By Jessica Greenberg

I often pose the question to students in my anthropology of law classes: Under what conditions is mass murder legal? It is a useful prompt because it has a completely sensical answer from a legal perspective. And from an anthropological and humanist stance it is utterly perplexing.

It was likewise with one foot inside and one outside the logics of law, that I tried to make sense of International Criminal Court (herein ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan’s application for arrest warrants issued on May 20, 2024. These sought judicial approval for warrants for five individuals on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the ongoing war in Gaza. I will focus less here on the first group of three warrants. While horrifying from a human perspective, they were neither surprising nor groundbreaking from a legal one.

The charges against Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (DIEF), and Ismail Haniyeh cover crimes committed on and after October 7, 2023. They include crimes against humanity (extermination, murder, rape and sexual violence, torture, inhumane acts) and war crimes (hostage-taking, cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity).

The second group of warrants are for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. These charges include war crimes (starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, willfully causing suffering and cruel treatment, murder, intentional attacks on civilians) and crimes against humanity (extermination, including death by starvation, persecution, inhumane acts).

The case against Israeli officials marks innovations and advances in international humanitarian and criminal law that benefit from a dual legal-anthropological analysis. First, the ICC request is unique as a high-profile case against a Western-allied, democratic state. It serves as a litmus test for the ICC’s legitimacy as an international rule of law institution to which powerful states and their allies are also subject. The application language itself highlights and pushes beyond the longstanding imperial hierarchies (democratic/undemocratic; rule of law/authoritarian, civilization/barbarism) at the heart of international law. As the Prosecutor’s statement notes, the ICC is bound by the doctrine of complementarity, which dictates that the ICC will only prosecute cases when national judiciaries are unable or unwilling to do so. That Israel has been deemed unable or unwilling to hold officials accountable for crimes challenges its claim that it is and can continue to be seen as a functioning rule of law democracy under current political conditions.

The case is also groundbreaking because it is the first time the ICC has held state officials to account for the crime of starvation as a weapon of war. The language of the application is unsparing. It submits expert evidence that “Israel has intentionally and systematically deprived the civilization population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival,” through “a total siege,” and “restricting…essential supplies,” including water and food, inducing “malnutrition, dehydration, profound suffering” and death. These acts, it argues, have been “committed as part of a common plan to use starvation as a method of war.”

There are limits in law to state violence enacted in the name of sovereignty. The weaponization of access to water, electricity, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance is not in itself wholly new. But Israel’s claim that this is justified against a civilian population is a grotesque attempt to rework the very basis of international law. In blurring the distinction between civilian and combatant (ordering a siege on “human animals” justified in the name of collective, civilian culpability) they challenge the central categories of civilian and combatant at the heart of war crimes, crimes against humanity and the affirmative obligations of occupying powers. Within these frameworks there is no such thing as “no innocent civilian.” The analysis of the proportional harms of war on civilians has always proceeded from the premise that starvation, malnutrition, suffering and death is a byproduct of war, but not its means. The military strategies of which Israel stands accused change that calculus altogether.  It is arguably the consequence of taking the slow death and suffering of chronic humanitarian conditions as the very logic of war itself.

The ICC case offers an opportunity for us to analyze and teach in real time how states innovate and found new kinds of warfare with impunity. It reveals a hideous worldmaking project using the language of the law to violate its spirit. The case also offers an opportunity to reflect on why, when, and how international legal institutions are important sites for challenging the active production of impunity. The ICC’s actions means that a new stage in weaponizing humanitarian crisis as a means of war does not pass quietly into the legal record without challenge or comment. That the ICC should step in is not only a question of this particular conflict. It speaks to the ways institutions safeguard the very categories of international law itself. That some weapons are beyond the pale is enshrined in legal treaties against the use of landmines, chemical and nuclear weapons. Prosecuting the weaponization of humanitarian crisis—starvation, dehydration and the denial of necessities for human life—means a similar adaptation to the changing means through which war is being waged.

