1. (Background) Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

I had two research interests quite independent from each other from the very beginning as an undergraduate student: the role of law in social and political life; and political participation in all its ambiguity. I actually started studying political science, public law and sociology to find out about these questions. Rather soon, however, I found that anthropology gave me much more to address these questions of political community, political participation, and law.

At the time, everyone was studying ethnic conflict and nationalism. When a mentor said: go somewhere where you like being, I went to India, to Bombay. I had received a grant for studying questions of reconciliation. Severe violence had ravaged many parts of the city after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ajodhya in 1992. However, I did not find much reconciliation. So, in this typically anthropological way, I turned instead to try and understand how people arranged their cohabitation, trying to make sense of the appeal of one Hindu nationalist movement that was dominant in the politics of the city. Here I was again with my initial questions on political community and political participation, and now also violence.

I then moved on to the Max Planck Institute for Social anthropology and its group on legal pluralism. I rethought my research questions in relation to different legal orders intersecting, conflicting or finding arrangements, and how this affects the possibilities of differently positioned people to mobilise legal norms for their purposes. In the course of exploring how laws from different sources were mobilized “from below” in struggles for social justice and state accountability, I came to be interested in changing attribution of responsibility. These for me are still central questions: Whom do people hold responsible? How are notions of responsibility for and responsibility to intertwined? And, more more basic still: What underlies assumptions about the very possibility of responsibility, whether legal or moral?

Looking at this as a matter of law was cheating myself a bit about where these questions come from. In many ways, they arise directly from the moral imperative of historical responsibility underlying my very political subjectivity, the paramount political norm of the Never Again of German memory culture in which I grew up in the 1980s in West Germany. I realize now, of course, all the exclusionary dynamics and blind spots of that memory culture, and yet, I find holding on to it, (while also ridding it of these vast blind spots), imperative. For scholarship, this for me has always meant that we needed to understand how the Holocaust was possible. Understanding that meant knowing that it is always possible again, in whatever form, and that our responsibility is to understand this to see it approaching and to prevent it from happening again. There is little in my scholarship that is not somehow related to the question: How was the Holocaust possible?

2. (Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article?

Fazil Moradi had organized a public symposium for the JIIAS on Mahmood Mamdani’s book that I was part of. This gave me the unique possibility to ‘think together’ my research on political community and the role of law in historical responsibility, as well as my reflections on the personal reasons for these very research interests. I was interested in how Mahmood Mamdani links the histories of colonialism, nationalism and racialisation, and the way he seeks to move beyond that unholy trinity. I was also interested, because at the time there was a fierce debate in Germany about the idea of multidirectional memory, the concept that Michael Rothberg had put forth. The allegations of relativizing the Holocaust appeared to me always as an utter misunderstanding of the actual thesis and aim of ‘multidirectional memory’, that was not only about the common sources of different histories of violence, but also precisely about the way different memories, in their singularity, can and do inform each other about how in each the very idea of a shared humanity is destroyed, as Hannah Arendt already said. At the time of writing, moreover, Moshtari Hilal and Sinthujan Varatharajah had published a piece on how Nazi inheritance shaped privilege in today’s Germany, and how it still defined the idea of a “German”. This for me extended to the self-righteous exclusionary dimensions of German memory culture, in which only the descendants of those who had been classified as Germans in Nazi-Germany know how to commit to the Never Again. So thinking about the legacy of different, entangled histories of violence and notions of political community had at that moment (like always) both a very personal political, and a scholarly dimension.

3. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

What I tried to bring to this discussion are the notions of ‘Presence’, law and obligation that it has in the title. In order to overcome the proprietary logic of the nation state, and re-conceptualize membership in political communities, I introduce the notion of ‘presence’. I build here on the current debates on citizenship and membership, but extend the notion of presence that, for example, concepts of urban citizenship employ, to address our far-reaching entanglement. Presence for me means connection, being effectively implicated in each other’s’ lives and circumstances. Secondly, I argue for a role of criminal law in addressing the different positions of perpetrators, bystanders and victims – even if these roles are always messier. My argument is that they survive in ‘the Social’, histories of dispossession continuing to provide for privilege, even when they have been done away with politically. Decolonizing criminal law means building institutions of responsibility rather than merely guilt (and I thereby attempt to complicate the sometimes all too easy dismissals of law, and criminal law in particular, in anthropology). Hence, thirdly, I try to develop a differentiated notion of legal responsibility that can institutionalize relations of care, however, as a matter of a responsibility to others, rather than for them.

4. Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

Theory is thinking about how things hang together, how specific situations come about. We make pronouncements of how things come to be the way they are, that is, how phenomena are related to each other. That is theory. In fact, I think there is no observation without theory; our ways of seeing and understanding the world are full of assumptions that are implicitly informed by theories, that is: There is no ‘theory-free’ understanding. Of course, theorizing needs to make explicit these assumptions about how things hang together in a changing world, and seeing whether these assumptions help explain what we see – or whether they fail in the face of the processes we observe. Anthropological theories that are un-affected by observations in the world are to me not really anthropological theories. Anthropology’s constant back and forth between observing and understanding makes for the particular value of its theories. Theories will often make us see what we see differently, or in a more precise way; they can reveal more connections between different phenomena than assumed. I do not think we can understand the world without theory.