Rechtskulturen
2012/ 2013

Antonio De Lauri

Judicial Practice and the Poetic of Compromise in Kabul – A Legal Anthropology

Antonio De Lauri received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Milan Bicocca in 2010. He is specialized in legal anthropology and Afghan studies. Since 2005, first in the frame of his doctoral research and then of his postdoctoral studies, he has carried out repeated periods of fieldwork in Afghanistan. His research has focused on the process of legal reconstruction and the implementation of a new legal system after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. In 2010, he was Visiting Scholar at the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University (New York) and during the 2011/2012 academic year postdoctoral fellow at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) in the frame of the Fernand Braudel-IFER program. 

Judicial Practice and the Poetic of Compromise in Kabul – A Legal Anthropology

As a Rechtskulturen Fellow he will work on the sociocultural settings and normative interconnections that shape contemporary judicial practice in the tribunals of Kabul. Through an interdisciplinary approach, he will develop two lines of inquiry. First, he will look at the interconnections between state justice and customary law, which characterize judicial practice implemented in the primary civil and criminal courts of Kabul. Second, he will focus on the activity of judges and give voice to their understanding of the changes that in the past decade have invested the Afghan judiciary and the role of judges in particular.