Finally, in revealing how Israeli officials attempt to redefine the central categories of international law through legal justification, the ICC case is an opportunity to analyze the legal, institutional, and social work that goes into making law legitimate in the first place. As I have written about elsewhere, international legal institutions offer one means of experiencing human agency through the judicialized registers of constraint and restraint. They are simultaneously robust and fragile. They require both critical engagement and nurturing in order to work. It is this history and legacy that is at stake in the ICC’s case. As humans innovate in cruelty, people push the law to catch up – a foundational lesson of Nuremberg and the courts inspired by it. At stake is the very idea of international law as a meaningful field of action, one that must be protected from attempts to subvert it from both without and within.

As an anthropologist I proceed from the basic premise of the sanctity and value of all human life. It is difficult to square that commitment with the idea that mass death can be legal in any instance. At the same time, I am saddened but not always shocked by the depth and creativity of human cruelty found in our written and material record. Reconciling a faith in the humanist project and a realism about humanity’s flaws has been a professional necessity. I have found international law an important avenue to think through this more fundamental anthropological tension. Once we understand (if never truly accept) how war is made legitimate within the parameters of international law, we can better intervene in the conversation as scholars and advocates. And from this position we can offer a critical perspective on law’s relationship to violence, while always humanizing those who dwell in those possibilities and limits.

Jessica Greenberg is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

By Erica Weiss

“Um-Shmum” is a term invented and made into a household expression by Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. “Um” is the acronym for United Nations in Hebrew, and Shmum uses “Shm-reduplication,” a linguistic construction from Yiddish that migrated to Northeastern American English and Hebrew (e.g. fancy-shmancy). It implies contempt and distain. So essentially “U.N.-ShmU.N.” Who cares what they think?

How did this term come into being? If it were a piece of fiction, we would call it lazy writing.

In 1955, after terrorists crossed from Gaza and attacked Israelis living in the small communities on its borders, the Israeli government held a meeting to strategize. Ben Gurion, serving then as Defense Minister proposed that Israel had no choice but to occupy the Gaza strip. Israel’s Prime Minister Moshe Sharett was less convinced, and expressed concerns that the international community and the United Nations would object to the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Ben Gurion’s response: “Um-Shmum,” followed later by a quote that has likewise seen frequent quotation ever since, especially today: “It is not in the global arena but rather from within that Israel will be strengthened and stand…these are the things that will determine our destiny more than any external factor in the world. Our future is not dependent on what the gentiles will say but rather what the Jews will do!”

Without the historical details, this is a conversation that could have taken place between Benjamin Netanyahu and one of his right-wing coalition members who have recently been advocating reoccupying Gaza, such as Ben Gvir, because in the Middle East, history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as …. an even greater tragedy. In the terrorist attack of 1955, one Israeli was killed, and Israel did not occupy the Gaza strip. This time 35,000 Palestinians (and counting) as well as 1,200 Israelis have been killed. The reoccupation of Gaza is on the table and the scale of the pain is staggering.

In 1948 Hannah Arendt critically articulated the mood of Israel in a way that is eerily identical to the dominant mood of the country today: “The Jewish experience in the last decades—or over the last centuries, or over the last two thousand years—has finally awakened us and taught us to look out for ourselves; this alone is reality, everything else is stupid sentimentality; everybody is against us…  in the final analysis we count upon nobody except ourselves; in sum—we are ready to go down fighting, and we will consider anybody who stands in our way a traitor, and anything done to hinder us a stab in the back.”

The announcement that the ICC prosecutor would be seeking indictments for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was received by the vast majority of Jewish Israelis in this resentful spirit. The same is true of the ICJ decision that Israel should end its offensive in Rafah. It is fair to say that these decisions did not result in a response of moral accounting for the war or collective soul-searching, but rather added fuel to the extremely widely held sentiment that the world, a priori, stands against Israel, regardless of Israeli actions, and is in constant search for opportunity to find fault and weaken Israeli standing.

