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Jeffrey S. Kahn, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 352 pp. Immigrant detention--a carceral regime based not on criminal punishment [...]

This article discusses the concept of the "Forever War," referring to the ongoing conflicts and military operations that have persisted since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The author highlights how the Forever War has become normalized and intertwined with the US imperium, despite no clear end in sight. The article also explores the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the continued projection of violence into the country. It emphasizes the need for anthropologists to critically examine and engage with the Forever War, particularly in relation to issues of imperialism and militarism. [Extracted from the article]

This article delineates a particular orientation to combining professional legal training and anthropological scholarship that I call ethnographic lawyering. Ethnographic lawyering takes legal form as an object of anthropological analysis, loosely inspired by the Marxist jurist Evgeny Pashukanis's theorization of law as a social relation. If ethnographic method in anthropology entails theorizing from the concepts and experiences of interlocutors, then ethnographic lawyering analytically centers the subjectivities, logics, and relationalities that legal form both presupposes and animates. Ethnographic lawyering brings to light the contingent lives of legal form. To demonstrate this method, the article uses the example of conspiracy in early US court cases involving Al Qaeda, informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and anthropologist in litigation arising from the war on terror. An ethnographic lawyering approach illuminates how conspiracy's distinct forms in criminal law, the law of evidence, and tort law each bring far‐flung subjects, events, and actions together into reified entities even as they atomize and recombine social relations. This dynamic tension resembles the vertiginous nature of conspiracy theorizing in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronically described as poor, overcrowded, and dangerous, the Gaza Strip exemplifies the longstanding Zionist 'dilemma' of how to deal with dense concentrations of Palestinians who must not be granted equality but who cannot be removed or exterminated en masse. This article analyzes key Israeli policies toward the Gaza Strip--specifically, the use of closure, buffer zones, and air power--in the context of the Zionist movement's broader geographic and demographic goals. It argues that the Gaza Strip can be usefully seen as a 'laboratory' in which Israel fine-tunes a dubious balance of maximum control and minimum responsibility, refining techniques that are also suggestive of possible futures for the West Bank.

The role of Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in fuelling the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis in Rwanda is considered. It is argued that RTLM spread negative propaganda about the Tutsi minority and encouraged ordinary people to participate in massacres.

Taking note of the relatively limited accounts of race in contemporary international legal doctrine, this Article posits a thought experiment: What would international legal theorizing look like not from the place of the metropole or the colony, but rather from the journey of the enslaved, from the barracoon to the hold of the slave ship to the plantation? For one possible answer, this Article turns to the work of the Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter to consider race in relation to international law in order to argue for the utility of replacing a formalist and state-based notion of universalism with a more open-ended and contestation oriented approach. Such a move would reframe international law's "origin myth" about 1492 from a dyadic account of Western colonizers versus the colonized to a triangular encounter between Europeans, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved Africans. It would also pivot away from understandings of race as a generic form of invidious social differentiation to be managed solely by states as an internal matter to instead theorize legal regimes of racialization in connection with political economy as both distinct and conjoined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-running debates over military privatization overlook one important fact: The U.S. military's post-2001 contractor workforce is composed largely of migrants imported from impoverished countries. This Article argues that these Third Country National (TCN) workers--so called because they are neither American nor local--are bereft of the effective protections of American law, local regimes, or their home governments; moreover, their vulnerability is a feature, not a flaw, in how the U.S. projects global power today. TCN workers are an offshore captive labor force whose use allows the government to keep politically sensitive troop numbers and casualty figures artificially low while reducing dependence on local populations with suspect loyalties. Legislation to combat human trafficking has done little to remedy exploitation and abuse of TCN workers because of jurisdictional hurdles and the lack of robust labor rights protections. Substantive reform efforts should address the deeper issue at stake, namely that the government uses TCN workers to carry out a core state function--namely, the use of force--without a clear relationship of responsibility to them. Unlike with soldiers, the labor of TCN workers is not valorized as sacrifice and unlike mercenaries selling their services to the highest bidder, they are frequently indebted to the point of indenture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]