Connected Minds

The liberal critique of the recent rise of populism reveals an uneasiness toward 'unruly' emotional crowds and their leaders' anti-democratic posturesalbeit these figures have captured political power through democratic means. i Trump, Le Pen, Modi, and Erdogan have indeed stirred nationalist emotions and collective energies in explosive directions. Erdogan's purge of

This article examines the politics of protest in Pakistan as practiced by the human rights activists and litigants seeking justice for people who have been “disappeared” by the state's military and intelligence services. Based on fieldwork among the family members and friends of these “missing” persons, it discusses how they create dossiers of memory to retain the memory of the disappeared within public sphere and records. Most studies of state bureaucracy and legality trace their history—assumed to be embedded in official files and documents—in state archives. The dossiers assembled by families and friends challenge the state narrative on its war against terrorism and serve as counter‐archives through which state violence can be traced politically and ethnically and mapped geographically. The article draws attention to how marginalized groups use law and its documentary forms against the state in order to hold it accountable for the excesses committed against them.

This article critically assesses the notion of dignity used in recent
Supreme Court judgments on ‘third gender’ and ‘transgender
rights’ in South Asia, and suggests a reexamination of dignity as
the basis for demanding justice for historical wrongs. Tracing the
constitutional genealogy of the idea, I suggest that dignity has
a distinctively European philosophical and legal origin. Yet the
category of dignity has taken on a universal significance, and it
has become a platform for demanding all kinds of rights and
making appeals for the assuagement of political, moral, social and
cultural injuries in the postcolonies. By juxtaposing the conception
of dignity with the demand for izzat (respect), I argue that the
notion of dignity – as it is freely deployed in discourses on
human, gender and queer rights, and assumed to be contingent
upon the fulfilment of one’s (gender) identity – fails to address
the demand for justice made by hijras in Pakistan. Demands for
justice, I further argue, are raised in the context of historical
dispossession of hijras by the colonial state and their exclusion
from middle-class sharafat (respectability). Challenging their
dispossession, hijras identify with middle-class signs of ‘progress’
and question traditional hierarchies, identities and sources of izzat.

Das Verschwinden von Menschenrechtler(inn)en und politischen Aktivist(inn)en ist ein Indikator für das allumfassende Überwachungs- und Strafregime im heutigen Pakistan. Frühere Militärregime waren berüchtigt dafür, dass sie Meinungsverschiedenheiten nicht tolerierten. Unter demokratischer Herrschaft scheint das erzwungene Verschwindenlassen jedoch in eine organisierte Form übergegangen zu sein. Was als
militärische Taktik zur Bekämpfung militanter Gruppen im Nordwesten Pakistans begann, ist allmählich zu einem Instrument geworden, um politische Meinungsverschiedenheiten und öffentlichen Dissens einzudämmen. Der Autor beschreibt diese Entwicklung.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Both the recent rise of populist leaders and the success of protest movements in the last decade have brought the study of political and social movements center stage. Questions to do with political subjectivity and agency, affect, and activism are at the heart of many recent works that have looked at mass politics, right-wing populism and movements for democracy in Europe, South Asia, and Northern Africa. Recently, for example, Walter Armbrust (2019) has provided an ethnographic account of the Egyptian revolution, focusing on activists and tricksters in the liminal phase of the revolution, and

Adresse de l'article : https://e-legal.ulb.be/volume-n05/la-mobilisation-du-droit-par-les-mouvements-sociaux-et-la-societe-civil e/human-rights-in-a-state-of-emergency-protest-politics-and-legal-activism-in-the-missing-persons-casesin-pakistan La reproduction, la communication au public en ce compris la mise à la disposition du public, la distribution, la location et le prêt de cet article, de manière directe ou indirecte, provisoire ou permanente, par quelque moyen et sous quelque forme que ce soit, en tout ou en partie, ainsi que toute autre utilisation qui pourrait être réservée à l'auteur ou à ses ayants droits par une législation future, sont interdits, sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'Université libre de Bruxelles, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation sur le droit d'auteur et les droits voisins applicable en Belgique.