This does not mean there are no critical Israelis. Many people want Netanyahu, a politician known for corruption and gauche decadence, behind bars. There are also a small, but I believe growing community of those who oppose the assault on Gaza, but who are still skeptical of the idea of “international law,” which is often seen to be differentially applied and also frequently performative. Despite my own pacifism and opposition to the Zionist dispossession of Palestine, my research points to similar skepticism towards these bastions of the international order. In his book, Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant advocated universal governance to guarantee world peace, transforming Pauline universalism into a political philosophy in which the political, legal/juridical, moral, and religious cosmopolitanisms work together in harmony. Anthropologists and others have repeatedly shown how international law was critical to the emergence of empire and colonial projects, in part by creating hegemonic legal frameworks and conventions resistant to decolonization. Furthermore, they tend to target figures in the global South while leaving leaders in the global North insulated by the liberal legal conventions.

I too am exasperated by Israel’s recalcitrance and indifference to the moral call to live up to its claims that above all else it values life, an attribute not currently visible in its actions. I am, like many observers, desperate for effective tools that will actually have an impact on Israeli policy when the leadership and the populace seem completely impervious to pleas or persuasion. If I thought that the ICC or the ICJ had any chance of success, I would gladly sacrifice principle for efficacy given the stakes. But I do not believe that to be the case.

Erica Weiss is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University

By Arzoo Osanloo

On late May 20, 2024, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, declared his intention to apply for arrest warrants for specified leaders of Israel and Hamas. In his brief statement announcing the charges, Khan, a British lawyer selected in 2021 by the United Nations Security Council and elected by the member states of the ICC, detailed violations of international humanitarian law and international criminal law. Prosecutor Khan ended his announcement by underscoring the need to apply the law equally to all. In order to safeguard the idea that the lives of all human beings have equal value, his office would pursue cases against the specified Israeli and Hamas leaders, as co-perpetrators and superiors in violations of crimes against humanity and war crimes. In alleging violations of both crimes against humanity and war crimes, Khan covered the breadth of the current conflagration but also situated it within a widespread and systematic manner inclusive of the long-established siege of Gaza, if not the wider occupation.

The prosecutor’s request for warrants provides clarity for the crimes alleged and repeatedly emphasizes the significance of upholding the rule of law to his decision. The ICC had never before requested warrants for sitting heads of states of western countries or their allies. This is one of the important outcomes of the ICC prosecutor’s decision. Another is the reaction of western leaders.

To consider the implications of these charges, rife with references to the significance of the rule of law, I begin by reflecting on what the rule of law, this phrase that so many scholars, journalists, and politicians have discussed and debated of late, means. Legalistic definitions of the rule of law describe it as the restriction of the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws. Definitions of rule of law often include accountability to the law, equality before the law, fair application of law, substantive and procedural transparency, just law, and accessible and impartial justice.

The rule of law can be distinguished from rule by law. The difference being that for the former, all human beings are under the purview of law, while rule by law, suggests that some reside above or outside of the law’s rule. In the latter case, a ruler who is not subject to law may apply the law to others erratically or haphazardly and, in so doing, the administration of justice becomes more akin to an act of sovereign mercy than the rule of law. The administration of justice through the rule of law, then, is an important element of any egalitarian community regardless of scale.

As a law student in the early 1990s, I enrolled in a program on international law in Brussels, Belgium, the de facto capital of Europe. One of my courses, International Criminal Law, was distinct from the others in that it had no casebook. On the first day, the instructor handed out copies of articles about the idea of an international criminal justice system. They covered the post-World War II international legal regime and the attempts to establish an international criminal justice system based on the rule of law. Our studies included the Geneva Conventions, International Military Tribunals, including Nuremberg, the United Nations Charter (UNC), and the Genocide Convention. The Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC was, at that time, being drafted.

In the aftermath of the second world war, these international agreements were intended to end war and begin a new global order in which a post-colonial world of nation-states would submit their disputes to international forums, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), for resolution prior to the outbreak of mass violence. One element of that course which all the students left with was the post-WWII motto: never again.

Sitting in that course, the professor advanced the idea that criminal law, which is adjudicated in local jurisdictions to punish offenders of domestic penal codes, is more difficult to universalize and prosecute at the international level, not only due to state sovereignty, but also because what we think of as crime comes from distinctly domestic settings. The post-WWII attempt to find broad agreement for an international jurisprudence of crime emerged with the express aim of preventing future wars, but, importantly, also atrocities that do not involve cross-border aggression. This was of course because two key causes of international inaction with respect to the Holocaust were, first, at the onset, no cross-border aggression had occurred and second, national laws had not been violated.

