The United Nations has long positioned itself as a global leader in ending gender-based violence. However, its peacekeeping missions have been repeatedly implicated in sexual exploitation and abuse against the very populations they were deployed to protect. Using the Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study, this paper argues that peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse are not isolated acts of misconduct but reflect deeper structures of inequality. It examines the blurred boundaries between security and humanitarianism in conflict zones, arguing that peacekeeping missions also function as political sites of power where women are positioned as paradoxical subjects of both protection and violation. Drawing on critical race theory, this paper also highlights how survivors are positioned as hyper-visible objects of exploitation but invisible as victims, demonstrating how systems intended to protect actively reproduces harm. It calls for accountability frameworks that move beyond performative compliance to strengthening survivors’ access to justice.
Across courts and workplaces, appearance functions as a condition of institutional visibility. This article theorizes aesthetic governance as a sociolegal mechanism through which law regulates bodies by allocating perceptual attention under conditions of finite observational capacity and dense normative expectations. In rule-saturated environments, scrutiny cannot be evenly distributed. Aesthetic deviation lowers thresholds of attention, concentrates observation, and increases exposure probability prior to interpretation. Using the concepts of proxy criminalization and anticipatory governance, the article shows how formally neutral standards of decorum and professionalism encode visible difference as scrutiny-relevant and extend attention over time. Intensified observation amplifies minor deviations, increasing the likelihood that they become actionable even where interpretive standards remain neutral. By locating inequality at the level of exposure rather than judgment, the article demonstrates how differential enforcement can emerge without overt bias or formal rule change.
This study examines Women Police Stations in Haryana as sites of gender-responsive policing, analysing how formal legal mandates, socio-cultural norms and frontline bureaucratic discretion shape women's access to justice. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork across three districts (2022-2024), including 38 semi-structured interviews, observations and document analysis, it applies Feminist Institutionalism and Street-Level Bureaucracy to explain gaps between institutional design and everyday practice. Findings show WPS function as hybrid institutional spaces where legal frameworks are reshaped through discretion and informal organisational norms. Frontline practice is shaped by resource constraints, workload pressures and socio-cultural expectations around family, marriage and gender roles. Women officers undertake significant emotional labour, including counselling and mediation, often substituting for formal legal procedures. Complaints are frequently redirected from First Information Report registration towards counselling, even in cognisable offences. The study, therefore, demonstrates how gendered institutional outcomes are produced through the interaction of informal norms, institutional constraints and frontline discretion.
This article examines how right-wing populist actors reshape human rights claims to evade accountability and legitimize increasingly punitive policies. Departing from conventional debates on liberal penality and human rights - which often cast rights as limits on punishment, drivers of criminalization or 'fatigued' norms - it analyzes how rights-based language is strategically redeployed within contemporary penal politics. Drawing on theoretical insights and two case studies, the article illustrates how appeals to freedom of expression are mobilized to shield 'othering' speech, and how LGBTQ+ rights are co-opted through homonationalist logics to target racialized and migrant communities. These tactics recast human rights as a vehicle for punitive governance under the guise of liberal values. By interrogating these dynamics, the article extends debates on the intersections between right-wing populism, punishment, human rights, and liberal legal orders, demonstrating the vulnerability of human rights to instrumentalization within exclusionary and coercive political projects.
This article explores a cascade of deathly entanglements between nations, legal systems, communities, and individuals. Its focus is the vitally important, yet under-theorised corner of Australia's private law known as burial disputes: disputes relating to the disposal of the body of a deceased person. As many as three-quarters of burial disputes in Australia involve at least one Indigenous party. The impetus for this paper is twofold: first, the need to situate these burial disputes in their nomocidal colonial context; and second, the radical reshaping of the legal doctrine employed by courts when resolving these disputes. In particular, and grounded in the capacity of the corpse to act as a site of creative necroresistance, it draws on work done by Australian Indigenous and decolonial scholars to offer a critical, yet affirmative, reading of this doctrinal development, which, it argues, has occurred primarily in response to the Indigenous insider presence in the burial dispute case law.
