Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Roundtable

Changing Climates of Politics and Law I

Politics, Law

Organizer(s)

• 

  Mark Goodale

  University of Lausanne
• JG

  Jessica Greenberg

  University of Illinois

Chair(s)

• 

  Elif Babul

  Assisitant Professor
  Mount Holyoke College
• 

  Jessica Winegar

  Professor
  Northwestern University

Presenter(s)

• 

  Kamari Clarke

  Professor
  University of California Los Angeles
• MC

  Matthew Canfield

  Assistant Professor, Law, Politics, and Society
  Drake University
• RR

  Robin Riner

  Marshall University
• HS

  Hanan Sabea

  Associate Prof of Anthropology
  American University in Cairo
• DD

  Dace Dzenovska

  University of Oxford

Abstract: If the period after the end of the Cold War was marked by what some have called the “judicialization of politics,” a period in which political claims were rendered increasingly legal (often through rights), is this still the case? How do the political and legal now relate to each other in light of the backlash against human rights, the rise of nationalism, ongoing structural racism and sexism, and the challenges created by exploding global inequality? Are we entering (should we be entering?) a phase of “de-judicialization” in which political claims and claims-making are being decoupled from the legal to be pursued in other ways? What does our collective ethnography tells us about these questions?

This roundtable—one of two companion roundtables—brings together political and legal anthropologists from the editorial board of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), the journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA), to consider these and other questions. The close relationship between political and legal anthropology has proven to be a fruitful one. At the same time, the conceptual and ethical linkages between the political and the legal have remained dynamic. Participants in the roundtable will critically examine this relationship in order to both take stock of the enduring value of the central logic of APLA and consider the ways in which this close collaboration can respond to wider changes in the way politics and law relate to each other in practice in the contemporary world.