CFP: Law, Custom, and the Commensurability of Decidability in Africa and Beyond

Working title: Law, Custom, and the Commensurability of Decidability in Africa and Beyond

There are many examples in anthropology and socio-legal studies of the combination of state law and regulation with "traditional" or "customary" practices to address contemporary social problems. For example, a pre-Colonial dispute resolution practice has been formalized in Rwanda and used to try thousands of genocide suspects, and in countries like The Gambia, "customary" and Islamic financial practices are brought into private law. These systems are not simply the result of multiple processes emerging organically and co-existing, but rather are "governed" by state and non-state actors as processes framed as "more inclusive" (and, hence, "better") of forms of authority often seen as marginalized by the modern postcolonial state. In this vein, the intersection between "customary" and state law has been a recurring motif in the anthropology of Africa. It has drawn our attention to how customary practices are rendered legible by state legal frameworks which are typically heavily indebted to a European model; what is left out of these processes; and how different modes of legality do or do not coexist in specific jurisdictions (viz. "legal pluralism").
Beyond simply highlighting the interplay between law/regulation and custom, however, this session aims to reconsider this intersection by examining, across a variety of contemporary examples, the conditions that make a legal or regulatory matter decidable: that is, how an issue is defined as capable of being addressed through an easily identifiable procedure that will provide a set answer. We are specifically interested in exploring how ways of making decisions, rendering predictions, circumscribing evidence, and establishing connections, are made to seem discrete (as properly "legal" or properly "customary," for example) or, conversely, how they are subordinated to one another. Our central concern, which we consider across a range of case studies, etc), is thus not how modalities of law and regulation differ, but how they are made to seem distinct yet at the same time commensurable.
If you are interested in participating in this session or have any questions, please email (preferably with an abstract but at the very least a sentence or two describing the paper) the organizers (Niklas Hultin, at nhultin1@swarthmore.edu and Kristen Doughty at kdoughty@sas.upenn.edu) as soon as possible, or at the very latest by March 29. The AAA deadline is April 1. We are especially keen on including case studies beyond sub-Saharan Africa, but all types of papers are welcome.

CfP: Impunity, Complicity, and the Exception: Rethinking Arenas of Sovereignty Beyond the State

Call for Papers: American Anthropological Association (AAA), 19-23 November, 2008
Proposed Session: Impunity, Complicity, and the Exception: Rethinking Arenas of Sovereignty Beyond the State
Co-Organizers: Haley Duschinski (Ohio University) and Ken MacLean (Clark University)

Sovereignty, Agamben reminds us, resides in the exception - a double-movement that exempts the sovereign from the field of rule andthen defines the parameters of "bare life," i.e. those who can bekilled but not sacrificed. It is this "state of exception," he argues,which defines what forms of human life the sovereign will protect andthose it will not. In recent years, a significant body of scholarship has emerged around this provocative re-definition of sovereignty,which intersects and productively extends prior work by Schmitt,Arendt, and Foucault, among others. This critical engagement with the question of how sovereign power is operationalized has refocused attention on the continued relevance of the nation-state and its boundary-making practices in the globalizing present. However, many questions remain as to the applicability of Agamben's insights in other cultural contexts given the constitutive role Western political philosophy, jurisprudence, and historical experience plays within his arguments regarding sovereignty. This panel explores these concerns by turning an anthropological eye towards the making and unmaking of impunity specific local contexts in Central America, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Impunity, in human rights discourse, refers to a condition in which those responsible for ordering or carrying out acts of violence are immune to or exempt from punishment. The guilty parties are, quite literally, placed outside the law because the state is either unwilling or unable to prosecute them for their actions. To better understand this from an anthropological perspective, we approach impunity as a set of cultural practices that categorizes certain populations as being excluded from the domain of citizenship and thus, to varying degrees, expendable. At the same time these practices also define their mirrored other: the formal and informal security forces that enact state-sponsored forms of violence and, in doing so, demarcate the boundaries of "bare life." Together, these practices help produce culturally specific regimes of impunity that raise challenging questions concerning how zones of exception—the space between nature (zoe) and culture (bios)—are constituted, maintained, and challenged in other settings of sovereign power.
The papers on this panel address a series of questions that seek to elucidate and expand Agamben's work on sovereignty by examining what happens when the foundational categories and their concomitant cultural practices are "provincialized" and "internationalized" in contemporary arenas of sovereignty. In what ways do existing international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee frameworks structurally produce or reproduce regimes of impunity at both the sub-national and transnational scales? Do these "zones of exception," which may or may not be spatially contiguous with existing political boundaries, differ from those described by Agamben? What changes when the primary focus of our attention broadens or shifts to include corporations, international financial institutions, private security firms, and/or third-party states that are complicit in human rights abuses? In what ways do contemporary efforts to assert regulatory authority over entities that produce their own "state effects" challenge us to rethink what sovereignty is becoming?
Please send abstracts (250 words) to Ken MacLean (KMacLean@clarku.edu) or Haley Duschinski (duschins@ohio.edu) by March 15, 2008.