Thus, international criminal laws provide guidance in the aftermath of the second world war, based on that experience politically, culturally, and geographically, to end impunity for the most serious crimes, defined now as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. While laws guiding armed conflict have been around for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years, the two latter crimes are newer and gained their meaning in the aftermath of World War II and can occur outside of a hot war.

We might consider this search for a comprehensive body of international criminal law as culminating in the ICC with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as its adjunct. The ICJ was established by the UNC to help nation-states resolve their disputes. Although member states are not required to submit their disputes to the court, it may nonetheless provide advisory opinions. However, should states accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction to resolve a dispute, then its decision would be binding. The ICC, on the other hand, is a more recent venue that came about after the ratification of the Rome Statue (1998). This court began its work in 2002 with the express duty of ending impunity for the most serious crimes committed by senior leaders. The crimes included in the ICC’s jurisdiction are limited to genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Together, these two international courts adjudicate laws, which, while not always enforceable, suggest the beginnings of a jurisprudence of international criminal law, with the express aim of ending impunity by instituting command responsibility for the most serious crimes intended to apply to most states and peoples all over the world.

But international criminal law is just one component of the international legal regime that emerged from the post-WWII aim to advance the rule of law in a supranational context. This legal regime is also based on a rules-based international order that grew out of powerful post-war security interests. That is to say, the rule of law and the rules-based order are not the same. The true focus of the security interests was the maintenance of the power structure that the victors of WWII established through the UNC. And despite the formal end of empires and the UN-assisted process of transitioning colonized and dominated peoples to independence, at least formally, one need not look beyond the great triumph of the Nuremberg Trials to ascertain that with the UNC, the post-WWII order was established quite self-consciously to maintain not only the rule of law, but also the rules-based legal order.

Prior to or instead of the rule of law, societies have operated under the rule by law, in which leaders stand above or outside of the law and administer their rules while they, themselves, are not subject to them. When leaders are not subject to law, they mete it out arbitrarily because they have no cause to think they will be subject to any authority. Rather than a horizontal system where all are equal before the law, this is a vertical system where most are subject to the sovereign’s arbitrary rule by law. With the arbitrary rule, then, the shift from right to might is clear and without right the rule of charity sets in. We are not able to exercise rights before rule of law, but rather are made to bow before those who are outside of law to seek their exercise of benevolence. In the current international order, then, the rule of law and rule by law operate in opposition with one another.

The US-constructed humanitarian pier built haphazardly to deliver aid to Gazans is one such example of this exercise of benevolence. And perhaps in a metaphorically keen moment, just days after the US decried the ICC ruling as it pertained to Israel’s leaders, the pier, slated to showcase US’s care for besieged Gazans, broke apart. The message to Palestinians, then, seems to be that in the rubble of Gaza and on the verge of starvation, they must wait, not for justice, for it was never intended for them, but rather for mercy in the form of US aid. The ICC prosecutor, however, seeks to balance that vulgar display of US charity by seeking arrest warrants and attempting to recover some semblance of the rule of law out of the rubble of Gaza.

Arzoo Osanloo is a legal anthropologist and professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington

By Kamari Maxine Clarke

Since the October 7 Hamas attack, international attention has been keenly focused on Israel’s military response in Gaza, particularly the extent of civilian suffering and death in the region. According to a June 2024 report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the number of fatalities (civilian and military) in the Gaza Strip were estimated to have exceeded 37,400 (in addition to over 500 in the West Bank and over 1,000 in Israel) with the number of reported injured estimated to be around  85,5001 On May 20, 2024, just weeks prior to the release of this information, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan filed applications before the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber I for multiple arrest warrants against leaders on both sides of the conflict for crimes against humanity allegedly committed on the territory of Israel and the State of Palestine. A panel of judges is currently deciding whether the standard threshold for issuing arrest warrants has been met based on the evidence submitted thus far. However, we do not need to wait for the legal decision from this panel of judges to understand the affective force of Khan’s application. 