This article theorises racial eliminativism and civil ordering operating in combination as ongoing processes to eradicate race and counteract racism. Racial eliminativism and civil ordering are initially explicated as complementary ideational and institutional provisions. The paper then develops this interchange between racial eliminativism and civil order in three sections. Section 1 assesses the salience of legal definitions of race and its status as a protected characteristic, questioning whether protection should be afforded to racial persons or against racism. Section 2 examines the implications of defining and addressing abuse in racial terms. This is then related to civil order focusing on criminalising racist abuse. Section 3 evaluates the coherence of racial justice. Instead, the article raises the objective of pursuing antiracist justice in relation to civil ordering. In conclusion, the article advocates using racial eliminativism in conjunction with civil ordering to deliver an authentic form of social justice to all citizens.
Between 2020 and 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Melbourne, Australia was known as the most locked-down city in the world. Communities experienced rolling and extended lockdowns differently, impacting access to various resources, including access to justice. This article presents the key findings of a study on the effects of the pandemic on migrant and refugee communities' ability to access social and legal services in Melbourne which it frames as an issue of access to justice. The research highlighted that COVID-19 magnified existing barriers in the form of structural violence experienced by these communities - including racism, uncertainty, fear, distrust and isolation. The research also demonstrates that the pandemic importantly provided an opportunity to rethink old ways of working by centring community as a justice practice: not delivering services to but working with communities to meet their needs. We argue that collaborative work with communities was key to effective service provision but also a safeguard against structural violence. Through this participatory-collaborative model, the research reveals how structural violence is perpetuated when it decentres community needs and expertise, and how space can be opened up for change.
This article explores right-wing legal mobilisation conducted by conservative and religious actors against reproductive rights, analysing their legal strategies, the context in which they are used, and the conditions in which they become impactful. It shifts scholarly attention from governments to non-state actors, their interrelations, and their transnational network. Using the Polish Constitutional Court's abortion restriction as a case study, it frames Poland as a paradigmatic example of a broader European and global pattern in which right-wing actors deploy tools and institutions designed to protect and expand rights and freedoms in order to restrict them. Such mobilisation has been facilitated primarily through the strategic appropriation of the language and tactics of human rights advocacy, the transnational transfer of legal know-how, strategies and tactics, and the mutual reinforcement that occurs within conservative legal networks, combined with a readiness to act in moments of democratic fragility.
Emotion plays an increasing role in contemporary law and policy making. While it may sometimes appropriately motivate legislative action, it can also significantly interfere with justice and reasonable governance. Taking the punitive response to 'reborn dolls' in Brazil as a case study of a recent harmful sideway of emotion-based criminalisation, we contend that any emotion-based criminalisation must be socially understood, deconstructed and positioned against legitimate criminalisation criteria. Drawing on the scholarship on legitimate criminalisation, punitiveness, (gendered) legal moralism and the social harm perspective, such emotionalised criminalisation is, firstly, contextualised and, secondly, contrasted to the more reasonable type of governance that includes public sentiment as a relevant factor in the criminalisation process. It is further argued that similar cases of criminalisation are not only normatively illegitimate, but that they can also amount to 'legislative harm', which has tangible adverse consequences on the lives and human rights of many.
Land presents an interesting site for examining inheritance, given its complex intertwining with kinship and its contested relationship with gender. In Indian society, land has been a resource owned in common, belonging jointly to family and kinship networks. Drawing on this imagination, customary institutions and legal regulations either permit or deny women's right to access, increasingly influencing their livelihoods in a capitalist economy. Recognising the complex relationship between land and gender, this article focuses on the inheritance experiences among rural pah & amacr;di women in Uttarakhand. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Uttarakhand, we examine the meaning of inheritance in the context of an asset that holds multiple meanings and values in the everyday lives of these communities. We raise the questions: How do these communities perceive and engage with the inheritance of land? How these practices and imaginations of inheritance sit alongside the changing value of land in the free market.
