This co‐authored essay builds on a growing anthropological literature that engages critically and creatively with idealized official and popular ideas about documents of/in migration regimes. Documents are often championed as a common and unquestionable good in transnational migration but they are intrinsically tied to inequalities and exclusions. As such they can be the source of hope for migrants, but are frequently also the source of violence, normative judgement, and control by a range of state and non‐state actors. In conversation with Nicole Constable's book, Passport Entanglements , this essay draws on the ethnographic research of its six co‐authors to discuss the shifting temporalities and scales of documents in their encounters with people. From aspal (“real but fake”) passports to well‐meaning international NGOs and profit driven brokers, we review the bureaucratic infrastructures of mobility controls that produce varying degrees and kinds of violence, exploitation, and vulnerability for differently situated people. Engaging with these shifting temporalities and multiple scales of documents, we argue that documents not only help or hinder people's mobility but are themselves in motion through significant relations.
This article examines how humanitarian management of the dead in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict constructs deceased soldiers as objects of care, incorporating them into "humanity after life"-a postmortem register of humanitarian concern. Drawing on ethnographic research with families of missing persons and observations of care practices around the war dead in post-war Azerbaijan, I argue that under Azerbaijan's system of mandatory conscription, humanitarian practice can displace ethical and institutional attention from living conscripts in active duty toward the dead, making "humanity" most institutionally actionable through recovery, identification, and burial. I call this posthumous humanity: the process through which dead bodies become an enforceable site of international humanitarian legal recognition and procedural care, even as those same individuals, while alive and as members of the armed forces, were lawfully targetable while participating in hostilities under IHL's principle of distinction. I show how "humanity" functions here as a juridical register distributed through IHL categories and humanitarian practices. The article also challenges the legal-humanitarian category of "children" by tracing how kinship idioms, such as referring to conscripted sons as u & scedil;aqlar ("children"), unsettle legal distinctions between protected civilians and combatants. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on law, kinship, humanitarianism, and the politics of death.
Developing interactions within the much-secluded setting of women's jail is an intricate process. That carries foreseen anxiety about building rapport with prisoners, the dread of expulsion, and constant field volatility. Engaging women offenders to converse is difficult, and adapting to such sociability is not very convincing. Given the ethos of Indian prisons, a researcher must consider the holistic picture. The task starts even before commencing the research, continues with the scholarly ethnographic study and the post-phase of jotting down what is compiled. Technical innovations like cell phones, audio recorders, and cameras-fail inside prison, requiring researchers to lean on memory to supplement field annotations. By experiencing one of the difficult field explorations, this article reviews why prison environments are challenging to capture insights and how certain tools help advance notes effectively. By doing so, the larger aim is to excavate anthropological insights through creative methodological considerations in Indian prisons.
How does it feel to observe, participate, document, and eventually analyse 'material' where the ethnographer studies her own community's complicity, consensus and actions toward a majoritarian state? When anti-Muslim sentiment is on the surface of things: temples on ruins of demolished mosques and graves, renamed cities which sound unmistakably 'Hindu', saffron artefacts like flags atop homes, stickers of hyper-masculinized Hindu Gods on vehicles, religious tattoos on bodies; and hate toward the Muslim minority looms gently, casually, as a matter of fact within family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers, the heart (break) of an ethnographer becomes a productive filter to perceive and study this world. Reflecting on fieldwork conducted in Uttarakhand, India I attempt to put in words the unspeakableness of sorrow of doing such work, where fieldwork doesn't just entail yet another field site, but is life itself-a site of recurring loss.
In this paper, I discuss my experience of ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh (UP), which has emerged as an ideal prototype of a Hindutva state in India. I examine my position as an oppositional researcher at one of Durga Vahini's annual training camps in UP. Based on my experience, I further analyze how certain bodies are allowed within or expelled from the coveted events of Hindu right-wing organizations that work towards training young minds for the Hindu nation they aim to build. I assess the question of my privileges in the field, which stem from my social location, which provided me the confidence to study the Hindu right-wing and assured my physical safety. In the article, I focus on "strategies based on fear" in hostile situations and the ethical dilemmas faced by an oppositional researcher in the field.