The arrest warrants requested by ICC Prosecutor Khan are part of a two-pronged assemblage of protests that align, in these instances, with both legal and nonlegal discourses that invigorate affective afterlives. First, they react to mass killings and abductions by Hamas and disproportionate deployments of Israeli violence against innocent Palestinian civilians; and second, they respond to the long durée of violence deployed by Israel by creating openings for rectification and new possibilities.  On the one hand, in the legal realm, an ICC arrest warrant is a legal document issued by the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber or Trial Chamber. These warrants order the arrest and surrender of an individual accused of committing one or more of the following crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. On the other hand, and in the realm of sociality, arrest warrants fall into the affective domain. An affective domain involves psycho-social feelings, emotions, histories, and institutions of power that have sedimented over time, often unconsciously, and shape social relations. It is the way that people deal with related external and internal phenomena, and it presumes that these engagements have material effects on daily life.  

Arrest warrants have dynamic relationships with the affective and legal domains through which they are constituted.  Their affective lives shape various justice imaginaries through the feelings, emotions and psycho-social responses that shape the terms for future possibilities within and outside of the law.  In a context of post-atrocity violence that triggers legal responses, the assertion of arrest warrants demands a public inquiry and insists on detainment and answerability before the law. This symbolics of inquiry and answerability is what otherwise might be described as a demand for legal accountability. Indeed, several months before Prosecutor Khan sought arrest warrants from the ICC, South Africa had already turned to the United Nation’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an intervention. On January 26, in the form of South Africa v. Israel, South Africa brought before the ICJ a case under the Genocide Convention requesting that the court take provisional measures demanding that Israel “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of Genocide Convention, in particular with respect to killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” South Africa next filed an urgent request with the Court on March 6th; that action resulted in a court-issued Order which reaffirmed the provisional measures issued in January 2024 and added additional provisional measures. That South Africa, in particular, would bring this case before the court further illustrates the two-pronged assemblage of protests as its history of racial apartheid adds weight to the affective domain of this case. 

Even so, while legal orders and indictments provide a course of action that compels analysis, the arrest warrant and the symbolics of legal accountability that it demands is not restricted to legal institutions and discourses.  It operates within a field of social engagement that goes well beyond the life of the law. At certain times the arrest warrant supports particular social interests to protect life by intervening into future killings; at other times, it undermines them, a case in point being the work of Israeli activists whose loved ones are missing, some of whom feel that the warrant erodes the possibility for the return of all Israeli hostages. The reach of the arrest warrant has implications for understanding the ways in which justice-making practices are embedded affectively in the life of the law, while also being propelled alongside institutional domains and related imaginaries that shape other domains of possibility.   

The arrest warrant and its role in social life must also be understood to open spaces, amplifying the voices of those often marginalized from mainstream narratives as well as others who insist on vehement refusals of the status quo. These voices may align with some public sentiments even as they may challenge others.  But in the process of finding their way to a larger discursive arena, they facilitate the way that political narratives are formed, and social change mobilized.   

One site for openings that align with the symbolic power of the ICC arrest warrant narrative is found in the emergence of pro-Palestinian encampments. Throughout the war in Gaza, and alongside the horror of the Oct 7th attacks leading to the disproportionality of Palestinian death and the long durée of their dispossession has sparked widespread protest and activism. These encampments have both prefigured and responded directly to the ICC warrants via their insistence on justice through vociferous calls for ICC accountability heard during marches and protest signs demanding Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest.  In these displays calling for accountability, we see how the arrest warrant as a symbolic of action has the potential to become a mobilization that is deeply affective.  In this regard, students and protestors also take aim at proximate conduits, asserting that in enabling fiscal investments that support the Israeli state, university presidents are also complicit.  

