Introduction: law containing violence: critical ethnographies of occupation and resistance

ABSTRACT

This special issue of The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law brings together legal anthropologists and legal scholars who share a common commitment to understanding law's formative and constitutive role in relation to the social, cultural, and political dynamics of occupation. The authors draw upon and extend recent work on the emergence of new forms of military, multilateral, and humanitarian occupations, and their roles in reinforcing institutionalized violence against occupied peoples. Contributions in this volume treat occupation as a distinct object of legal and cultural analysis, revealing its similarities as well as its departures from colonial and postcolonial modes of state and military sovereignty. The special issue seeks to move beyond the limitations of existing cultural and legal frameworks and towards a context-driven mode of understanding the varied and flexible state practices of occupants and the legal texts and juridical decisions that shape the nature of their authority. At the same time, ethnographic analyses shed light on the collective memories and lived experiences that shape people's everyday relationships to the state and its military power.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupation
• emergency
• sovereignty
• democracy
• law
• violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Benvenisti describes this principle through the notion of trusteeship: “The power exercising effective control within another sovereign's territory has only temporary managerial powers, for the period until a peaceful resolution is reached. During that limited period, the occupant administers the territory on behalf of the sovereign. Thus the occupant's status is conceived of be that of a trustee” (2004, 6).

2. The increasing concern among international law scholars with the impacts of occupations on people's lives is reflected in the ICRC project, initiated in 2007, on “Occupation and Other Forms of Administration of Foreign Territory,” which aimed “to analyse whether and to what extent the rules of occupation law are adequate to deal with the humanitarian and legal challenges arising in contemporary occupations, and whether they might need to be reaffirmed, clarified or developed.” This project considered the emergence of multilateral and humanitarian occupations, as well as issues of concern in the everyday lives of occupied peoples, such as protection of civilians, ensurance of public order and safety, coordination of relief efforts, provision of travel documents, property rights of the population, management of cultural heritage and art objects, management of refugees, and others.