PhD Final Seminar - Playing the Games of Justice: Ethnographic Inquiry of Law Across the Spatialities of Power-Knowledge in Northern Kurdistan

The seminar will be conducted online. Follow this link at 13:00 on 14 January to attend.

Cansu Bostan, PhD Candidate at the Sociology of Law Department, Lund University

This Ph.D. research project explores the different formations of law enabled by its responsiveness to various justice aspirations in Northern Kurdistan. Against the backdrop of the Necropolitical practices of the Turkish State in Northern Kurdistan marked by the gravelessness in different forms such as enforced disappearances, mass graves, unidentified murders, destruction of the cemeteries and gravestones, this research, based on the fieldwork conducted in Amed, Northern Kurdistan between April- September 2019, attempts at an ethnographic inquiry of the web(s) of relationalities law engages in when responding to the dynamics excluded by the modern spatiotemporal boundaries of the nation-state and its law. It aims to reveal the movements of and connections between various negotiations, contestations, and constitutions of law and justice by relying on the epistemic pluralities that are (re)configured by changing truth regimes.

Informed by Foucauldian spatial analytics based on a nominalist intervention, this research adopts spatialization as an analytical strategy and boundaries as analytical tools to introduce law and justice into power-knowledge locus wherein they are continuously reformulated. A non-container view of space understood as continuously made by the power-knowledge relationalities enables this research to use spatialization as an analytical strategy to explore law and justice as inscribed in (a) truth regime.

With the clashes, collaborations, and encounters of multiple truth regimes, Northern Kurdistan provides a remarkable field to trace various interplays. As the truth regimes also produce subjectivities within, revealing the truth produced in these different (particular) regimes is what is aspired as justice by the subjects produced within that regime. By engaging in a trace of boundaries making a “space of interplay” appear, this research looks into the subjectivities, knowledges, and truth generated by particular spatialities in Northern Kurdistan. Therefore, it reveals justice as it is linked to that particular truth regime, explores law’s determinacy seeking to accomplish these justice aspirations within the truth regime it operates, and responsiveness to what is excluded by its boundaries, continuously (re)embedding it in a different truth regime. Therefore, by looking at these different justice formulations and responses of law from different standpoints, this research methodologically attempts to explore epistemic pluralities.

The main discussant for the seminar is Tobias Kelly, Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at Edinburgh University.