At the same time, pro-Palestinian encampments operate within particular settler colonial locations (e.g. Canada, the United States, Australia, and so forth) and are part of larger global movements advocating for Palestinian rights and the rights of all indigenous or occupied peoples.  In these contexts, they seek institutional accountability in relation to the law but also well beyond it. And many of the protestors see their own long-term struggles reflected in the war in Gaza. Articulating indictments against the violence of the Israeli state and against the scale and magnitude of the war engine decimating innocent victims, students and civil society actors have mobilized to intervene in the profound losses of innocent Palestinian lives.   Organized by students in universities and activists from various social organizations across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and East and South Asia and Latin America, tent cities have been established in prominent locations on campuses and in major cities, serving as physical spaces of solidarity, protest and education. They have brought attention to the plight of Palestinians and advocated for rights and justice. They have created focal points for educational events, demonstrations and action to draw attention to the war. Student protesters have demanded that their institutions divest from companies and investments that support or profit from Israeli occupation and the colonization of Palestinian lands, end complicity with Israeli occupation – including reviewing partnerships and collaborative research with Israeli institutions and provide greater transparency in the university’s divestment practices and accountability for decisions regarding investments in companies involved in human rights violations.  

In these domains of protest, encampments provide a space for demanding not just legal accountability, but also political, economic, and socio-institutional accountability. By calling for the disclosure of university investments in Israeli companies that promote violence, divestments from those investments, and distancing from Israeli universities that promote violence, they seek new possibilities for justice.  These actions are often articulated through a series of demands aimed at addressing issues related to the university’s stance on Palestinian rights, academic freedom, and institutional investments, and they reflect broader calls within the global movement for Palestinian solidarity.   

Such encampments have not only been sites of global mediation and communication, teaching and dialogic messaging, they have also facilitated the exchange of ideas, disagreements and demands for new futures.  With signs, petitions, images and slogans, they offer communicative modes that both call for, respond to, accept, and produce messaging aligned with the justice visions they advance.  New technologies like Signal and Telegram have significantly enhanced the ability of activists to communicate and coordinate their efforts with encrypted messaging services, ensuring secure communication among activists associated with social movements. And some of the messaging is public-facing and some is dialogic –that is facilitating interactive exchanges across transnational borders.  Those in the heart of Gaza communicate with signage of protest outside of Gaza. While students in encampments hold up signs of transnational solidarity ranging from “Free Gaza” and “Defend Against Genocide” to “Our Tuition will not be spent on Violence” and “From Turtle Island to Palestine: Landback,” those living in the heart of the violent struggle hold up signs of solidarity or paint messages on their tents thanking students for their sacrifice: “We see you, we hear you” we are told by their signage, affirming the popular uptake of anti-war activists. Like the arrest warrant, encampments as assemblages of accountability offer us the opportunity to understand the affective workings of transnational social protest in real time. This relationship between the figure of the arrest warrant and the encampment is affectively driven.  Both request that we stop, interrogate and make accountable those we deem most culpable. 

One thing is very clear – in contemporary life the arrest warrant is dynamically embedded in the complexities of social change. It is an artifact of law that finds its power not simply in the legal forms it occupies, but also through its potential for action, discourses of justice, and its aspirations. When understood as a form of practice that far exceeds its legal constraints and conventions, the arrest warrant also produces what it enables. It calls on us to stop, to inquire, to assess, and to judge. It speaks to our various visions of justice through the domain of potentiality. Arrest warrants occupy an affective domain, expressive in their potential to pursue the possibilities for evidence and secure the legal right to detain an individual for various forms of wrongdoing.  

When we move beyond the strict contours of the law, we begin to see what the arrest warrant does in the world, and what people do with the affective spaces that these warrants render visible.  For although it may never be enforceable or even actionable, what is relevant is that its affective impact is magnified in its circulation of social life within and beyond the law.  As a constellation of complex domains of sociality, arrest warrants reflect and foster hopes, dreams, socio-moral and political aspirations and symbolic possibilities that are propelled by stories and practices that enable social rectification of wrong-doing. Whether the arrest warrant is answered through the court forum, or whether it provides discursive opportunities that take shape and are realized in the public arena, it opens a door for new voices and spaces of affective engagement with justice and its potentials and possibilities. 

Kamari Maxine Clarke is a distinguished professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto 

This year, six scholars were selected to receive the 2022 Carole H. Browner Latin American Studies Fellowship Fund for Travel (LASFFT) award. This award is given to support the travel of undergraduate or graduate students from anywhere in Latin America to attend the AAA Annual Meeting.

