Suchergebnisse
Filter
7 Ergebnisse
Sortierung:
Book Review: The Truth Machines: Policing Violence and Scientific Interrogations in India
In: Law, culture & the humanities, Band 17, Heft 2, S. 385-388
ISSN: 1743-9752
The social life of technicalities: 'Terrorist' lives in Delhi's courts
In: Contributions to Indian sociology, Band 53, Heft 1, S. 72-96
ISSN: 0973-0648
How do we imagine the place of courtrooms in relation to society? There have been two dominant ways that ethnographers have viewed trials. The first treats trials as ways of understanding social structures and political power. In relation to terrorism trials, the courtroom becomes the arena in which nationalist politics can be re-enacted. There is the space of a pre-existing society—with all its hierarchies and conflicts—and the court case is then merely affixed to the social. The second way, which has a minor role in scholarship on India, has imagined courtrooms as theatrical spaces in which society is discursively constructed. In this article, I argue that an ethnography of courtrooms can be a way of accessing the space of courtroom on its own terms. I argue that the technologies of law set in place their own relations and forms of sociality and that the courtroom is a world in and of itself. Based on an ethnography of terrorism trials in Delhi, I show how the terrorism trial is not only the arena in which bigger contestations over nationalism and religious identity may play out; it is also the space in which new forms of life specific to the courtroom emerge.
SSRN
Working paper
The Right to be Public: India's LGBT Movement Builds an Argument about Privacy
In: Australian Journal of Asian Law, 2019, Vol 20 No 1, Article 7: 87-101
SSRN
Book Review: Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India
In: Law, culture & the humanities, Band 13, Heft 1, S. 169-171
ISSN: 1743-9752
Authoritarianism in Indian State, Law, and Society
In: Verfassung und Recht in Übersee: VRÜ = World comparative law : WCL, Band 55, Heft 4, S. 459-477
ISSN: 0506-7286
While India possesses features conventionally associated with liberal democracies, it has lately been understood to suffer from "democratic backsliding". Commentators have used descriptions like "authoritarianism", "electoral autocracy", "ethnic democracy" and "totalitarianism" to understand the current moment in Indian history. The framework of "autocratic legalism" illuminates the dynamics of centralization of power but there are also elements in the Indian experience that complicate this framework and reflect potentially unique features of the country's democratic decline. These features can be attributed to the political rise and entrenchment of the Hindu nationalist ideology, profoundly facilitated by the electoral dominance of the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014. This article argues that India's spiral towards authoritarianism is also characterized by a range of disturbing and insidious developments beyond the centralization of state power, which are more concerned with majoritarian power seeping into everyday legality. The article considers three examples of such majoritarianism in everyday legality: the use of "anti-terror" laws against minorities and political opponents, policies driving towards the dispossession of minority citizenship, and the mobilization of the mob in ways that blur the lines separating the state from Hindu nationalist actors. These examples demonstrate how in India, autocratic forces are not merely interested in undermining (meaningful) democracy—all in the name of democracy. Instead, autocracy flourishes as a diverse and relatively disaggregated set of actors undermine democracy in the name of an ostensibly truer, Hindu, Indian nationhood.