This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin-like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin-like groups to implement change. Yet, I argue that oversight practices also occur within the realm of kin due to the ambiguities of kinship. By approaching policing through the lens of kinship, I show how relations of loyalty and belonging are not merely institutional effects, but forms of relatedness actively produced through everyday practices of kinning and dekinning. To exemplify this, I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kenya between 2017 and 2018 and problematize the internal-external oversight dichotomy prevalent in oversight studies. This paper contributes to anthropology of policing scholarship, and specifically anthropologists working on police reform and oversight.
This article uses the framework of prefigurative citizenship to show how Sahrawi refugees have worked to build a sense of hope and possibility while displaced. Prefigurative citizenship is both made and mobilized in relation to a vision that rewrites current connections between a state, a territory, and a people to reposition Sahrawi refugees while building decolonized futures. This article explores how Western Sahara's territorial qualities and natural resource wealth inform the making of a prefigurative Sahrawi citizenship through affective ties to the territory. These configurations of Sahrawi place and property in Western Sahara form the basis for building a future that challenges dispossessive social orders of the contemporary, creating the landscape for political actions and claims-making in the present.
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing of asylum processing and resettlement from Global North to South. Many of these containment practices retrace the fault lines of more typically thought-of colonial extractive regimes. This article draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, the world's smallest island nation, located in the equatorial Pacific. I consider how past toxic regimes give shape to the emergence of contemporary toxicities related to expanding outsourced border regimes. I advance the notion of toxic entanglement to help account for the relational production of damaging extractive sectors. Building on both literal environmental toxicity and the increasingly prevalent popular usage of "toxic" as a descriptor for harmful social relations, I argue that the concept of toxic entanglement-informed by local references to toxicity-allows for a deeper understanding of unevenly distributed risks that migrants and locals face. By attending to toxic entanglements across extractive industries and making visible moments of refusal, we can better amplify future responses to mutually constitutive forms of social oppression.
This article seeks to highlight the unstable relationship between identity documents, checkpoints, violence and the law. To do this the piece uses stories from three Syrians concerning their everyday interactions with the law, primarily at checkpoints but also in other administrative settings. Building on anthropological and socio-legal scholarship on documents and state encounters, as well as literature from integration and memory studies, I argue that checkpoints are key sites where the latent violence underpinning legal authority becomes visible. At such sites, the inherently unstable way identity (most obvious in identity documentation), violence and the law interrelate has affective possibility. Through deepening our understanding of these particular legal encounters, I highlight commonalities in the way identity documents, checkpoints, violence and the law functions not just in authoritarian settings but also in so-called liberal democracies.
In Rotterdam, the Netherlands, grassroots organizers with a forced migration background provide support to recent refugees. These organizers try to sustain the informal character of the work they do, while, at the same time, they seek to institutionalize their organization by entering into collaborative government arrangements that are structured by neoliberal funding instruments. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article does three things. First, it reveals modes of affectivity in settings in which society and the state are imbricated with neoliberal market-oriented logics. Second, it shows how right-wing populism feeds into fantasies and rituals of statecraft. Third, it demonstrates how refugee support is situated in hybrid and diffuse webs of governance. I argue that competitive tendering as a way of sponsoring and regulating civil society organizations not only supports capitalist and neoliberal ideologies by following the logics of capital but also enables the proliferation of racism and anti-migrant hostility. To demonstrate their "professionalism," civil society organizations are faced not only with the impossible job of implementing a degree of bureaucracy to show that they are non-bureaucratic, but also that they get to speak the language of capital-that in an extreme right-wing conjuncture becomes easily tangled up with anti-migrant hostility.
How do researchers navigate the "nervousness" of conducting fieldwork in the face of ethical discomfort? Drawing on our field notes, we show how collaborative fieldwork helped us navigate some of these challenges. We argue for an alternative way of imagining fieldwork that foregrounds collaboration as an ongoing research practice extending beyond just fieldwork.
