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An investigation into how indigenous rights are conceived in legal language and doctrineIn the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law.According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they "become indigenous." Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state.Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed—and continue to manage—to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies

In The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, the International Criminal Court (ICC) tried the destruction of UNESCO World Heritage sites as a war crime for the first time. In this case, the value of things in relation to the value of persons became the central issue. Based on courtroom ethnography conducted during the proceedings and informed by affect and emotion research, this article identifies the rhetorical practice of sentimentalising persons and things as an important process of legal meaning making. Through sentimentalising, all parties rhetorically produce normative arrangements of bodies by way of emotionally differentiating the relevant persons, things and other entities from and affectively relating them to each other. Sentimentalising provides an affective-emotional frame in which to determine the degree of guilt and innocence, justice and injustice.

Was verbirgt sich hinter dem Begriff »Gerechtigkeitsgefühle«? Inwieweit spielt die gefühlte Legitimität von Recht eine Rolle? Um diesen Fragen auf die Spur zu kommen, mobilisiert der Band rechtsanthropologische, rechtssoziologische und kulturpsychologische Ansätze. In ethnographischen Fallstudien zu Madagaskar, zum Südsudan, zu Indonesien, Israel/Palästina, Peru, Uganda und Südafrika werden Gerichtssäle, Grenzübergänge, Besprechungsräume, Büros und offizielle Dokumente ebenso analysiert wie Alltagspraktiken, Mediendiskurse, Demonstrationen und Debatten in den Social Media.

In this essay we propose an alternative approach to assessing the state of democracy in Indonesia. We focus not on institutional indicators (as is usually the case) but on manifestations of political discourses in the public sphere. In applying post-Marxist political theory through the work of Slavoj Žižek and Chantal Mouffe, we argue that democracy's main defining feature is that it allows antagonistic discourses about alternative policies to coexist, yet still manages to coalesce around a minimal consensus on how these discursive conflicts are to be dealt with in a fair way. Applying this approach to democracy analysis to Indonesia, we suggest that the major obstacles to democratic practice do not emerge from institutional problems, but from an overbearing political discourse that imposes broad consensus and harmony on most political issues. Political discourse in Indonesia is generally structured around "Islam" and "the people." These themes provide a basis for a political consensus that conceals economic and social contradictions and reveals considerable depoliticization in Indonesian democratic practice. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

AbstractThere is an ongoing debate in anthropology on the kinds of subject positions activists ascribe to the marginalized actors they encounter and the political consequences this brings about. Drawing from ethnographic research on refugee activism in Germany and transitional justice activism in Uganda, we revisit the respective debates on humanitarian activism, human rights activism, and political activism and argue to reframe the analysis. Instead of looking for the "right" subject position activists should ascribe to the people they engage with, the anthropology of activism should embrace a research approach that looks at the material conditions, in which activists and their subjects find themselves in and the kind of agency they are able to develop within these conditions.