Law and Social Sciences
Research Network
Conference
2012
December 14 to 16
Department of Law,
Sri Lanka
in collaboration with
Law & Society Trust, Colombo
Call for Papers
The
inaugural Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet) conference was
held at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi in 2009. A subsequent
conference was held at the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education in
Pune in 2010. These conferences
identified a number of priorities for the research, study and practice of law
in South Asia. A key concern was to interrogate how law is conventionally
taught, practiced, and researched as an autonomous and self-sufficient
phenomenon. Those who regard law as
autonomous believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. Law teachers,
legal scholars, practitioners, and judges tend to treat the law as a discipline
that can furnish principles to decide 'hard cases' by drawing on internal
logics of consistency and coherence, with inbuilt protocols for determining
legislative intent, fair procedures, and natural justice ensuring access to
courts. What is 'law', properly so called,
also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police
'do' – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices
of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and
condition behaviour.
The notion that law is autonomous (legal
formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over
many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies. Broadly
conceived, these scholars draw on epistemologies and pedagogies from the social
sciences in order to explain that law is a social, anthropological, historical,
and economic artifact which should be understood and studied as such. In South Asia, the research, teaching and
practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the
margins.
LASS
was constituted to consolidate the work done so far, to map the field of Law
and Social Sciences in South Asia, and to build scholarly bridges between
disciplines across the region. Its objective is to begin conversations, develop
research, and create an archive of legal praxis that draws on the social
sciences. In doing this, LASS seeks to
be innovative in its deployment of social science methodologies, challenging
existing socio-legal approaches that have almost exclusively focused on
revealing hidden social determinants of the legal. LASS calls into question this social
constructivist approach. It promotes research that examines how specific
practices and relations of knowledge and power are constituted. If law a site
where power/knowledge is constituted or exercised, how do we know this? If law
is not the only site, then what sustains economic and political connections as
seemingly disparate as the splicing of a gene and the growing of rice in a
rural village? What research methods can
be drawn from the social sciences to identify and explain the link between
knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming
multiple ways of being in the world?
Alongside
these general priorities and questions which LASS has grappled with – we also
recognise that Sri Lankan law, society, and economy gives rise to specific
questions and problems. These are not unique to Sri Lanka, and are of wider
significance to South Asia, and regions beyond in what is an increasingly
globalised world. The conference in Sri Lanka seeks to promote research and
discussion on a broad list of themes. The panels will be developed by focusing
on a particular theme below including comparative discussions across South
Asia, or through a combination of themes oriented by the following:
1. Development – Development is seen as
the solution to most woes in Sri Lanka, and in other postcolonial, post-war,
and newly industrializing economies. Most critiques of development have merely
stated that the process is one-sided, and that it enables yet more incipient
forms of imperialism to emerge. Others have done discourse analyses focused on
how development has become discursively and ideologically prominent. We
encourage papers that are specifically focused on the particular processes
through which 'development' unfolds and the forms of accumulation and
dispossession characteristic of neoliberal capitalism.
2. Land – In addition to rights
based approaches, we encourage papers that draw from recent debates in Sri
Lanka and other South Asian settings about how 'land grabs' for special
economic zones, tourism, or major infrastructure projects have impacted on
local populations. What are the economic and social formations that promote and
resist these patterns of appropriation?
3. Natural
Resources and Mining – A key frontier of contemporary conflict is the extraction
of natural resources, and the impact on local communities, economies, the
environment, and political cultures. As the Indian Supreme Court put it
recently in Nandini Sundar & Ors v Chhattisgarh (July, 2011), the
extraction of natural resources by local and multinational corporations and the
state deploys violence that mirrors the horrors of European colonialism and
plunder that Joseph Conrad described in the Congo in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. How do social movements, and existing juridical
structures resist or facilitate resource extraction? How do we break down the
modern binary between the 'natural' and the 'social' to re-conceive and
democratise the relation between community and the material world?