Drawing on research with human rights activists and families of 'missing persons'-suspected Islamic militants, nationalist separatists and their sympathizers, extrajudicially abducted and detained by state military and intelligence services-in Pakistan, this paper reflects on ethnographic engagement with 'ambivalent subjects'-persons who do not neatly fit the categories of victim or perpetrator. While the ethnography of ambivalent subjects humanizes the lives of those silent in the state and media's discourses on 'terrorism', it also gives insights into non-normative ethics of grief and sacrifice that help people make sense of violence stemming from larger political economic structures of power. The ethnography of ambivalent subjects moreover adds to dark theory in anthropology by reflecting to us our assumptions regarding suffering as a common, apolitical ground for all humanity and our own politics of solidarity built upon others' suffering. I suggest that ethnography's task is not simply to unmask this unevenness-in the categorization and definition of suffering subject-but also to reflect on the moral and political ambiguities of those subjects who defy easy identification of a victim, perpetrator and/or an agent of violence.

After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan's military government unleashed a program of extrajudicial detentions to surveil and track down “Islamic terrorists.” These men are known as the “missing” or “disappeared” persons in the movement mobilized by their families to protest the abductions. Ethnographic research with the families of “missing persons” in Pakistan, however, involves working with people whom I call “imperfect victims”—that is, persons who do not easily fit the subject position of those occupying the “suffering slot.” Such imperfect victims often rely on nonnormative ethics of grief and sacrifice to help them make sense of violence stemming from larger political-economic structures of power. An ethnography of imperfect victims responds to calls for going beyond the “suffering subject” in anthropology. It does so by questioning the humanitarian assumption in anthropology that suffering is a common, apolitical ground for all humanity and that a politics of solidarity can be built on the suffering of others. [witnessing, suffering subject, ethnography, human rights, disappearances, missing persons, Pakistan, South Asia]

This paper examines the contestation about khwajasara corporeality-legal, medical and activist claims about the khwajasara body-and how it has been subjected to state projects of welfare and citizenship in South Asia. The khwajasara/hijra body was a suspicious and a transgressive body for the colonial state, but it has become a target of legal and medical forms of knowledge with the transformation of the "transgender" as a new subject of citizenship in South Asia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the khwajasara community in Pakistan, this paper examines how new "grid[s] of intelligibility" (Butler, 2001: 629) informed by legal and medical forms of expertise mediate rights claims as well as fuel social imaginary about khwajasaras-making the body of khwajasara legible as a Gender X citizen while also providing a new political context to which khwajasaras diversely respond. My analysis suggests that the new "citational apparatus" (Mitra, 2020: 111) concerning khwajasara corporeality makes khwajasaras "deserving" subjects of state welfare and protection, but only through introducing new forms of welfare surveillance, mediated by legal and medical experts. The paper suggests that as an object of state intervention as well as a means to elude legibility and demand equality and rights, the body remains central to governmental projects of welfare, governance and citizenship.

This paper examines how relationships are 'built' among khwajasaras [non-normative non-binary persons] and female jouno karmis [sex workers] in two sites in Pakistan and India respectively. We focus on the non-normative nature of these relationships, first, to disassemble gender normativity itself; second, to argue that the colonial legacy of bureaucratic norming of kinship in South Asia, anchored in legal consanguinity and affinity on one hand, and territory and patriarchy on the other, erases these found relationships. Finally, in formulating what we term, 'relative kinship'-authenticating one's identity and belonging as a citizen typically through a male kin-we trace the current impetus in Pakistan and India to algorithmically converge biographies and biometrics to recalibrate citizenship. We ask, how may we understand the built lives of those deemed by the state to be legally out of place as 'aliens' or 'foreigners'. Through the lens of kinship and gender modalities in marginalized communities, the article has wider implications for thinking about the kinship-nation continuum and the ways in which one does or can belong, if at all. On a crisp spring morning in 2019, I (Hussain) sat with Naseem 1 at her 2 derra. Naseem's derra was on the outskirt of Islamabad, near the shrine of Sufi Barri Imam. From there, a street crowded with out-of-school children playing next to sewage water and cow dung led to her house. Located in a nonregularized settlement close to Quaid-e-Azam University, the neighborhood of semi-concrete houses was mainly populated by working-class families from This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.