CfP: African Customary Law Revisited

"African Customary Law Revisited: The Role of Customary Law in the 21st Century"
Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, Fordham University, Botswana
23-24 October 2008

The sponsoring organization of "African Customary Law Revisited: The Role of Customary Law in the 21st Century" invites submissions and participant nominations for a collaborative exchange and discussion at a two-day conference to take place on October 23-24, 2008 in Botswana. The conference working language will be English. The conference will include paper presentations on topics detailed below and will also include working group discussions with a broad range of stakeholders, including, for example, traditional leaders, members of the judiciary, representatives of non-governmental organizations and other interested persons, on topics related to customary law.
Customary law, the traditional law indigenous to a region, continues to regulate many areas of people’s lives in Africa. For example, some African constitutions now enshrine the right to culture and oblige courts to apply customary law where applicable. Elsewhere, constitutional and statutory law have superseded most or all customary law. Yet, even in situations where constitutional law, statutory law and common law have largely superseded it, customary law may nevertheless govern in certain areas, such as family relations. For example, in many places, the requirements for marriage, the rights and duties of husbands and wives, the obligations toward and custody of children, the ownership of property acquired during marriage, and many other aspects of family life are governed by customary law. Moreover, even where conflicting constitutional or statutory law exists, lack of access to legal resources may mean that, as a practical matter, customary law still governs. Finally, the persistence of longstanding expectations and social practices informed by customary law has given rise to many problems in enforcing contradictory statutory law.
Notwithstanding the significant role customary law continues to play in people’s lives, there has been a notable lack of research and formal scholarly exchange on the topic. As detailed further below, the African Customary Law Revisited conference will attempt to fill this gap by exploring the nature, substance and role of customary law in Africa in the 21st Century.
Transportation to the conference venue, lodging, meals and transportation at the venue will be subject to arrangement between the sponsoring organizations and the event participants.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Twenty papers will be selected for presentation at the conference by a Steering Committee comprised of members from the sponsoring organization. All proposals should include a project description and the applicant’s curriculum vitae. All proposals should be in English with project descriptions not to exceed 1000 words. As publication of selected papers in contemplated, submissions should describe work that has not been previously published.

Possible topics for consideration:
- What is customary law in the 21st Century?
- How is customary law ascertained? What are the sources of customary law? How is it generated? How does it change?
- The history of customary law; customary law and colonialism
- “Procedural” aspects of customary law / Venues to enforce customary law
- Traditional courts and other venues for decision
- The relationship between traditional courts or decision-makers and the formal court systemm
- Evidentiary standards and methods of proving customary law
- Codification of customary law
- Substantive areas of customary law, for example:
- Land tenure
- Family law
- Environmental law
- Chieftancy
- Intellectual Property
- Criminal law
- Gender and customary law
- Customary law and international law
SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS MARCH 25, 2008.
Proposals should be submitted by e-mail to:
leitnercenter@law.fordham.edu
Participants will be notified in April 2008 that their papers have been accepted for presentation at the conference. The papers will be published together in a book after the conference and will be posted on-line at: http://www.leitnercenter.org
Publication is contingent on producing a final paper of publishable quality.

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

The sponsoring organizations invite nominations of traditional leaders, members of the judiciary or other persons or organizations who may be interested in attending the conference to participate in the working group discussions and discussion of papers. Persons may self-nominate or nominate others with expertise in matters related to customary law.

Nominations should include:
- The title and address of person or organization nominated.
- An explanation of the reasons for the nomination (500-word limit) including:
- What is the person or organization’s role with respect to customary law? What is the basis for the person or organization’s expertise in this area?
- Why, specifically, do you believe this person or organization should be included in the conference?
- What areas or issues related to customary law would the person or organization be most interested in discussing?
- Submitter information: Your name, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address.
NOMINATION DEADLINE is March 25, 2008.
Nominations should be submitted by e-mail to: leitnercenter@law.fordham.edu
Nominated persons and organizations who are accepted to participate in the conference will be notified in April 2008.

CONTACT
Leitner Center for International Law and Justice
Fordham University
33 West 60th Street, 2nd Fl
New York, NY 10023
USA
Tel: +1-212-636-6862
Fax: +1-212-636-6775
Email: leitnercenter@law.fordham.edu
Web: http://www.leitnercenter.org

CfP: Dialogue among Cultures: Peace, Justice and Harmony

Call for Papers"Dialogue among Cultures: Peace, Justice and Harmony"
ISUD 8th World CongressInternational Society for Universal Dialogue (ISUD)
Beijing International Studies UniversityBeijing (China)
23-28 July 2009

The ISUD is an international association of philosophers devoted to promoting the discussion of such fundamental issues as world peace, social justice, human rights, and dialogical interrelations of diverse cultures. Through this congress the Society hopes to stimulate philosophical reflection and discussion on topics related to the central theme of dialogue among cultures. Topics on philosophy of culture, cultural diversity and universality, globalization, ethics of peace, social equality, justice, and harmony are welcome, as are non-western or other philosophical perspectives. Papers presented at the congress will be published in the ISUD bi-annual proceedings.

