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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. The group was initiated and lead by two former Ph.D. fellows from the 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 Revital Madar & Ola Galal.

Haaland v. Brackeen, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Ethics of Care

By Dana Lloyd. On June 15, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Haaland v. Brackeen. In this case, non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents argued that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which gives preference to Indigenous parents in fostering and adopting Indigenous children, is unconstitutional. They said the law discriminated against them on the basis of race. In a 7–2 ruling, the court rejected all of the petitioners’ challenges to ICWA, some on the merits of the case and others for lack of standing. In this essay, Lloyd reads the Brackeen case against the background of two hundred years of federal Indian law and assimilation policy and proposes two notions of care as a framework for thinking about the case: the first, associated with U.S. assimilation policy, sees care as charitable, but it is actually coercive and harmful; the second is based on solidarity and is at the heart of Indigenous sovereignty.

‘Acting Like a Law’: Regulating ‘Care’ Through Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution

By Sophia Hoffinger. In May 2019, the German Parliament (Bundestag) passed a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign initiated in 2005 by Palestinian civil society actors to pressure Israel into complying with international law. The resolution passed with the support of all major political parties, except for Die Linke and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The story of the anti-BDS resolution in Germany raises pertinent questions about the relationship between law, the state, and the mobilization of antiracist principles: what does the application of a non-legally binding resolution as quasi-law reveal about the underlying norms shaping perceptions of history, Palestinians, Jews, and their relationships with Germany? Whilst laws are coercive, I suggest that quasi-laws like the BDS resolution present a site where we can follow the iteration and sedimentation of norms, which gives insights into how care is distributed between racialized subjects in Germany.

The German Duldung: Legal Violence and Struggles Over the Means of Life

By Aino Korvensyrjä. Authorities and policymakers legitimised repression by portraying people concealing their passports as deceitful ‘identity refusers’.This framing is grounded in the Residence Act, which imposes ‘obligations to cooperate’ (Mitwirkungspflichten), requiring individuals to submit passports or other proof of identity to the authorities.

The State’s Friendly Face? Post-2013 Egyptian Exiles and Turkey’s Exceptional Legal Tools

By Elsayed E. Abdelhamid. Turkey’s selective approach to regularizing displaced Egyptians, initially as diplomatic leverage and later as a gesture of goodwill, fundamentally shaped their everyday lives and future prospects. The use of exceptional legal measures, such as presidential decrees and discretionary citizenship policies, not only reflected Turkey’s shifting foreign policy interests but also created spaces for forced migrants to negotiate their legal status through community mobilization and “everyday diplomacy.”

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.