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Category: Law and Care

This blog series builds on the discussions of an interdisciplinary virtual Working Group titled “In Search of the ‘Political’: Law’s (Il)legibility between Violence and Care” that met online between October 2021 and June 2022. All contributors have been part of the PhD scholarship programme “Trajectories of Change” run since 2014 by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. The seven pieces draw attention to the entanglement of violence and care in modern law and to the global judicialization of politics. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and historical archival research, the various pieces grapple with the question of how care became a key modality of governance that constructs vulnerability and protection in particular ways as grounds for rights claims-making. We look at how the subjects of law, such as immigrants, activists, soldiers, litigants, and state agents among others variably wield the law and its juridical categories to produce carness, carelessness, and varying modes of (un)caring to navigate institutions and social life. From African migrants in Germany to Egyptian exiles in Turkey to Israeli settlers to Tunisian activists, encounters with the law occur against the backdrop of competing moral and legal frameworks to reinforce, reshape, or contest extant political configurations and open up new political horizons. Francesco Trupia examines the post-pandemic moment in Bulgaria to show how the biopolitical management of Roma serves to consolidate whiteness. Elsayad E. Abdelhamid argues that the experiences of post-2013 Egyptian exiles in Istanbul highlight the complex interplay between geopolitics, state discretion, and the pursuit of legal stability in the context of forced migration in Turkey. Building on fieldwork among African migrants in the German asylum system, Aino Korvensyrjä invites us to think of ways to organize our movements to expand the “No Borders/No Deportations” utopias. Sophia Hoffinger highlights the repressive character of resolutions against the movement that calls for the boycott of Israel, known through its acronym BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) ultimately binds people together. Dana Lloyd reads the Brackeen case against the background of two hundred years of Federal Indian law and assimilation policy to propose two notions of care that pit sovereignty against charity. Revital Madar examines how Israel’s Rules of Engagement expanded the right to harm in debates around the killing of Palestinian civilians. Ola Galal examines the interactions between activists and battered women at a shelter in Tunisia to show how care became a legal category that reconstituted self, community, and labor. Reflections on the intersection of law and care are now more pertinent than ever as we witness global transformations that call into question the consensus on the legitimacy and the applicability of international law. From Israel’s genocide in Gaza to Trump’s statements about taking over Greenland, the international political field is being reconstituted in new and unexpected ways.

This series is curated by Anna Hofmann & Ola Galal.

Policing the Roma in the Service of Whiteness. Post-Pandemic Reflections from Bulgaria

By Francesco Trupia. Bulgaria’s bio-political population management remains instructive to showcase the embeddedness of the policies of white-enclosing with the diversely universal conditions of discrimination, scapegoating, and racism. Race is undoubtedly central to charting out the genealogical lines of past and present violence against Roma and other minority groups in Bulgaria.