Matters of Law: Archives, Evidence, and the Production of Accountability in the Syrian War

Public PhD defence by Petya Mitkova Koleva.

 

International criminal justice – as a system of laws and a field of practice – was conceived as a modality to address the legacy of conflict by bringing perpetrators of war time violence to account in a court of law. In recent years, as conflicts have increasingly become internationalised and that much harder to resolve, the field has shifted its focus from post-conflict contexts to situations of active warfare.

Empirically anchored in the Syrian case, Matters of Law offers an ethnographic account of this shift through the experiences of a group of Syrian and international investigators whose work of collecting an archive of Syrian security intelligence documents grants them frontline perspectives on the ways in which international legal norms operate in chronic conflict and amid institutional decline.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the work traces the trajectory of the records in this archive from the battlefields of Syria to European jurisdictions and attends to the practices, logics and mental models that transform instruments of state violence into legal evidence.

By exploring the changing affordances of these records across time and space, Matters of Law draws out the social and political relations which shape how the materiality of violence is given legal meaning in a dynamic context of internationalised warfare. As such, the dissertation works towards anthropology of legal becoming by expecting the conditions under which the law was brought to bear on the Syrian context.

Probing the politics of archiving and the stakes of legal knowledge production, Matters of Law seeks to offer an understanding of the possibilities, limits and implications of seeking recourse through international law in active conflict. By raising questions about time, space and legal knowledge, Matters of Law thus seeks to offer a contribution to the anthropologies of crisis, chronicity, international criminal law, archives and evidence.

 

Assessment committee

  • Professor Atreyee Sen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)
  • Associate Professor Elizabeth Drexler, Michigan State University, USA
  • Associate Professor Maria Sapignoli, University of Milan, Italy

Supervisor

  • Professor Henrik Vigh, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Moderator

  • Associate Professor Anja Simonsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark


After the defence, the department will host an informal reception in the Ethnographic Exploratory, Faculty of Social Sciences, building 4, room 4.1.12.