4. Trauma,
Memory, Witnessing – Sri Lanka and numerous other countries grapple with the
problem of the 'truths' of the past when seeking to attend to legacies of state
and non-state violence, exile, dispossession, and displacement. Commissions of
inquiry challenge the limits of conventional judicial approaches. But all acts
of bearing witness grapple with the problem of re-presentation. What forms of
witnessing and memory attend to trauma and conscious and unconscious legacies
of the past? What are the memory practices of the law itself? Beyond juridical
measures, what aesthetic and archival practices of writing, cinema, theatre,
and visual arts attend to and breach memorial practices?
5. The
State –
While many discussions around globalisation marginalised the contemporary role
of the state and its sovereignty – Sri Lanka, like many other countries,
exemplifies the persistence and expansion of sovereign power. How does the
state proliferate and mutate in the context of development economics, war, and
conflict? What are the limits of liberal democratic constitutionalist
approaches to the state? What are the limits of liberal democracy? How do the
political theologies of sovereignty intersect with religious formations in the
postcolonial state?
6. Struggles
for Social Justice – How has law engaged with struggles of trade unions,
student movements and other constituencies challenging state policies? How does
trade union action in contemporary times relate to ideas of the working class
and class formation? How do struggles around education relate to broader
conceptions of democracy and social welfare?
7. Nationalism – Both Tamil and Sinhala
Buddhist nationalism have been the midwives of social and economic disasters in
Sri Lanka. Simplistic claims of rights to self-determination or federalism do
not grapple with the underlying crisis of plural political existence.
Nonetheless, sub-national self-determination, and national sovereignty continue
to be asserted by progressive and reactionary political movements as a bulwark
against social and political marginalization at the nation-state level - and
the hegemony of capital, or the power of regional and international powers
beyond the level of the nation-state. What are the underlying conditions and
reasons for the persistence of nationalism over other forms of political
mobilisation?
8. Feminist
debates –
While feminist interventions need to continue to tackle violence against women
– LASS has consistently promoted approaches beyond analytics of victimisation.
Papers considering questions of women's labour in special economic zones and as
migrant labour; women in war and in a militarised setting; and explorations of
forms of women's resistance are especially welcome.
9. Sexuality – what is the impact of
religious nationalism on LGBT people? What lessons might Sri Lanka draw from
the Indian experience and the advances made through debates on Section 377 of
the Indian Penal Code or the Nepal Supreme Court decision on recognition of
same sex orientation? What are the links between neoliberal capital and
emergent forms of sexual citizenship in South Asia?
10. Subaltern – How can we begin a
discussion on the ways in which the dominant theories/narratives of the law,
the state and capitalism excludes discussion and access to subaltern classes?
What has been the varying impact of law on caste structures in South Asia and
what processes have over determined law's engagement on caste issues?
11. Rethinking
Civil Society – What constitutes civil society and what kind of role is there for
civil society in relation to post-war reconciliation in Sri Lanka? What is
civil society's relationship to social movements, grass roots networks and
public intellectuals? What are the local discourses of reconciliation, how do
they engage questions of gender, class, caste and ethnicity, and how do they
understand processes of reconciliation elsewhere in the world. How do
approaches and critiques of human rights relate to the process of reconciliation?
And what impact do interventionist international discourses such as Responsibility
to Protect (R2P) have on the local political process?
12. Rule
of Law –
The rule of law in Sri Lanka was undermined by the armed conflict,
militarization, Emergency and the Prevention of Terrorism Act. While there have
been calls for a return to the rule of law in the post-war context, what are
the challenges as well as limitations of constitutional propriety and rule of
law with respect to social change and post-war transformation?
The
Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet) is anchored at the Centre
for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
Organising Committee
Ahilan Kadirgamar –
Graduate Center, City University of New York
Gehan Gunatilleke -
Centre for the Study of Human Rights, University of Colombo
T. Shanaathanan –
Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna
Sumathy Sivamohan –
Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya
Liyanage Amarekeerthi –
Faculty of Arts,Univesity of Peradeniya
Priya Thangaraja –
Independent Researcher
Kamala Sankaran – Faculty of Law, Delhi
University
Siddharth Narrain – Alternative Law Forum,
Bangalore
Neloufer de Mel – Department of English,
University of Colombo
Jagath Weerasinghe - Postgraduate Institute
of Archaeology, Colombo
