The legal afterlife of war and revolution

Bringing together diverse scholars at different career levels, as well as scholars with lived experience and those originally from the Global South this project on the legal afterlife of war and revolution seeks to explore the following questions:

• How do personal experiences of the law after mass violence or revolutionary events affect the legal consciousness of subsequent generations?
• If legal consciousness is all-encompassing, what avenues are there for resistance and/or subversion of state violence and the law?
• How does an individual’s understanding of the law after violence or revolution in their country of origin affect their understanding of law in the state they have been displaced to?
• Are there particular physical manifestations of the law (e.g. the necessity to acquire legal identity documents) that provide a unique window into how legal consciousness functions? And if so, how?
• What functional role do legal concepts such as treason and political loyalty play in post-war or post-revolutionary states?
• How do specific, seemingly benign, laws change or morph over time as a result of war or revolutionary events? And, how are these used and/or perceived by citizens or certain segments of the population?

The proposed workshop at Oñati will mark the end of a 12-18 month “slow scholarship” project on this theme. The project subscribes to a slow scholarship manifesto where academia is not only about production but the means and ways in which scholarship comes about. To this end, the project has convened an agenda that involved monthly meetings online to share, discuss and collaborate on eachothers work and suggested readings, met for bi- and trilateral meetings in Europe and online and gathered for a workshop at Melbourne Law School in Australia in October 2024 which involved 2 nights staying and hiking in Wilsons Promontory National Park as a community building exercise.

The project is interested in establishing mentoring relationships where possible. The Oñati workshop will be used as a way to match 8 scholars involved in the project with an experienced and more senior academic mentor. At the workshop, each mentor will review and discuss the article of their matched participant in an in-depth way. The article will then be finalised for publication in a special issue of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR). The aim is to foster mentoring relationships that will outlast this project and the Oñati workshop, helping scholars navigate the complex landscape of academia as well as assist early career scholars to produce more thoughtful and careful socio-legal scholarship.