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John Conley and Justin Richland

Editors’ Introduction

As is customary in PoLAR, this issue brings together a group of papers that rangewidely across time, place, and topic. They deal with such ostensibly different issuesas the politics and culture of the European Union, crime and punishment in LatinAmerica, the ambiguous relationship between global capital and the nation-statein oil-rich (and oil-poor?) Kazakhstan, and social and economic reform programsin the post-9/11 Arab world. But as also is customary in PoLAR, a deeper lookat the articles reveals common themes, transcendent issues in law and politics thatreflect anthropology’s complementary strengths of intense focus on the local againsta coherent background of theoretical concerns.

We begin with two articles that deal with law, politics, and culture in the Euro-pean Union. In “The Governance of Things: Documenting Limbo in the GreekAsylum Procedure,” Heath Cabot examines documentary practice in Greek asylumprocedure. Her ethnography focuses on the “pink card,” the government identitydocument for asylum-seekers, showing how its use simultaneously—andunpredictably—reinforces and undermines its role as a regulatory technology. Heranalysis raises the larger issue—captured vividly in her title phrase–of how tangiblethings, in this case documents, and the way they circulate and signify, can be bothobjects and instruments, if not agents, of governance.

Bureaucratic processes and the persons they figure also take center stage in “TrainingBureaucrats, Practicing for Europe: Negotiating Bureaucratic Authority and Govern-mental Legitimacy in Turkey.” In it, Elef Babul explores some of the complex culturalissues that have arisen in Turkey’s long-term effort to join the EU. To meet the EU’sgood governance standards, Turkey is making a concerted effort to inculcate the val-ues of human rights and egalitarian state-society relations among its public officialsand government workers. By thus portraying state officials as subjects in need ofeducation and reform—of modernizing, as it were—this effort challenges their tra-ditional status as educators of the people and custodians of the keys to modernity. Toretain their legitimacy, Babul shows, government officials must reinvent themselvesas being of the people rather than above them.

The next two articles deal with aspects of crime, policing, violence, and punishmentin Latin America. In “The Art of Torture and the Place of Execution: A ForensicNarrative,” Stephanie Kane investigates the torture and execution of a teenaged boyin a remote ecotourist destination in Argentina—a death that was officially ruled a

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 35, Number 1, pps. 1–3. ISSN1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01175.x.

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suicide. Kane’s essay weaves official reports and the reflections of the victim’s familyand friends to reveal the ways in which violence leaves its mark, haunting not only onthe memories of those left behind but also the physical and sociopolitical landscapewhere the events occurred. In so doing, Kane’s analysis discloses the ways in whichthose still caught in the sorrow of their loss and the senselessness of this crime gropetoward and through narrative in an effort get justice and find peace.

Aldo Civico’s “ ‘We Are Illegal, but not Illegitimate’: Modes of Policing in Medellin,Colombia also looks at violence, policing, and their mutual entanglement. Civicofocuses less on the victims of crime and more on those entrusted with their protection,specifically on the “murky pacts” made between state forces and “demobilized”former paramilitary members who had once been their enemies, as they work inconcert to police certain marginal neighborhoods of Medellin. Such pacts, Civicoargues, compel new ways of thinking about the nature of the state and the supposedmonopoly on legitimate use of force that undergirds its sovereignty. Analogizing tothe intreccio, or intertwining, of the Sicilian Mafia in the Italian state, Civico findsin these cooperative ventures that bridge licit and illicit forms of state-sanctionedviolence, undertaken ostensibly in the name of law enforcement, evidence not of theimpotence of the state but of its presence, and indeed its effectiveness.

Although set half a world away, Saulesh Yessenova’s The Tengliz Oil Enclave: Labor,Business and the State raises related questions about the nature and efficacy of thecontemporary state. Yessenova’s ethnographic subject is an oil enclave in Kazakhstan,and her primary focus is on the troubled relations among labor, the multinationalcompanies that manage the project, and the Kazakh state. Examining the incongruityof labor riots during an apparent economic boom, she uncovers troubling aspects ofthe relationship between the state and multinational capital, including the unexpectedinfluence of the form contracts that set the terms of the public-private partnership. Inthis case, Yessenova concludes, the state’s failure to extend the rule of law to workersin the enclave is evidence of its impotence, as well as of the capture of key stateactors by economic interests.

Finally, Mayssun Sukarieh’s “The Hope Crusades: Culturalism and Reform in theArab World” presents an ethnographic perspective on public relations campaigns inthe post-9/11 Arab world that promote such slogans as “Hope,” “Life” and “Opti-mism.” Examining these campaigns and a set of parallel policy reform documents,she finds that they share a “culturalist” ideology in which individual thought andaction are strongly determined by shared beliefs. In this view, the problems of theArab world are thus largely a product of cultural deficiencies that can be remedied bytop-down cultural change. Sukarieh’s most surprising finding may be that this culturalreform project—which also embodies neoliberal economic reform—is promoted asmuch by transnational Arab elites as by the West.

We welcome the complex ways in which our contributors to this issue are thinkingthrough the cultures of law and politics in so many varied contexts. We especiallyappreciate their attention to the ways in which social actors enmeshed in legal andpolitical processes find themselves caught up with each other. Indeed, though the

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locales are far-flung, the measure of concern revealed in all of these essays suggestshow often, in today’s late modern state, the mythic “social contract” of classic liberalpolitical theory reveals itself to be something more in line with Civico’s “murkypact.” We hope you find these essays to be as revelatory as we do.