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Programme, in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India, revealed that the dominant Maratha caste used kinship, caste and political networks to colonise field level ICDS positions and capture state benefits and resources. Further, dominant caste ICDS field workers used everyday programme/state practices to perform ritual superiority, producing the Scheduled Castes/Dalits as 'polluted', 'untouchable' subjects and excluding them from programme services.

However, in a departure from much writing on the politically mediated state, I present two case studies of Dalit resistance to Maratha domination in the ICDS. Such resistance is led by Dalit state functionaries who confront Maratha attempts to control their labour and reproduce the material and cultural basis of Maratha caste power, by invoking the rules and structures of Weberian bureaucracy. Maratha attempts to blurr the state-society boundary by reproducing caste power as state power are challenged by Dalits through recourse to the idea of an impersonal and rational state.

In sum, this paper contributes to the anthropology of bureaucracy by focusing on the understudied role of state functionaries in everyday practices of the local state and highlights that (1) state functionaries use state practices to perform caste, exercising dominance and contesting subordination (2) such contestations produce competing imaginaries of state, and (3) intersections of state practices with the local political order do not only challenge the notion of the Weberian state but may work to uphold it as well.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the 'boundary work' needed to produce bottom-up statecraft, I argue that the process of 'unblurring' the boundaries between state and other entities through advocacy should be understood as a process of rewiring the relationship between citizens and authorities in the 'ought-to-be' way.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the 'boundary work' that is needed to produce bottom-up statecraft in Lebanon, in the area of environmental protection. Literature on the state in Lebanon has amply clarified the fact that neat divisions between state/non state and public/private are largely fictional, and that political clientelism, based on sectarian affiliation, is the primary channel through which citizens and non-citizens may access public services. This is not lost on ordinary inhabitants, who are acutely aware of the connection between corruption, the neglect of public interest, and these blurred boundaries. In the case of mobilisations for the protection of urban commons from privatisation and redevelopment, activists have identified this boundary in the person of public officials, who work in theory for the public good while in reality advance private and sectarian interests through the instrumentalization of state powers. If a Foucauldian approach understands the state as managing deviant populations (Thelen, Vetters and von-Benda Beckman 2014), progressive civic statecraft proceeds in the opposite direction, instating desired 'hard' boundaries around an envisaged state by managing 'deviant' public officials who are seen in breach of their perceived role as promoters of the public good. This, I argue, should not be seen as a process of depersonalisation or bureaucratisation, but rather one where relationships between people and power that are judged inappropriate contrasted to an ideal 'ought-to-be' state (not to be confused with the Weberian ideal-type) are severed only to be reconnected through more appropriate channels, for instance public consultations.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on town mayors entangled in a conflict over planned railway construction in the Italian Alps, this paper proposes to view local administrative institutions as dynamic sites where crisscrossing relations produce contradictory experiences and expectations of 'the state'.

Paper long abstract:

La fascia tricolore - the three-colour band of green, white and red - is the symbol worn by state officials such as mayors in Italy. But in the Alpine Valley of Susa (Valsusa), individuals wearing the fascia can sometimes be seen on barricades, facing angry policemen or getting beat up by riot cops. The mayors and other amministratori (members of the local administrations) of the many small towns in the valley have been involved in conflict over the central government's plan to build a new high-speed railway, which local residents have been opposing en masse. They are caught up in crisscrossing relations and contradictory obligations: they are the local representatives of 'the state', but also the expression of local communities; to the members of their constituencies, they are also kin, neighbours and friends. Many were local activists before becoming officials. The conflict has seen mayors play leading roles in the protests, but also abruptly shift their loyalties, strike deals with the government, and 'betray' the protesters. Drawing on thirteen months' of participant observation and interviews with mayors, activists, and local residents, I take a relational approach to 'the state' to explore these entanglements. I argue that the local institutions of public administration be seen neither as peripheral organs of a cohesive 'state' nor stable loci of resistance, but as dynamic sites of the articulation of power where heterogeneous forces converge and clash, producing contingent and unstable outcomes and shaping contradictory experiences and expectations of 'the state' among local citizens.

Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnographic examination of Turkey's coup trials, this paper demonstrates how legal proceedings have become one of the primary tools for the Turkish state to refashion itself and the actors that represent it.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from 2008, hundreds of officers of the Turkish Armed Forces were put on trial in multiple cases with allegations ranging from forming a terrorist organization within the state to leaking of state secrets for purposes of military espionage and plotting a coup to overthrow the government. These unprecedented trials constitute a momentous attempt to challenge the military's legitimacy and debunk its authority. As such, through the trials, soldiers, once privileged stakeholders of the state, often situated outside and above civilian legal frameworks, had their image shattered by the very state they were taught to represent and uphold. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research, the goal of this paper is threefold. First, it analyzes how, and to what effect, the rhetoric of the rule of law can become a tool to dismantle militaries, revert the exceptional status under which they operate, and in so doing, rearticulate the state and nation anew. Second, this paper reflects on the limits of contesting the doings of the state for people caught within the fraught situation of representing the state's interests and being its subjects—and subject to its power—at once. Finally, this paper demonstrates how, in the contemporary moment, legal proceedings have become a way to contain the chaos through which the Turkish state operates. Overall, this paper aims to highlight the interconnectedness of the law, state, and the military through the overarching framework of the trials as a moment of moral rupture in history by examining state making in action.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the welfare state as a key site of state-citizen relations. Welfare programs provide access to larger socio-political constellations, and the moral economies and forms of social contract these spell out.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the welfare state as a key site of state-citizen relations, which provides access to specific, historically and spatially situated socio-political worlds. Rather than examining the disciplinary effects of particular forms of governance and service provision, as many anthropological explorations of the welfare state do, I suggest we step back to examine the larger socio-political constellations of which these welfare programs are part, and the moral economies and forms of social contract these spell out. I propose we understand welfare state programs as modelling particular relationalities, between states that embody a public will, public good or public actor and agency, citizens, individuals positioned in particular reciprocal relations with that state, and other entities, like the public, society or community that represent forms of congregation among citizens. Taking inspiration from approaches developed out of science and technology studies, we can ask how such entities, and the relations between them, are enacted in and through welfare programs. I will illustrate the value of this approach by drawing on examples from fieldwork in Amsterdam over the last ten years.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on perspectives from 'Indigenous' Political Science, Critical Development Studies and Digital Anthropology, this paper argues that a new kind of state is emerging in Solomon Islands, one that is both illiberal and relational.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on perspectives from 'Indigenous' Political Science, Critical Development Studies and Digital Anthropology, this paper argues that a new kind of state is emerging in Solomon Islands, one that is both illiberal and relational. An investigation of Constituency Development Funds, local representatives of the state, especially teachers, and the rise of indigenous netizens reveals how Solomon Islanders subvert normative, outsider perceptions of the state. Instead, they re-align them based on long-standing notions of relationality, reciprocity and indigenous forms of governance. This realignment highlights those boundaries between the state and its imagined citizens that matter most to Solomon Islanders and that are actively integrated and blurred in everyday life, not only in the political centre, Honiara, but also in the predominantly rural settings that conventional perspectives often argue to be void of any noteworthy form of statehood. Simultaneously, the everyday blurriness of some boundaries reveals those boundaries that appear to many Solomon Islanders as rigid, impermeable and as such as essentially non-relational, non-reciprocal and foreign. It is the tensions between the relational and the non-relational or illiberal state that defines the particular challenges faced by Solomon Islanders as they encounter the global state system while demonstrating their ingenuity in refashioning their relationships with this system in the everyday.

Paper short abstract:

The Turkish National Police underwent intensive reforms during the 2000s, which generated a range of social projects. Such projects often felt like suffocating care, which I take as an analytic to explore how populist authoritarianism builds new relational space for state-citizen encounters.

Paper long abstract:

The Turkish National Police underwent intensive reforms during the 2000s, which generated a range of social projects implemented across different police units with the support of other governmental branches focusing on social policies, welfare and social security. These projects helped police experiment with new, mostly sensorial, policing methods in addition to teaching people how to see and feel like the police. People became subjects of proactive policing projects, and their homes became laboratories of emergent state care. Policing through social projects often felt like suffocating care, especially for regular recipients of social assistance. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2015-2017 in different social settings, from police stations to home visits, the talk analyzes the convergence of a service-oriented bureaucratic ethos with a populist appeal to serve 'the people'. I take 'suffocating care' as an analytic to explore how populist authoritarianism makes inroad to everyday life and builds new relational space for state-citizen encounters.

Paper short abstract:

In my paper I explore the cases of two orphaned patients at a public hospital in Tanzania to look at the constructions of vital relationships through practices of care. By reading across domains such as public/private and state/kinship I intend to reveal the relational aspects of the state.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research in the department of health including the public hospital and social welfare office of a small district in Tanzania, I investigate the case of a patient on the male ward, a young man who could be best described as 'socially naked' (Howell 2006): picked up on the street by the police and suffering from advanced HIV/AIDS which made him unable to communicate verbally, he appeared as an unrelational individual without past. By focusing on the daily practices of care I want to explore the ways in which hospital staff and social workers, as agents of the state (Fassin 2015), created significant and - in a double sense - vital relationships with him over the course of his ongoing hospitalization. Following recent calls of a relational (state) anthropology (McKinnon/Cannell 2013; Thelen 2015) the constructions and negotiations of these relationships, often expressed in kin terms, show the mediation between different realms such as public/private or state/kinship and thus pose a vivid example to read across social domains (McKinnon/Cannell 2013). Including a second case of a another patient, a day laborer without relatives, and his eventual death on the male ward prompts further questions of (political) belonging, (un)deservingness, and the boundary work of the state.