Jorge Molina Aguilar

Jorge Molina Aguilar is a Salvadoran-born research professor in the department of research and pedagogical training at Don Bosco University in El Salvador, Central America. He’s also a Phd candidate in social sciences in El Salvador. Jorge studies chronic diseases and mourning processes in the social sciences with an emphasis on medical anthropology. Aguilar is a member of the International Scientific Committee at the Self-medication Observatory of Rosario University in Bogotá, Colombia and the Experts Committee at the Knowmad Institute in Johannesburg, Germany. He writes on Nawat-Náhuat epistemology and pedagogy, self-medication, death, and grief. Jorge is currently researching the ontology and pedagogy of energy, the pedagogy of geography regarding conflict and war, and a book on the pedagogies of death.

Maria Belén López

Maria Belén López is a PhD student in social anthropology in the Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Studies at National University of San Martin (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and professor of Introduction to Anthropology. She is a doctoral fellow in the participatory action research project, “Socio-environmental strategies to strengthen the rights of migrant women workers in the Reconquista Area” for the International Development Research Center (Canada) and the National University of San Martin (Argentina). Her research interests are gender relations and sexuality, care issues, migration and environment. She is currently exploring the participation of migrant women in the environmental care at the settlements of the Río Reconquista basin in San Martín district.

Thainá Gondim Lúcio

Thainá Gondim Lúcio was born in the city of Goiânia-GO in Brazil. She graduated with a degree in psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Goiás in 2020. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in social anthropology at the Federal University of Goiás, working in the research area of Body and Social Markers of Difference, investigating the (re)construction of masculinities in a reflexive group for men alleged to be perpetrators of domestic violence. Thainá is also an investigator at the Center for Studies and Research on Crime and Violence (NECRIVI) at UFG, working on a project to analyze databases on the situation of women in Goiânia and produce subsidies for the creation of a Women ́s Observatory.

Arturo Mendieta Navarro

Arturo Mendieta Navarro is an economist and anthropologist from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP). He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in anthropology with the study plan “trAndeS: Advanced Studies on Inequalities and Sustainability” at the of Institute of Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin and the PUCP. He studies issues related to institutions, inequality and the environment in Andean-Amazonian spaces from historical, ethnographic, and economic perspectives. His most recent research work on mining environmental liabilities was published in World Development (2021) and socio-natural dynamics in Amazonian protected areas in Forest Policy and Economics (2021). He is currently working on a research about historical inequalities in the alpaca fiber markets in the southern Peruvian Andes.

María José Díaz Reyes

María José Díaz Reyes is a Nicaraguan doctoral student in social anthropology at the Center for Research and Higher Studies (CIESAS) in Mexico City. María is enrolled in the specialty of semiotic anthropology where she developed the research “Discourses of resistance: Nicaraguans against State violence (2018-2020).” Through ethnography, she tries to understand the social meanings that State violence and social resistance display. She developed 15 years of experience in the management of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and in research with an emphasis on programs and projects linked to local community development; food security, risk management, citizen participation, sexual rights, reproductive rights, municipalism and public policies, and youth culture.

Débora Gerbaudo Suárez

Débora Gerbaudo Suárez is a PhD Fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET) and performs research at IDAES School in the National University of San Martin (UNSAM). She has an MA in Social Sciences from the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS), as well as a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Débora studies the generational dimension in migrations, focusing on the dynamics of the Paraguayan population and their descendants in Argentina. As part of the Nucleus of Migratory Studies (NEMI) and the Social Studies Program on Gender, Childhood and Youth (CEDESI), both based at UNSAM, she explores the links between age, gender and space to visualize urban and environmental inequalities among young migrants. She carries out ethnographic work with transnational communities living in areas of urban segregation and environmental degradation within the Participatory Action Research project “Migrantas en Reconquista” (UNSAM-IDRC Canada).

Julio Villa-Palomino is the recipient of the 2020 Carole H. Browner Latin American Studies Fellowship Fund for Travel (LASFFT) award.  This award is given to support the travel of graduate students from Mexico, Central, and South American to attend the AAA Annual Meeting. Having earned his B.A at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru; he’s currently a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although it’s early in his doctoral studies, Julio has been published widely in peer-reviewed and non-reviewed journals in Spanish and English.