PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Congratulations
PoLAR has been accepted into the Social Science Citation Index!

New Editors
We are pleased to welcome PoLAR's new editors, John Conley and Justin Richland! Click here to read their introductory commentary and learn about their vision for the journal.


On-line Book Reviews
In 2011, PoLAR introduced a new open access only-online Book Review Section! Click here to read book reviews from the latest issue.

Virtual Issue: NGOs
This virtual issue provides a companion to the 2010 Symposium Issue on NGOs, bringing together nine articles previously published on the topic in PoLAR.

Virtual Issue: Reflections from Occupied Worlds
This virtual issue marks the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Movement with a collection of essays and postscripts that provide unique commentary on challenges of pursuing social justice and activism alongside anthropological inquiry.

Spillover sections contain original material that is connected to the topics discussed in issues of PoLAR. In its on-line sections, the journal connects established scholars with the new generation of political and legal anthropologists. Younger scholars who submit articles and are published iin PoLAR enter into direct conversations with leaders in their fields.

Recent conversations include:

Challenges in/of the Field

 Chelsey Kivland reflects on her fieldwork in Haiti. She specifically looks at the political ambiguity of the UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSTAH, which has been there since 2004. Focusing on a few artistic expressions, she details the mission’s significance in a neighborhood where its impact has been most prominent, the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.

Here, Heath Cabot discusses on her doctoral fieldwork and the challenges of documenting asylum in Greece. Salvatore Poier provides a supplemental reflection that attests to how even the seemingly mundane aspects of documentation entail ethnographic dilemmas.

Anthropological Research on NGOs
Read new PoLAR author Jennifer Curtis's interview of James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, known for their influential work on on the contradictory effects of seemingly altruistic efforts to help countries in the "developing world." Curtis's article on NGOs in Ireland appeared in PoLAR Volume 33, Issue 2.


Additional spillover conversations include:

 Anthropology and Activism: Budi Hernawan, a Franciscan friar and doctoral candidate, and Eben Kirksey, author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power, weigh in on how they have studied the West Papuan independence movement and how they have endeavored to raise the visibility of its West Papuans’ strife under Indonesian rule here.

Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the State in Everyday Life
The New Anthropology of Crime


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