how violence and the law intertwine

In her hybrid memoir 58 Facets, lawyer and legal anthropologist Marika Sosnowski traverses time and societies to reveal intricacies of law enacted by states to control, suppress, displace and, in some instances, erase people. For myriad reasons, these people do not possess the legal documentation to survive.

Many of us take the law for granted, or at least, do not have to think much about how it intersects with our daily lives. Similarly, many of us may not think about the pulse of revolution and resistance, or how significant revolutionary acts are, especially in this current moment.

Review: 58 Facets: on law, violence and revolution – Marika Sosnowski (Melbourne University Press)

This book is part of Sosnowski’s postdoctoral work as a research fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. Her main proposition is that violence and the law are inherently linked in all societies.

Violence and the law flow through time and space like a river. They eat tributaries into people’s bodies and minds. They stream easily from one generation to the next, crafting and shaping.

Sosnowski carries with her a family history of displacement and violence, which is threaded through other stories she has collected from her fieldwork and travels, from Amsterdam to Syria, Turkey to Berlin.

She begins by reflecting on her experience at a checkpoint in Melbourne during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The encounter with this checkpoint in my homeland of Australia triggered me in ways I was completely unprepared for, that were both ethically and morally challenging.

This kind of control, with the requirement to verify identity with documents by an agent of the state, writes Sosnowski,

is something that happens ‘over there’ to ‘others’ in places where I travel to do fieldwork and then have the privilege to leave. Checkpoints like this do not, I had felt quite sure up until then, happen ‘here’.

Of course, camps and checkpoints pervade much of Australia’s history and present moment, depending on who you are. Sosnowski defines a camp as “anywhere that the state of exception manifests, and, perhaps surprisingly, you need not look far for these spaces of strange oxymorons”.

She quotes academic Suvendrini Perera’s idea of “not-Australia”, a legal construction aimed at enabling people to “arrive, yet not arrive”.

Conceptions of camps here might be offshore detention of asylum seekers or, in a colonial context, the continuing impacts of First Nations displacement and surveillance: settlements, reserves, foster homes, boarding schools, “gross acts of violence in the name of ‘protection’”.