Category Archives: courts

Open Acess: “Asylum Interviews in the UK”. Published in Social Anthropology

My new article “Asylum Interviews in the UK. The problem of evidence and the possibility of applied anthropology” has just been published with Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale (33/3: 51-65).

In this article, I interrogate the process how evidence is established in asylum procedure by engaging with anthropological and socio-legal literature on evidence and credibility assessments. Drawing on ethnomethodology, I analyse asylum interviews and show in what ways evidence can be understood as the result of an asymmetrical co-construction. As a result of this procedure, the individual applicant disappears and a ‘case’ is established.

Anthropologists who write country of origin reports based on such ‘case material’ for tribunals and courts can highlight the asymmetries in evidence-making and question the very categorisations through which the state operates. The article contributes to ongoing debates on the role of anthropologists and their knowledge as experts in court.

It is open access and can be downloaded here.

Crimes against commonality

Before all other forms of membership, we are “all members of the human family”, as the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has specified. Thus, the international legal concept of crimes against humanity is crucial because all war crimes are predicated on the fact that those committing these atrocities are enabled once they succeed in establishing difference that makes us forget our human commonality.

We cannot but make do with what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has called the imaginary order – the way in which we try to relate to others by looking for similarities and differences, mainly in order to acknowledge ourselves. We need the ‘other‘ to sustain ourselves as the I(ndividual) we imagine ourselves to be.

The imaginary order is the order of world-making in the sense of Hannah Arendt (1959) for whom the world is not ‘out there‘, but rather that which arises between people in discourse, as I will develop in an upcoming presentation. We have to keep engaging with others, irrespective of the fact that we will never really understand each other entirely. But we are obliged to keep trying. There is no other way.

“For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse … We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it, we learn to be human” (Hannah Arendt, 1959, 24-25)

Human commonality is already there from the beginning, transcending all dichotomies, whereas difference is something we can only ever bring about consciously. What we have in common and what makes us human is that we are split by language, as Lacan argued. If we acknowledge this, we might be able to include the other not as an opposite ‘they’ but as part of our own unconscious: we are always other to ourselves first.

UN Photo In 1950, on the second anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, students at the UN International Nursery School in New York viewed a poster of the historic document.

Research Colloquium at Université Paris-Nanterre

This winter term, I will be spending some time with my anthropology colleagues at Paris-Nanterre as part of the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie comparative (LESC), part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

One part of my research stay is devoted to working on my current project: “Towards an anthropology of statelessness”. I will be speaking at the Department’s Colloquium in December (see plan below). I will also be teaching a course in legal anthropology … more about this one later.

The colloquium is free and open to the public, everyone is welcome.

“Rethinking community in Myanmar. Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon” (NIAS Press 2023) has arrived!

‘Community’, I argue in my new anthropological monograph, was actively turned into a category for administrative purposes during the time of British imperial rule. It has been put to work to divide people into ethno-religious selves and others ever since.

Rather than bestowing on community some sort of positivist reality or deconstructing the category until nothing is left, my aim in this book is to shift the angle of approach: I acknowledge that community (for reasons that can usually be traced historically) feels real to and is meaningful for individuals. Their experiences and their struggles to engage with community are no less real. Through their own classificatory practices, my interlocutors — Muslims and Hindus in urban Yangon — demonstrate that they reason and reflect on symbols and meanings in their own culture as much as anthropologists do. But my approach goes beyond a social constructivist concern over how terms such as community are used, and also beyond a representational approach in which actors are subjected to culture as a system of meaning.

When I talk about the work of community (drawing on Nancy 2015), I reflect on the ways in which individuals accommodate ‘community’ in their acts of reasoning, meaning-making and symbolization. The way my interlocutors in Yangon see and talk about themselves has a historical context that begins in nineteenth-century England, encompasses British colonial India and later Burma itself, and extends into presentday
Myanmar. I then widen the emic perspective of my interlocutors and offer a novel way of describing how a we that does not neatly map onto or overlap with a homogeneous social group is generated in various situations.

What I call we-formation encompasses individual and intersubjective routines that can easily be overlooked, as well as more spectacular forms such as the intercorporeal aspects of the ritual march I described earlier. Attending to such sometimes minute moments of co-existence or tacit cooperation is difficult, but doing so can help us understand how community continues to have such an impact on the everyday lives of our interlocutors, not to mention on our own analytical ways of thinking about sociality.

By focusing on individuals and their bodily practices and experiences, as well as on discourses that do not explicitly invoke community but still centre around a we, we-formation sensitizes us to how a sense of we can emerge .

You can purchase the book on the publisher’s website: NIAS Press.

Who gets to be ‘Myanmar’ at the ICJ?

The Myanmar military will appear at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on 21 February 2022. I argue that their main interest does not lie in defending the country against genocide allegations. Read the full post at Allegra Lab.

In the case of The Gambia vs Myanmar currently pending at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Myanmar has been accused of having violated the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 by committing serious crimes against the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. In 2017, 800.000 Rohingya fled Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh in an effort to escape the military’s atrocities.

The army’s attempted military coup of February 202

The case did not proceed after the Myanmar military attempted a coup on 1 February 2021. That night, Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were arrested and have since been accused of corruption, violations of the telecoms law, a state secrets act as well as covid-19 regulations. They are currently facing several years of imprisonment. The generals declared the November 2020 parliamentary elections as fraudulent and put a state of emergency in place. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is now heading the country. But not only the State Counsellor and the President, but the entire population of Myanmar has been held hostage: since February 2021, over 1.500 people have been murdered, thousands have been arrested and 450.000 people have become internally displaced, adding to the already high numbers of IDPs.

The National Unity Government

Members of the parliament elected in November 2020 formed the National Unity Government (NUG) while in hiding, now operating from undisclosed locations. They have established working relations with many states and international organizations, including the UN, where Ambassador U Kyaw Moe Tun supports the NUG and has been able to continue representing his country even though the military fired and charged him with high treason. While the military regime has received backing from China and Russia, most other countries have cut diplomatic and also economic ties with Myanmar under the current leadership. The question of who is representing Myanmar in the international community is a contested one which needs to be kept in mind when the case in The Hague continues on 21 February 2022.

Trying to benefit from a genocide accusation

Historically, the army has shown no interest in complying with international legal norms. The “rule of law”-paradigm has been a particular red rag for the Generals. Still, the Myanmar military will likely send delegates to attend the upcoming proceedings in The Hague. At the same time, the National Unity Government (NUG) has declared that United Nations Ambassador U Kyaw Moe Tun is the only person authorised to represent the country in The Hague.

However, for the generals, defending the country against the genocide accusation is largely a means to an end: they will use this opportunity to conduct themselves as the legitimate representatives of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar on a global stage. One should not fall for this trick, or not again: Already in April 2021 the military managed the feat that a general participated in an online-event of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), thereby bypassing the UN Secretary General’s own advice not to cooperate with the junta.

The ICJ is one of the principal legal organs for investigating violations of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, to which Myanmar is a signatory. To invite the junta to represent the country means to offer them the chance to use the court as a platform for strategic litigation where no longer the crime, but the performance of legitimacy will be key: When the ICJ reopens the case against Myanmar, the Rohingya genocide is not a primary concern of the generals. Rather, it is to be ‘Myanmar’. The ICJ has a historical opportunity to avoid such an ethical, political and legal failure.

Read the full post at Allegra Lab.