Socio-legal research has traced the rise of hybrid legal regimes that combine punitive and welfare logic. This article advances this scholarship by theorizing what performative legality-legal practices where speech acts, rituals, and staged interactions shape subjects, but with the ultimate authority monopolized by state actors-does within such hybrid systems. I develop the concept of the Performative Submissiveness Catch to describe the paradoxical demand that individuals must perform both submissiveness (to qualify for help) and competence (to deserve autonomy), creating an impossible double bind that deepens dependency. By analyzing this double bind, the article demonstrates how hybrid legal regimes can entrench endless supervision and epistemic disqualification through performative practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations of Israeli child protection proceedings, I demonstrate how hearings become a form of collective performance, where judges and social workers portray "ideal parenting" to parents, infantilize them, and deny the structural role of poverty. The Performative Submissiveness Catch thus reframes child protection as a case study in how Child Protection Law constructs dependency, not only through sanctions, but through the very rituals of adjudication.
This study examines the mass closure of magistrates' courts in England and Wales. It tracks how the closure policy was formulated, justified and operationalised by successive governments. An advanced managerialist truth regime redefined court buildings as financial assets, identifying multiple courts as 'surplus' or 'inefficient' and ripe for closure and sale. 'Consent' was fabricated through consultation processes, premised on predetermined outcomes. This policy was overlain with government pledges to switch to a tech-justice system, improving access to justice, achieving greater efficiencies and cost effectiveness. Our findings reveal how: court buildings were sold with scant regard to the adverse impact on court users; many of the remaining buildings were allowed to deteriorate; locally accessible justice was undermined and defective technologies failed to deliver. This study contributes to a research agenda that examines the deleterious consequences of sedimenting an advanced managerialist truth regime that is resistant to critique and shielded from scrutiny and accountability.
This article analyses the criminalisation of sex work as an ecological system of governance, sustained not only through statutory law but also through institutional mandates, funding logics, and cultural ideologies. Drawing on interviews with NGO practitioners in the United Kingdom and United States, and using ecological systems theory, we show how criminalisation operates through networked institutional relations. NGOs, as meso-level actors, mediate between sex-working clients and carceral systems, navigating data-sharing mandates, safeguarding protocols, and exclusionary eligibility rules. We introduce the concept of 'cascading vulnerability' to capture how these interactions can compound risk across ecological levels. Addressing structural exclusion requires engaging the broader architecture of governance, not statutory law alone.
This article examines how China's Giant Panda National Park turns conservation boundaries into a redistribution of collective forest rights without expropriation. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and legal-policy analysis, the study traces how the park's boundary is 'made real' through territorial technologies: maps and markers, permitting and certification gateways, and remote-sensing-enabled audits. Two cases illustrate a dual mechanism of taking-like loss: (a) a de facto logging ban produced through permit withdrawal and routine refusal, blocking timber income and lawful conversion into emerging forest commodities, and (b) a certification freeze that prevents in-park forest rights from being documented and used as collateral, immobilising credit-dependent livelihoods and investment. Across both, an 'audit horizon' reshapes bureaucratic risk, making non-authorisation the safest default. Linking legal geography and takings analysis, it explains why substitutes, leasing, swaps, agreements, and welfare-forest conversion remain distributively thin, and it proposes clearer compensation triggers and calibrated, accountable permitting.
This article explores why individuals in vulnerable positions may not mobilise available legal avenues to protect themselves from harm, despite being aware of their existence. Drawing on data relating to precarious housing situations in Berlin and Zurich, we argue that the assumption that mobilising the law would improve the situation of individuals is not always accurate. We present three dimensions of non-mobilisation that prevent individuals from turning to the law: (1) their precarious market position in relation to their landlords, (2) the perceived detrimental impact of legal mobilisation on other legal affairs and (3) available solutions do not fit individuals' complex realities. Theoretically, we bring insights from the 'non-take-up' literature in social policy into the debate around legal mobilisation and legal consciousness. We argue for a more nuanced understanding of legal mobilisation that takes into account both people's understanding of law and their broader legal, economic and lived realities.