Conducting fieldwork on politically sensitive topics in authoritarian contexts presents researchers with acute trade-offs between access and autonomy. This note reflects on the methodological strategies and ethical dilemmas we encountered while studying land acquisition in Vietnam-a single-party state where land conflict represents one of the most politically contentious issues facing the regime. Specifically, we discuss how working through government-affiliated institutions and local officials carries both significant advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, official state support proved essential for reaching otherwise inaccessible populations and building respondent trust. On the other hand, it introduced sampling biases toward compliant respondents, misperceptions of researcher power among interviewees, and ethical tensions inherent in conducting research that state actors viewed as potentially useful. We describe the adaptive strategies we employed to mitigate these constraints and reflect on the broader implications for positionality, research integrity, and the responsibilities of researchers who study communities whose lives are shaped by the very systems under investigation.
This article explores how social policy is created through the everyday labor of social workers in a Serbian town, challenging assumptions about the absence of the state in post-socialist welfare regimes. Drawing on rich ethnographic material, I argue that social policy is not merely implemented or absent, but actively constituted through the moral, bureaucratic, and relational work of frontline professionals. Rather than viewing the state as absent or dysfunctional, this ethnography reveals its presence as fragmented, negotiated, and affectively charged. Through the lens of double-embeddedness, social workers' simultaneous entanglement in institutional structures and community networks, I show how social workers navigate both bureaucratic expectations and community obligations that produce social policy. By situating social work within broader debates in the anthropology of the state and policy, the article contributes an understanding of the way in which governance is lived and shaped in the post-Yugoslav context.
How should researchers in "closed contexts", navigate "post-access" scenario when their own positionality conflicts with ideologically driven keepers of "information" in conflict/authoritarian settings? If they decide to consciously write/not write such information, do researchers perpetuate "relations of domination" prevalent on field or compromise agency of the marginalized populations? Also, how should researchers navigate indirect threats, suspicion and fear that come along while navigating through such information? Based on my fieldwork experience of doing policy ethnography (October 2022-June 2023) in spatially polarised Ahmedabad (and a short fieldwork in Dimapur (Nagaland) studying mob lynching incident and peacekeeping in 2015 in which a mosque was attacked), this short paper engages with the ethical implications of "possessing information" through what I call "declining to use access". Declining access implies selective withdrawal of access to sensitive information that could be valuable to research as it is shared on perceived perceptions of mutual trust (intimacy) by partisan and non-partisan actors in authoritarian settings.
To speak of methods is to speak of the tools through which knowledge is gathered and produced. Yet, method can also be understood as a mode of engagement that shapes what becomes perceptible and how we reproduce political worlds. Fieldwork, then, is at once the application of techniques to make sense of a research problem, but also, ultimately, an encounter that rearranges our intellectual expectations and affective dispositions alike. This note develops a discussion around one such rearrangement: from hope to rage, both as a lament that developed in the field and as a proposition that could help us think about how knowledge is produced under conditions of closure, repetition, and the exhaustion of hope.
This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin-like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin-like groups to implement change. Yet, I argue that oversight practices also occur within the realm of kin due to the ambiguities of kinship. By approaching policing through the lens of kinship, I show how relations of loyalty and belonging are not merely institutional effects, but forms of relatedness actively produced through everyday practices of kinning and dekinning. To exemplify this, I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kenya between 2017 and 2018 and problematize the internal-external oversight dichotomy prevalent in oversight studies. This paper contributes to anthropology of policing scholarship, and specifically anthropologists working on police reform and oversight.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) today have an unclear, sometimes ambiguous status. How are we to make sense of all this? As panaceas for a range of problems, in both humanitarian and development fields, the NGO idea died—but it did not do so completely, and neither has it entirely faded away. Ideas and approaches that NGOs once helped to originate live on—such as participation, empowerment, and microcredit—but in new or changed forms. Paradoxically, while the term NGO itself may be increasingly shunned by many groups and organizations, it has gained a firmer place in the everyday vocabulary among publics in both the Global South and the Global North. In this special issue, we explore these paradoxes through a conceptual framework that we term the “NGO afterlife.” Despite these various kinds of “deaths,” both the NGO form and the NGO idea continue to influence social life at local, national, and international levels, and in a variety of ways. The afterlives perspective offers a distinctive view of transformation in which entanglements of past and present continue to influence how NGOs are seen within the local and international landscapes of activism, policy, and development, and shape internal organizational strategies and subjectivities of those involved.