June 1, 2008: Deadline for abstract submission.
August 15, 2008: Notification of acceptance and invitation to submit full paper.
December 1, 2008: Full text of paper due.
February 15, 2009: Notification of acceptance of paper.
May 1, 2009: Accepted papers posted on ISUD website.

Registration: May 1, 2009, early registration fee due($125);
June 1, 2009, late registration fee accepted ($150).

Send a 300-500 word abstract in English by regular post or email attachment in Word to the address indicated below.For more information on the congress please visit our web site: http://www.isud.org

Contact:
Dr. Marc LuchtDepartment of the Humanities, Francis Hall 229, Alvernia College
400 Saint Bernardine Street, Reading, PA 19607, USA
Email: marc.lucht@alvernia.edu
Web: http://www.isud.org

CfP: Imagining and Constructing “terrorism” and “war on terror” (EASA 2008)

The workshop takes place at the biennial conference of the European
Association for Social Anthropology to be held in Lubljana, Slovenia,
26-30 August, 2008
WO26 Imagining and Constructing "terrorism" and "war on terror"
Julia Eckert, Max-Planck-Institut e for Social Anthropology, Eckert@eth.mpg.de
Reetta Toivanen, Centre of Excellence in global Governance Research, University of Helsinki, Reetta.toivanen@helsinki.fi

This workshop focuses on the cultural construction of terrorists and terrorist organisations as "the other". There is a lack of research about the processes in which `knowledge' about the `dangerous other' is produced. It is interesting to think about the methods currently in use against terrorism, whether international or national, and about the ways in which a cultural construction, the stereotype of a terrorist, as "the other", influences the politics in which human rights are restricted in order to produce security / stability / economic growth. The workshop calls for papers discussing the processes and meanings of the dominant constructions of 'terrorists' by decision makers, media, security agencies and international actors. At the same time, papers addressing the political and socio-cultural implications of the "war on terror" are welcomed. Key words: othering, war on terror, human rights, security agencies

To propose a paper, please use the conference website
http://www.easa2008.eu/ > call for papers

AAA CfP: Illegibility, Ambivalence, and the Political

Anthropologists have documented with increasing precision and insight the ways in which technologies of measurement, identification, and inclusion define certain social subjects as knowable and known, legible and registered, and as objects in need of intervention. Emanating from dispersed sites throughout 'civil society' and transnational networks, as well as traditional locations within the state, these technologies work by idetnifying the characteristics of particular groups, defining the meaning of social problems and conceivable remedies, and so containing the space of the political.
This panel explores instances when subjects exceed or elude strategies of institutional knowledge production and the technologies of exclusion/inclusion and regulation they authorize. Through concrete ethnographic and geographic studies, can we understand uncertainty and ambivalence as a form of the political, rather than a condition of being incompletely or insufficiently 'political'?
We wish to move away from the too-familiar celebrations—and condemnations—of hybridity, multiplicity, and liminality, on the one hand, or fixity, identity, and essence, on the other, that typically attend discussions of what we think of here as illegibility or ambivalence. To identify hybridity as a condition of political possiblity risks minimizing the traumatic injuries or political immobility that may attend or produce ambivalent attachments. Likewise, blanket assertions that "some essentialism is necessary" for politics risk separating a limited space of political authenticity from the complexity of real lives, and so reinscribing the authority of experts and diminishing or silencing those who exceed essentialist boudaries. Sensitive to these risks, this panel turns to concrete ethnographic investigations of illegibility, uncertainty, and ambivalence, keeping in mind that that these may be conditions of injury and abjection as well as possibility, and may attend rooted identities or places as well as fluid or unstable locations. What are the conditions of illegibility? What are the consequences for subjects who trouble or elude institutional modes of knowing, or who reside within or alongside illegible or ambiguous spaces? Finally, what are the politics of anthropological practice in these conditions? What models of collaboration or activism can we imagine to address the terrain of multiple political attachments, ambivalent identifications, and uncertain spaces?
We seek papers addressing a broad range of sites, subjects, and locations, organized around the questions we pose about ambivalence and the political. In order to meet the AAA deadline of April 1, we need to receive abstracts of no more than 250 words by March 20, 2008. Please send abstracts to Brandt Peterson at peter699@msu.edu.

