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Session #4: Saturday, 10 January, 11.30 - 13.15 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Bikram Jeet Batra, Lawyer and Researcher, Ghana (bjbatra@gmail.com )
Chair/discussant: Veena Das, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University (veena.das@gmail.com)
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
In accounts that look at the violence and the law, the law emerges not as a benign adjudicatory entity that orders or provides stability of meaning, but it emerges as a force that essentially dis-orders, that it not only destroys the meaning and the coherence of a normative world, but also visits upon its subjects, a very material violence. “Legal interpretation,” Robert Cover famously states “takes place in a field of pain and death…A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life. Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur. When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organised, social practices of violence. Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another.”
How does one then deal with the violence of the legal world? How does one re-inhabit a world visited upon by the law’s devastation? If the laws violence is world shattering, as Robert Cover argues, how does one pick up the pieces and go on living? Drawing from Veena Das’ Life and Words, I am interested in how people cope with and account for the law’s violence. Through ethnographies of women litigants in course of court cases concerning divorce, custody and maintenance, the question I ask is what place law occupies in their narratives and how do we understand the ways in which the law is deployed in their stories. Drawing upon these narratives, I argue that the law is not merely a medium through which rights and entitlements are claimed, but is at times accounted for in affective ways, and emerges as a site where love, responsibility, betrayal, and honour find expression.
Disappearances are a very common phenomenon in the existing circumstances of war in Sri Lanka. The beginnings of this phenomenon can be traced back to the decade before the 'officially recognised' beginning of the civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan Government. A sizable number of Sinhalese youth are said to have 'disappeared' during the seventies as part of the struggle between the communist vision of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the suppression of the same by the then Sri Lankan Government. From the beginning of the eighties, Tamil youth from the north and east of the country as well as Colombo and other parts begin to 'disappear' as the struggle for equality in civil and political rights gains ground among the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The nature of the struggle has changed. It is now a war between the Sinhala Fascist Sri Lankan Government and the LTTE who have ensured their place as the soul representatives of the Sri Lankan Tamil people through undemocratic means. This particular paper will examine closely three key concepts. It will look at the creation of the phenomenon of 'disappearance' itself and how its meanings might have changed from the 70s till today. Through this analysis, it will dwell into the process of the creation of individual subjectivities within the context of war. Further, it will look into how the memory of those disappeared has grown and has been maintained within the public sphere. This memory would then have had a significant impact on the other two concepts discussed earlier. Within this a significant caveat would be the case of Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, a young woman who was in school, who then 'disappears' on her way home from an army checkpoint. This case, saw an interesting construction of her subjectivity at a national and international level and saw all other 'disappearances' recede to the background. It is an interesting story for many reasons including, for the fact that 'disappearance' is otherwise constructed in public memory and discourse as male by default.
The paper will be based on habeas corpus cases from the 70s onwards. It will also be based on reports and other material produced by the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), a significant organisation that are meticulous watchdogs of human rights violations in Sri Lanka. Further, a survey will be done of two nodal web resources, the Sri Lankan Government's defense department's website and Tamilnet the mouthpiece of the LTTE. The ways in which this analysis may build are not finite. It will be an attempt at writing of the legal history of a significant phenomenon over almost three decades in Sri Lanka. It will also hope to look more closely at the creation of individual subjectivities in Sri Lanka today which is not within the often limited framework of ethnicity while not losing sight of the latter. The material analyzed will hopefully throw up many more questions within this context.
The objective of this paper is to investigate rumour as a medium for the violence of the state and its role in fashioning the ‘event’, the ‘everyday’ and the legends that are enmeshed in the two. This paper draws upon existing work treating the language of rumour as ‘a perlocutionary force’ that ties seemingly disparate events together. Nevertheless it cannot be tethered to one author, which may make it a site for contestations (Veena Das, 2007). In this region of doubt and anonymity, does the state lurk? Perhaps the state resides in these 'unfinished stories' of violence and the law, told by people who are 'translators'. These translations give and take away from the form that the event assumes at any point, given that people speak from different and multiple positions. The attempt is perhaps to piece together fragments, convey their pain / suffering. The state is both implicated and vindicated in this process of translation, in these words without an author and in this language whose meaning is uncertain. Be it a riot or a minor disturbance actuated by political motives, these elements are visible, as the state and rumour seem indelibly written into its subtext. The paper uses people’s tellings of such events as a starting point. How does the subject, living in the 'site of devastation', engage with the uncertainty of the rumour? How are the events woven into memories? We use the axes of violence, rumour and suffering to address these questions.
The death penalty has declined or disappeared in most parts of the world, including Asia. At present, only four or five Asian nations retain capital punishment and continue to conduct judicial executions with any frequency: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Singapore, and possibly Pakistan. Many analysts contend that the widespread decline of the death penalty dramatically illustrates the spread and success of human rights norms, and some observers believe that the decline or disappearance of the death penalty stimulates improvement in other areas of state behavior, including the use of extra-judicial violence. This article explores and speculates about the relationship between judicial and extra-judicial killing in the Asia region. It begins by describing the variation in state killing that exists in contemporary Asia. This cross-sectional analysis suggests there is little correlation between judicial and extra-judicial executions, but the appearance of independence largely disappears when the two forms of state killing are viewed in temporal perspective. Judicial and extra-judicial executions have declined over time in many Asian jurisdictions, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Burma, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and perhaps Nepal. The evidence is too thin to tell whether a similar pattern obtains in countries such as India and Thailand, where judicial executions are rare but where there has been considerable extra-judicial killing by the state in recent years. The article concludes by positing a hypothesis of “common causation” which suggests that the decline of extra-judicial executions may be explained by the same forces that explain the decline of capital punishment.