Workshop on authoritarianism, law, and the remaking of society

Date: 19 June 2025 to 20 June 2025

Time: 10:00 am

Venue: Room S312 (Paul Webley Wing), SOAS, University of London

Event type: Conference

Registration: The event is free to attend. Click here to register.

Join us for a 2 day workshop that seeks to draw attention to the social life of laws used by authoritarian states and leaders to change the composition of societies.

Download programme

Schedule

Thursday 19 June	Event
10am	Welcome and introductions
10:20am	Authoritarianism in affective registers: From the ordinary to the spectacular This panel will look at ideas of belonging and othering, and the ways in which every day affective registers are invoked to construct such identities.
11:40am	Authoritarian temporalities This panel unpacks the grammar of time. Papers will examine the continuities and ruptures in authoritarian legal strategies employed around the world.
12:30pm	Lunch
1:30pm	Geographies of violence: The urban, ‘home’, and ecology This panel will explore how authoritarian lawmaking engages with notions of spatiality and remakes public and private spaces.
3:15pm	Constructing dissent and the dissenters This panel will explore how the authoritarian State adopts new vocabularies to earmark dissent and target dissenters in contemporary times. Papers will also ask the question of who is labelled as a dissenter and examine the implications of such labelling.

Friday 20 June	Event
10:30am	Policing bodies through law: Between the carceral and the everyday This panel unpacks the everyday impact of carcerality in authoritarian times, focusing on how it is embodied by the State and the non-State and how the effects of carcerality travel beyond institutional spaces such as prisons.
11:45am	Imagining resistance: Modes, optics, and politics This panel looks at how people defy authoritarianism, finding ways to both engage and rescript legality to articulate resistance through alternate modes.
12:45pm	Lunch
2:00pm	Producing knowledge in authoritarian times: From the individual to the institution This panel peels back authoritarian legality to the process of knowledge-making, focusing on who makes such knowledge, what grammars do they use, and what are the challenges to disrupting these processes of knowledge-making.
3:00pm	Debrief, closing remarks, way forward In this session, we will try to round up a list of questions which emerge from the workshop, theoretical frames, and identify points of divergence too. We will also discuss next steps in terms of publication opportunities.

Register here to attend.