The lived legal realities of de facto sovereign states

Abstract

De facto states are sovereign aspirants that generate convoluted legal landscapes with contested boundaries, ambiguous juridical overlaps, and interstitial categories. The unresolved legal status of these states typically yields both opportunities and precarities. Much academic debate has resolved around attempts to make sense of these constellations from the perspective of international law, and around the resulting implications for the citizenship constellations of the inhabitants of these states. This panel seeks to complement this scholarship with an explicit focus on the everyday lived realities of these convoluted legal landscapes. After all, we know from work in legal anthropology, scholarship on migration and borderlands, and fieldwork-based research on identity documents that people are remarkably innovative in navigating the institutional frameworks of the states (whether recognized or not). A formal institutional organogram tends to be of limited analytical use for understanding the functionality of a state department, a procedure, or a legal framework. Policies are subject to workarounds, legal entitlements are subject to negotiation and documents assume meanings that differ from their intended purpose. The scholarship on everyday legal realities may thus offer us a productive – and hitherto understudied – analytical vantage point to grapple with the ambiguities and paradoxes of de facto states. The panel comprises four papers that engage with these dynamics, from four different contexts: Abkhazia, Somaliland, the Syrian Opposition, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Title	Details
Improvising international representation: Somaliland diplomacy and consular services by one-person offices in Europe	View Paper Details
Regulation, property, and foreign investments: Competing claims and practices in and around de facto states	View Paper Details
The bureaucratic revolution: The Syrian opposition’s civil registry system	View Paper Details
Legal identity in “half a country”: Disparate citizenship constellations in Northern Cyprus	View Paper Details