Call for papers: Authoritarianism, law, and the remaking of society! Submission deadline: 16 September 2024!
(Organised by- the ‘Social life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts’ project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, at Soas, University of London)
Submission deadline: 16 September 2024
Authoritarian states and leaders across the world have often premised the centralisation of their power on the targeting, through law, of certain groups within the societies they rule over: ethnic, racial, and religious minorities; civil society groups and dissenters; and opposition political groups. From punitive border policing in the United States, to the banning of the ‘International LGBT movement’ in Russia, to the targeting of indigenous communities and their lands in Brazil, to the persecution of minorities and civil society groups in India, authoritarian leaders have used the law and non-legal violence to demarcate and demonise this purported enemy within. Scholars have provided a range of concepts – such as autocratic legalism, democratic authoritarianism, and authoritarian constitutionalism to describe the relationship between the expansion of state power and legality. This workshop, differently, seeks to draw attention to the social life of laws that are used by authoritarian states and leaders to re-compose societies. Away from strongmen at the top of states, our interest is closer to the ground: we are interested in exploring the messiness and complexity of how the laws that are used to target sections of societies unfold in everyday life.
Format and deadlines for submissions
If you would like to share your insights at the workshop, please fill up the form with your name, contact details, disciplinary background, and institutional affiliation (if any), a title for your submission, language of your submission and abstracts of no more than 500 words by 16 September 2024.
Please submit your abstracts via this form
To encourage participation and a diversity of voices, we are keen to invite submissions in a variety of formats and languages as well. In addition to written academic papers, we will accept audio and visual submissions too.
We also welcome submissions in different languages. Please submit your abstracts in a language of your choice. Depending on resource considerations, we aim to support a translation of your submission, of your presentation, and of any subsequent publication.
We will publish the academic papers in a special issue of a journal. For selected visual and audio submissions, we hope to curate an exhibition during the workshop and make them available online through the project’s website.
For more details, refer here
