Law and Violence

This graduate seminar draws on ethnographic studies and social theory to examine the disturbing, but not paradoxical entanglement between law and violence. Building on Charles Tilly’s comparison between state-making and organized crime and Walter Benjamin’s concepts of law-making and law-preserving violence, we will explore how different modes of violence – from brutal force to more nuanced structural and symbolic forms of oppression – intersect with policies and practices of governance. Anthropological approaches will be used to analyze questions of sovereignty, security, and justice, as we will trace their meanings across disjunctive cultural and legal terrains.