The study of the health impacts of incarceration has generated new ethical imperatives focused on mitigating the suffering of incarcerated people. The problem with this framing, however, is that it presumes a binary relationship between care and suffering, which does not align with the legal status of the prisoner who suffers through the right to be cared for. Drawing from a prison health care class-action lawsuit in the state of Arizona, this essay explores the ethical insights, critiques, and impasses posed by the prisoner's health care claim. Through an analysis of the prisoner's plea for care, this essay ultimately advances an ethics of unhingement, which unsettles the assumed opposition between suffering and care and self and other. An ethics of unhingement not only refuses the present arrangement of structural violence and suffering under the carceral state, but poses the question, how do we care about the ways in which we suffer together?
This article charts the ideological and discursive trajectory of the minoritisation and criminalisation of Ahmadis in Pakistan, who self-identify as Muslims but are classified as a religious minority under the constitution. The law also prohibits Ahmadis from proselytising or using Islamic epithets. Following the Freudian notion of 'narcissism of minor differences', the article shows that Ahmadis, being profoundly similar yet different in one doctrinal aspect from mainstream Muslims, have come to represent a threat to the internal unity of the wider community. This difference has been mobilised by political forces and endorsed by the judiciary, including within the framework of liberal legality. Whilst recognising the limits of liberal law, the paper critiques the view that liberal law itself has led to the exclusion of Ahmadis. Rather, it shows that courts have stretched liberal canons and modes of reasoning to suit personal ideological motivations and populist agendas whilst validating discriminatory laws.
Where unions are weak and governance authoritarian, gig workers rely on everyday resistance rather than organizing. Taiwan is distinctive: both employees and the self-employed can unionize, and riders have formed unions, yet working conditions remain insufficient. Taiwan's employment relations provide few worker-participation mechanisms, leaving terms of employment largely determined by employer-imposed rules without worker input. Platforms use consent, freedom and fear to make standard employment appear undesirable, limiting solidarity-based demands for re-employment. The employee-self-employed binary thus forces riders to choose between autonomy and protection. Drawing on Taiwan's experience, labour-law reform should respond to riders' demands by establishing countervailing mechanisms and participatory rights - information, consultation and codetermination - empowering them to challenge algorithmic control, curb subordination and secure genuine autonomy.
This paper reconceptualizes hierarchy as a constitutive force of the international human rights regime rather than a residual feature of interstate politics. Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and critical legal scholarship, it argues that hierarchy permeates the material, normative, epistemic, symbolic, and institutional dimensions of international law, shaping who defines rights, whose claims are legitimized, and which subjects, harms, and forms of vulnerability are rendered visible or excluded. By proposing an integrated typology of five hierarchies, the article shows how law actively produces distinctions of authority, recognition, and subjectivity, mediating the translation of lived precarity into legal protection. From the liberal-individualist foundations of early rights instruments to the marginalization of collective, ecological, and intersectional claims, hierarchy structures the grammar of universality and the differential recognition of vulnerability across scales. International law's architecture not only mirrors inequality but reproduces it through classificatory mechanisms that privilege dominant epistemologies while silencing relational and slow-onset forms of harm. Moving beyond critique, the paper advances a reconstructive framework grounded in epistemic pluralism, relational justice, and decolonial engagement, reframing universality as a dialogical and historically situated process of co-creation.
In recent decades, many post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies have developed various non-judicial and quasi-judicial mechanisms beyond trials to deal with the consequences of mass atrocities. These mechanisms include truth commissions, local and national reconciliation processes, memory initiatives, apologies, conditional amnesties and reparations, among others. They not only represent distinct tools for addressing past injustices but also embody distinct theories of justice, including restorative, reparative, customary and historical justice. The article argues that the proliferation and coexistence of multiple theories of justice have made the field of transitional justice inherently pluralistic, moving it beyond a singular liberal-legalist tradition. The primary challenge is to examine how these theories of justice coexist, intersect and interact. Building on critical transitional justice literature, empirical findings, and informed by legal pluralism, this article does not propose a new overarching theory of justice. Rather, it aims to conceptualise a pluralistic theory of justice rooted in praxis and communities' perceptions of justice. This framework seeks to reorient the field's theoretical foundation and more accurately capture the multifaceted nature of justice after atrocities by incorporating diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences.
