Focaal

This introductory article aims to clarify why soft law is an interesting field to explore from a legal anthropological perspective and to point out a number of issues this theme section suggests taking into consideration. The article provides the context for the theme section, inserting soft law within global legal concerns and processes. It outlines the emergence of the notion of soft law, and summarizes the controversies it has raised among legal scholars and law practitioners. Then it explains why, despite the elusive character of the notion and its uncertain normative status, as soon as we move beyond a number of emblematic concerns for law practitioners, soft law mechanisms and practices appear to be a vantage point to explore the emerging transnational legal order, and particularly the relations among state, supra-state, and non-state (private) forms of regulation. Finally, the article introduces the articles in the special section of this issue by highlighting the ways in which they empirically deal with soft law practices and global legal pluralism in a variety of social fields and contexts, using ethnographic sensitivity and imagination.

This article examines the development of cultural policy recommendations, in the form of “soft law,” by the Civil Society Platform for Intercultural Dialogue, a nascent European civil society collaboration aiming to make culture a separate political endeavor within the context of European integration. Drawing on fieldwork among European bureaucrats and members of European civil society in Brussels, Belgium, the article offers an alternative discussion from common understandings of soft law, paying close attention to law as an aesthetic form that challenges dominant modes of policy-making. An investigation of soft forms of law provides a useful perspective to those who attempt to define, locate, and create European identity.

This article explores the use of soft law by those involved in the drafting of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, drawing in particular on the author's experiences as legal adviser to the Culture, Identity, and Language Working Group of the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights Forum. The article reflects on the extent to which the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities 1995 and other relevant international instruments can be considered as forms of international soft law. It then highlights controversies that have arisen in debates over the content and scope of provisions addressing culture, identity, and language issues in any future Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland.

This article analyzes how diversity-managing and affirmative action policies targeting Afro-descendants have been introduced into Brazilian workplaces since the late 1990s. It does so by exploring how international regulations and global normative regimes, namely the human rights and the corporate social responsibility movements, have penetrated and shaped the way Brazilian companies deal with racial discrimination. Contending interpretations by executives, managers, and activists are discussed from the perspective of “new legal pluralism,” by looking at how these different actors use the norms to induce, subvert, or even evade dominant orders in specific situations. It can be concluded that, even with no legally binding force, global normative regimes have been particularly effective in creating new “sites of opportunity” for Afro-Brazilians. Conversely, the corporate social responsibility premise of going beyond the law neither challenges the ineffectiveness of the national legal system nor disqualifies illegal discriminatory market behavior.

Touted as a means to extend democracy to previously disenfranchised people, participatory budgeting actually covers a variety of motivations and effects. This article explores diverse reactions and meanings through a case study of the Peruvian peasant community of Allpalumichico. Although the economic system embedded in the legal requirements of the Peruvian participatory budgeting process derives from the global neoliberal agenda, the actual practices also reflect the personal and political strategies of local and national politicians. At the same time, the citizen participants and beneficiaries of the process understand it on their own terms. Despite both the decline of the peasant community as an institution and the increasing heterogeneity of the residents, collective norms of resource distribution continue to inform how allpalumichiqueños engage in participatory budgeting decisions. This collective sense of community could be the basis for much more organic and relevant forms of participatory budgeting.

My latest project examines how small-scale, rural village-level sustainability both depends on and at the same time acts against simple household reproduction.That is, I am interested in how “making a community” and “making a family” come to find themselves in opposition, such that “successful” communities continue to shed significant numbers of people, even during economically and politically “good times”. The research for this project takes place in Labrador, Canada, in predominantly Inuit coastal villages and neighboring, not-predominantly-Aboriginal cities. Since the 1960s, coastal villages have seen considerable numbers of residents leave. At the conclusion of the most recent land settlement, one-third of Labrador’s Inuit population was living in Goose Bay, site of a large NATO air base created during World War II, where they make up more than one-fifth of the total population. If other nearby cities are included—St. John’s in Newfoundland, Halifax in Nova Scotia, or Quebec City and Montreal in Quebec Province—more than half of the Labrador Inuit now live somewhere other than the villages with which they most closely identify.

In my work with George Marcus we have sought to develop a particular design of and for anthropological projects that allows ethnography to operate as a means to engage analytical perspectives in the making, perspectives that take form prospectively, perspectives that seek to shape contingencies in, of, and about the future. What this demands is that we build our ethnographic project within pre-existing and/or emerging experiments pursued by our subjects. It further requires that we draw on a range of intellectual modalities that intersect, overlap, or are entirely indistinguishable from “ethnographic” method operating within technocratic and scientific settings. In other words, we seek to enter settings in which the “subjects” themselves experiment creatively with the intellectual exigencies of ethnography.

What makes our projects “anthropological”? What is that anthropological twist that we bring and what does it add to any given empirical or substantive field? These are the key questions that the editors of Focaal asked me to consider; intrinsically compelling, they hooked me into adding my own contribution to this Forum topic. The questions intrigue me because I see myself both as a keen advocate of certain ways of doing interdisciplinarity, and as deeply grounded in the history, practice, and thinking of my own discipline of anthropology. I start my reflection from the interdisciplinary end, via the theme of serendipity; somehow, these are linked.

Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg, eds., Reframing Dutch culture: Between otherness and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 291 pp., ISBN 978-0-754-64705-8 (hardcover).

Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the limits of tolerance. New York: Penguin Books, 2006, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-143-11236-5 (paperback).