Democracy, Disorder, and Discontent (SANA and AES Spring 2008 meeting)

The Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) and the American Ethnological Society (AES) announce a joint meeting for 2008:

SANA/AES Spring 2008 Meeting: Democracy, Disorder, and Discontent
April 3-5, 2008
Wrightsville Beach, NC, Holiday Inn Sun Spree Resort Hotel

Submission deadline for panel and paper proposals: January 15, 2008 (Instructions for submitting paper and session proposals are below the description).
The 2008 SANA/AES conference seeks panels and papers that creatively engage the discrepancies between the idea and the practice of democracy and that explore the forms of disorder and discontent engendered by these contradictions. What is democracy? Democracy is often understood as an expansion of individual freedoms, the spreading out of economic equality through participation in the market, and an alternative to excessive government regulation. Yet despite these optimistic claims, there remains an inherent tension between economic inequality and democratic politics. Emergent social and political orders in many parts of the world are characterized by growing inequality, and they are neither democratic nor secure. Furthermore, established rights, entitlements, and democratic principles in the United States itself have eroded, and wealth is increasingly redistributed upwards.
We seek participants who address the tensions inherent in democratic processes and the disorder and discontent that arise from these disjunctures. Key questions include, but are not limited to, the following: How do race, gender, class, citizenship, and sexual orientation shape the ways that different kinds of people understand democracy and democratic participation in the age of neoliberalism? Within emergent and long-standing democracies, how is citizenship linked to new forms of inclusion and exclusion? How and to what extent do democracies justify incarceration, police brutality, military and paramilitary activities and other forms of violence, even as they create political opportunities to critique them? What are the possibilities and pitfalls of new oppositional discourses that focus on individual, social, and human rights? What sorts of alternative political projects are currently imaginable and unimaginable?

__________________________________________

Keynote Speakers
* AES Keynote: Ida Susser, AES President (2005-2007)
* SANA Keynote: Hilary Cunningham (University of Toronto)

Plenary Panel Sessions
* "War, Impunity, and Accountability"
* "Race and Justice"
__________________________________________

Instructions for Paper and Panel Submissions

Deadline for abstract and proposal submission: January 15, 2008
-- Panel and paper submissions should be sent to aes.sana08@gmail.com
-- Please contact Lesley Gill with any questions, Lgill@american.edu
-- Please visit: http://aesonline.org/AES_SANA08_Call_for_Papers
to download the appropriate form to include with your paper or session proposal:
We encourage you to think about creative as well as traditional formats for presenting your work. Guidelines are below.
1. Sessions will generally be scheduled for 1.5 hours (1 hour and 30 minutes), which allows time for 5 fifteen minute paper presentations and a discussant or discussion.
2. Paper presentations should be prepared with a fifteen minute time limit in mind.
3. Organized session submissions are encouraged, but individual papers are also welcome. Individually volunteered papers will be organized into sessions by the program committee according to theme. All paper proposals, whether submitted individually or as part of an organized session, will be evaluated individually.
4. Roundtable discussions can be a useful alternative to traditional sessions. Instead of formal paper presentations, these involve informal discussion of a theme. Participants would be encouraged to circulate papers prior to the conference and to make copies available either at the meetings or on-line for others to read. Roundtable discussions have the potential to include more participants than traditional sessions, although they would be limited to the same 1.5 hours.
5. Other types of sessions are also possible, including poster sessions and workshops. Contact conference organizers if you wish to submit proposals for these or other types of sessions.
__________________________________

THE MOST RECENTLY UPDATED INFORMATION ABOUT THE AES/SANA 2008 CONFERENCE WILL BE POSTED AT:
http://aesonline.org/AESSANA2008

CfP: Law and Development Conference, Bogota, August 2008

New Perspectives on Law and Development: Between renewed State Interventionism and Post-Dependency
August 21, 22 2008
Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

The European Law Research Center at Harvard Law School and Los Andes University are delighted to announce a two day workshop on law and development to be held in the Faculty of Law, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia on August 21 and 22, 2008. The workshop will be part of the 40th anniversary celebration of Los Andes Law School as well as the launching of the Doctorate in Law at the same institution.
The conference will be divided into five themes: Identity, Development and the Nation State; Distribution and Development; Constitutionalization of Development; Globalization, the Role of the State and Development; Post Dependency and Development. We are still in the process of identifying participants who might be interested in this event. If you have suggestions as to whom we might include, please let us know! We would appreciate it if you could indicate your availability to participate as a panelist by responding to halviar@uniandes.edu.co by March 14 2008 with a one paragraph paper abstract. The preliminary program will be circulated in the beginning of May 2008.
We expect to have some funds to help cover travel expenses for those who are not able to fund their participation from their home institutions. Please let us know by March 14, 2008 if you anticipate needing support. We look forward to seeing you in Bogotá next August.
Sincerely,
Helena Alviar