FULL INTRODUCTION BY DR MAYUR SURESH

Authoritarian regimes do not just aim to centralise their own power. They also often seek to radically alter the composition of their societies and they enact such brutal policies through law. By looking at the social life of such laws in contemporary authoritarian contexts this project aims to understand the relationship between emerging authoritarian states, law, and the re-composition of society. Through ethnographic fieldwork and the building of data-sets, this project will study how contemporary authoritarian states use laws to remake society and how affected communities respond to these laws, this project aims (1) to develop knowledge and stimulate debate about how the state uses law to remake society; (2) to increase recognition of how affected communities respond to these laws; (3) to create bridges between scholars, affected communities and civil society to enable dialogue about mobilising against exclusions enacted by these laws; (4) to engender conversations between scholars in different countries where similar laws are being used to fundamentally alter social relations.

In exploring the ‘social life of the law’, this project understands that law is not only present at its moment of application but is also made present through everyday social discourse. Laws that are enacted by the state, are given meaning and structure behaviours beyond courtrooms and police stations. Ideas derived from and about these laws, circulate and are reformulated through everyday discussions and everyday interactions. These ideas seep into society and alter the fundamentals of its discursive terrain: how does one prove and perform one’s belonging to a society? What does ‘love’ mean when certain relationships are crimianlised? What does it mean to belong to a city, when one’s presence among others is considered dangerous? What is the fate of fundamental political concepts – such as the ‘rule of law’ – when the law is used towards such divisive ends? Responses to these laws also lead to forms of community mobilisation, through which different publics are engendered. In the process, differing conceptions of citizenship, law, state, and authority are given life.

This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust through the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award awarded to Dr. Mayur Suresh.