Disasters and Risks

9 juin 2022
14h-16h

Diego Zenobi ( Universidad de Buenos Aires-CONICET)
Juridical expertise and political commitment. Justice and reparation for victims of violence in contemporary Latin America

With the invention and spread of transitional justice, reparatory policies have spread to the extent of reaching a global scope. In this lecture I will address various reparatory processes that have emerged in the Latin American context. We can appreciate two different paradigms: the "old" models centred on the notion of "compensation" and the "new" forms oriented towards a "comprehensive reparations". In this context, I address the emergence of the compensation category "damage to the project of life" applied by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Organization of American States-OAS).
An ethnographic approach to these reparation devices emphasises the moral evaluations and expectations of the victims, as well as the professionals with whom they interact. In these contexts, discrepancies are often observed between the formal institutional objectives of reparatory mechanisms and the expectations of those agents.
I will show that experts and lay people engage with these mechanisms and work to reorient them towards the fulfilment of their own expectations of justice. I am particularly interested in the role of "committed advocates" who articulate professional expertise and political commitment to victims' struggles. I analyze the legal stakes and innovations that they promote in the field of law and its associated dilemmas. Drawing on data and materials provided by several ethnographies on Latin America, I intend to show that just as devices make people, people make devices.

Discutant : Nicolas Dodier (EHESS-CEMS)

1er décembre 2021
17h-19h (Salle Jean Monnet)
Contested Natures – Conflicted Environments in Asunción, Paraguay
Facundo Rivarola, PhD Candidate – Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Swiss National Science Foundation – Doctoral Fellow,Graduate Institute Geneva (IHEID)
Discutant : Carolina Angel Botero, PhD in Anthropology, University of Los Andes associate member

This research examines the case of the Paraguayan river and marginalized urban communities’ struggle over access to spaces in the city of Asunción. State-run new urban redevelopment projects deem that floodplains areas of the city are the “rightful and natural” space of the river and that marginalized communities living there should move elsewhere. However, these areas, known as Bañados, were never empty floodplains. Indigenous, mestizos and rural migrant communities have lived there since colonial times, forming a historically rooted socio-ecology with the neighboring river. As part of this large-scale re-urbanization project, the national authorities have recently declared an area next to the city’s river bay, located in the north Bañado, known as “Banco San Miguel,” as an ecological reservoir. By declaring this ecological area, the national authorities mobilize, sometime in vague and open ways, a notion of “nature’s jurisprudence,” threatening to permanently displace communities living in the area. In response, residents have formed grassroots groups self-nominated as “green guerrillas” and “green guardians.” This talk will examine the way(s) that different ideas, notions, and narratives about “nature” are being articulated, negotiated, contested, and defended, resulting in socio-ecological conflicts. In this way, I will ethnographically raise the main questions of: how is the Paraguayan State evoking the social and political jurisprudence of “nature” as a way to delineate environmental claims and deny access to land, housing and social welfare to the urban poor? Ultimately, who is entitled to politically and socially represent “nature”? How is this capacity to represent claimed? And what are the conflicts that arise from different (and competing) “environmental” claims?


Avec la participation de l'ANR à travers le projet Rulnat