Call for papers: Authoritarianism, law, and the remaking of society

Call For Papers June 2025

(Organised by the ‘Social life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts’ project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, at Soas, University of London)

Submission deadline: 16 September 2024

Authoritarian states and leaders across the world have often premised the centralisation of their power on the targeting, through law, of certain groups within the societies they rule over: ethnic, racial, and religious minorities; civil society groups and dissenters; and opposition political groups. From punitive border policing in the United States, to the banning of the ‘International LGBT movement’ in Russia, to the targeting of indigenous communities and their lands in Brazil, to the persecution of minorities and civil society groups in India, authoritarian leaders have used the law and non-legal violence to demarcate and demonise this purported enemy within.  Scholars have provided a range of concepts – such as autocratic legalism, democratic authoritarianism, and authoritarian constitutionalism to describe the relationship between the expansion of state power and legality. This workshop, differently, seeks to draw attention to the social life of laws that are used by authoritarian states and leaders to re-compose societies. Away from strongmen at the top of states, our interest is closer to the ground: we are interested in exploring the messiness and complexity of how the laws that are used to target sections of societies unfold in everyday life.

These laws often seek to target the quotidian aspects of social and political life: what one can eat, where one can live, who one can love, who one can associate with, what one can say, and whether one is a member of a political community. In this workshop we look forward to submissions that seek to understand the social life of laws that are directed at the everyday life of targeted groups, including their food and dietary habits; where people can live, buy or use property; relationships between people of different communities and their association with groups and organisations; restriction and censoring of speech; limiting citizenship and political participation etc.

In this workshop we invite fieldwork-informed submissions that engage with the social life of law in authoritarian contexts. We would invite submissions that respond to one or more of the following prompts:

1. Theorising contemporary authoritarianism and the use of law   What concepts can be offered to understand the use of law by certain states/regimes to change the composition of their societies? While scholars have offered a range of concepts to understand the agglomeration of power at the top of states, what concepts can we offer to think of how these same states use the law to re-imagine and recreate societies from bottom-up?

2. Temporalities of authoritarianism   What is different between ‘authoritarian legality’ and ‘ordinary’ legality’? How do we understand and conceptualise the continuities and ruptures between the social life of these laws in authoritarian times and the ostensibly democratic periods that precede and follow them? For example, most of what contemporary authoritarian states enact through law to change their societies have been done or have been built on laws enacted in*less *authoritarian moments in their history. For example, the use of anti-terror laws against minorities and civil society groups in contemporary India is mirrored by the similar use of anti-terror laws in the previous regime. And yet, there is a feeling that something fundamental about its use has shifted. In this context, how do we conceptualise what is different about the contemporary ‘authoritarian’ moment?

3. Agents of authoritarianism and patterns of enforcement We are interested in conceptualising how these laws are being used: who are being targeted? What are the patterns of enforcement? How do the variety of institutions and officials – the local police, lower bureaucracy, judges, lawyers – understand and use these laws?

4. Discursive strategies and everyday social life of laws In exploring the ‘social life of the law’, we understand that law is not only present at its moment of application but is also made present through everyday social discourse. How do ideas derived from and about these laws circulate and how are they reformulated through everyday discussions and interactions? How do these ideas seep into society and alter the fundamentals of its discursive terrain?

5. Modes of responses to authoritarianism What forms of response are there from affected communities? How do people navigate new social realities inaugurated by these laws? What forms of community mobilisation occur in response to these laws? Beyond the idea of resistance, what concepts can we create to conceptualise the responses to the laws? In these responses, what discourses of citizenship, law, state, and authority are given life?

6. Doing research in authoritarian contexts: Method and Methodologies What are the methodological challenges of doing fieldwork in authoritarian contexts? What are the risks, limitations, and strategies that researchers employ in such milieus?

Format and deadlines for submissions  

If you would like to share your insights at the workshop, please fill up the form with your name, contact details, disciplinary background, and institutional affiliation (if any), a title for your submission, language of your submission and abstracts of no more than 500 words by 16 September 2024.

Please submit your abstracts via this form

To encourage participation and a diversity of voices, we are keen to invite submissions in a variety of formats and languages as well. In addition to written academic papers, we will accept audio and visual submissions too.

We also welcome submissions in different languages. Please submit your abstracts in a language of your choice. Depending on resource considerations, we aim to support a translation of your submission, of your presentation, and of any subsequent publication.

We will publish the academic papers in a special issue of a journal. For selected visual and audio submissions, we hope to curate an exhibition during the workshop and make them available online through the project’s website.

You can find out more about the larger project here: https://www.socialifeoflaw.com/

If you have any queries please contact sociallifeoflaw@soas.ac.uk. Scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines – including socio-legal studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, human geography etc – are invited to apply.

Funding is available to cover limited travel and accommodation costs of invited authors. Unfortunately, visa costs are contingent on securing additional funding. Online participation will also be made possible.

Proposed editorial timeline for journal publication:  

• Deadline for submission of abstracts: 16 September 2024  

• Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2024  

• Special issue/symposium abstracts sent to journal: October 2024  

• Authors to send in first draft of papers: 16 May 2025  

• Workshop at SOAS, London: Week commencing 16 June 2025  

• Authors to send in revised drafts of papers: October 2025  

• Final papers uploaded to journal submission site for peer review: December 2025

Workshop organised by: Mayur Suresh, Fariya Yesmin, Lubhyathi Rangarajan, Raghavi Viswanath, Sagar Gonsalves, Saumya Maheshwari and Sunil Pun. Funding provided by the Leverhulme Trust, through a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award.

Photo credit: Fariya Yesmin