Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely …
#PoliticalEngagements: Introduction
Ethnography and Political Engagement This Thematic Thread emerged from a workshop organised (online) at the LSE in February 2021, entitled “In the …
ResonanceCast #2: Incitement and Coups
Podcast with Jastinder Kaur and Daniel White, moderated by Ian M. Cook Allegra Lab · ResonanceCast 2: Incitement And Coups …
Towards an Anthropology of Coups
When is a coup a coup? Reflections on the anthropological study of ‘coups’ There have been more than 200 coups in 95 …
Janne Heederik: The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden
As a result of welfare reform and continuing budget cuts, social service agencies in the UK have struggled to make ends meet …
Abolition and the Colonial Amnesia of Caribbean Prison Systems
The need for alternatives to prisons and prison reform in the Caribbean is long past due IntroductionProcesses of historical erasure scar the …
Pathways for the Post-COVID New Old World
Part 5 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. Some are openly proclaiming, “you don’t want to waste a crisis,” as they calculate …
Allegro vivace… the Italian laboratory, for better or for worse
This little essay was conceived wandering in the Swiss countryside. I’m on sabbatical leave and my whole work and travel program has …
Eerie desires for the authoritarian state. Covid-19 updates from Italy.
I have been – like anyone else in Italy – in quarantine for the past three weeks. Optimistically, Italy will be …
The return of the plague-spreader
Written in lockdown amid the pandemic, this post speculates about the political and epistemological implications of ‘middle-class’ reactions to the present crisis. …
On being voices of prudence in times of a pandemic – #Corona
Many academic disciplines have a lot to say these days about COVID-19. There are the medical experts, of course, epidemiologists, virologists, microbiologists, …
More of The Same: Kazakhstan’s leadership change between ageing leadership and popular discontent, by Luca Anceschi (University of Glasgow)
If there is only one lesson to be learned from Kyrgyzstan’s recent presidential dispute—a chain of tumultuous events that led to the …
#Review: State of Rebellion
In State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic, Louisa Lombard moves away from an anthropological tendency to study …
#Review: The Truth About Crime
What is ‘crime’? A social pathology? A violation of social order? The object or raison d’être of law enforcement? How can we …
Living a good life through infrastructure. A Review of three recent monographs on Central Asia
This post belongs into a series of posts on the workshop “The Future of Central Asian Studies” organized by Prof. Dr. Judith …
#Review: The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
The Force of Custom presents a strongly grounded ethnographic argument for the rethinking of ‘customary law’ as a category in the anthropology …
Call for #Reviews: #AnthroState #Africa
As we start into 2018, we seize the opportunity of this post by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on their influential …
The state of the state in #Africa
How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion has been a long-standing preoccupation in …
Is the United Nations Broken?
By Ronald Niezen When the United Nations General Assembly convened its annual meeting this September, amid growing nuclear tensions between the U.S. …
Axel Rudi: Independence from Whom? The Aftermath of the Kurdish Referendum
In the future, people will say, “On the 16th of October, it happened again.” The Kurds were once again betrayed by the …
Johan Fischer: Veg or non-veg? On fieldwork and food in India
Reporting from an ongoing fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, the central topic of this piece is the ways in which the vegetarian and …
James C. Scott: A brief history of flight from the state
James C. Scott rethinks refuge (primarily in mountain territories) and the flight of the state in the context of his later ideas …