Tag Archives: law

Harmony Ideology at The Hague. New Blog Post for Public Anthropologist

Together with Felix Girke, I have just published another op-ed piece on the genocide case currently pending at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. There, The Republic of The Gambia has filed a case against Myanmar, accusing the country’s army of having committed genocide of Muslim Rohingya. We have published on this issue also at OpenDemocracy, focusing on the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi herself, who has decided to act as the “Agent” of a high-profile team of lawyers. While her status as an ‘icon of democracy’ is unbroken within the country, especially in Western countries, commentators are grappeling with what they perceive to be a sudden and unexpected shift in her personality since she became “state counsellor”. However, as I have argued in 2017 already, this is in line with how she has always been doing politics.

Yangon, 10. Dec 2019. © B. Mette-Starke

In our blog post for Public Anthropologist, we take a look at Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech at the ICJ on December 11 2019. We argue  that she employs “harmony ideology,” a concept coined by the legal anthropologist Laura Nader in the 1990s, based on her work among the Talean Zapotec in southern Mexico in the 1960s. Later, Nader applied her new terminology to so-called alternative dispute resolution (ADR)-cases in the United States of America.

“Harmony ideology”, so Nader, needs to be understood as a counterhegemonic force with which her Zapotec villagers tried to keep the Mexican state at bay. By pretending that they are a harmonious people and capable of dealing with their disputes internally, they tried to fend off any outside interference. In ADR-cases, Nader showed how “harmony ideology” was used to “outsource” dispute cases that judges thought to be too irrelevant for to be decided in state courts. In the case of Myanmar at the ICJ, however, Felix Girke and I argue that

Aung San Suu Kyi acted as if her country were a southern Mexican village, needing protection from illegitimate legal governance that interfered with its internal affairs, while at the same time embodying the very state apparatus that is now internationally accused of having committed genocide against its own population.

While the Talean Zapotec might have had effective measures for local dispute resolution and good reasons to keep the state courts at bay, the atrocities committed against the Rohingya and the poor record of Myanmar to police itself suggest that Suu Kyi’s harmony ideology at the ICJ is sorely misplaced, we argue. Read the full post over at Public Anthropologist.

Upcoming term 2019/20: Teaching on Indigeneity and Law

This winter term I will be teaching a course on indigeneity and law for our BA-students at the University of Konstanz.

While in the colonial era the alleged “backwardness” of  “natives” or even  “savages” was taken as an opportunity to deny them their right to their land, today “indigeneity” is a term used by indigenous people themselves in order to assert their rights (to land, natural resources, cultural self-determination, etc.).

In this seminar, we explore the nexus of indigenity and law by reading anthropological texts on indigeneity (and related concepts such as ethnicity). On the other hand, we learn about legal sources for such claims-making through which the rights of indigenous peoples get articulated in recent decades (for example UN resolutions, current court decisions, …).

We will also read two different types of (auto-) ethnographic texts: on the one hand the life story of a Guatemalan indigenous woman, Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos / Menchú 1984) and on the other the recent monograph of the indigenous anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014) “Mohawk Interruptus. Political life across the borders of settler states “to the Kahnawà: ke (Haudenosaunee / Iroquois Confederation) in Quebec.

The aim of the seminar is to be able to trace  historical and current connections between processes of Othering and those of Self-culturalization in the name of “indigeneity” from an anthropological perspective, as well as to understand the central role of law in doing so.

Here is the syllabus of the seminar.

Watching Iraq talk about Human Rights. Excursion to the 20th Universal Periodic Review in Geneva

I am preparing for a two-day excursion with my Master students to the 20th Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations. The event will take place in the Palais des Nations in Geneva. In advance, we had to register via email, and in order to be allowed to participate, we will need to collect our “badges” on Monday morning at the gate of the palace.

We will be witnessing the Review of Iraq on Monday and the Review of Slovenia on Tuesday. We will hopefully also arrange for a tour around the building — in which the former Völkerbund was housed — and I am personally interested in observing the Distribution of the report on Kazakhstan.

My students’ task is to learn participant observation in an International Organization. That is, to employ anthropological research methods originally designed in and for colonized societies, in a setting that is not only “Western”, but also transnational, bureaucratic, complex, and …. boring? Maybe not. We shall see …

In order to prepare, we have read a couple of anthropological texts, most importantly those by Jane Cowan and Julie Billaud, who carried out long-term field research in the UPR two years ago. But also documentation itself such as

the English version of the National Report on Iraq

the Compilation of UN Information on Iraq

a Summary of Stakeholders’ Information on Iraq

and several sheets of advanced questions prepared by various member states of the UN. The UK, for example, would like to know the following:

“The situation for ethnic and religious groups including Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Turkmen and others remains deeply concerning. What is being done to protect vulnerable groups from continued attacks and persecution; and also to enable them to return to their homes in areas where they have been displaced – particularly where their neighbours have allegedly been complicit in the persecution?”

I am very much looking forward to hearing how “Iraq” is going to answer that one …

Recent Supreme Court Decisions

Recently, a couple of blog posts have dealt with the most outrageous, important, and/or course-changing decisions of the US Supreme Court in the last months, including topics such as botched executions and the right of women to remain in control of their  bodies. The following posts are worth reading:

1. Ilya Somin’s Religious Freedom in the Commercial Sphere (Burwell VS Hobby Lobby)

2. Austin Sarat’s Botching the 8th Amendment (Atkins VS Virginia)

3. Lyle Denniston’s Fifth Circuit Allows More Limits on Abortion in Texas

4. Amy Howe’s Court Strikes Down Abortion Clinic “Buffer Zone”( McCullen VS Coakley)

 

There is also a new monograph on the topic, published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

Garrett Epps’ American Justice 2014. Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court