Yazid Ben Hounet is a social anthropologist, Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and a member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (CNRS/Collège de France/EHESS) and of the Centre Jacques Berque (Rabat). He holds his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). His dissertation was published in 2009 and discussed tribal issues in contemporary Algeria. His past and current research is situated at the intersection of legal and political anthropology in Muslim context. His research has included the field of kinship studies. After his PhD thesis, he studied the local processes of reconciliation in Algeria and Sudan, and legal practices in matters of property (ANR projects ‘ANDROMAQUE’ and ‘PROMETEE’). His publications include: Parenté et anthropologie sociale (2009) and L’Algérie des tribus: Le fait tribal dans le Haut Sud-Ouest contemporain (2009).
Daniela Berti is is a social anthropologist, ‘Chargée de Recherche’ at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, and a member of the Centre for Himalayan Studies at Villejuif. Her research in North India focuses on ritual interactions, politico-ritual roles and practices formerly associated with kingship, and on the ethnography of court cases in India. She has coordinated with Gilles Tarabout an international programme on Justice and Governance in India and South Asia, and has recently started a new collaborative project focused on court cases which deal with environmental protection and animal rights.
Devika Bordia received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Yale University. She has held fellowships with the Just-India Programme based at CNRS, Paris and the Centre for the Development Studies, Delhi. Devika is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Gottingen.
Véronique Bouillier is a social anthropologist. She has mainly worked on the religious movements in Southern Asia (Nepal, India). She has authored many papers and books on Hindu Shaiva sects (Naître renonçant: Une caste de Sannyasi villageois au Népal central, 1979; Ascètes et Rois: Un monastère de Kanphata Yogis au Nepal, 1998; Itinérance et vie monastique: Les ascètes Nath Yogis en Inde contemporaine, 2008). She has also worked on Nepali legal system and, more recently, on the relations of South Asian litigants and French justice (French Law Courts and South Asian Litigants (2011); Interactions entre les institutions judiciaires françaises et les communautés sri lankaises (2011)).
Antonio De Lauri is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. He has held post-doctoral fellowships in Paris and Berlin. Since 2005 he has been working on legal pluralism, humanitarian intervention, human rights, and legal practices in Afghanistan. As a member of a ERC project on slavery and post-slavery his current research focuses on bondage, systems of dependence and forms of emancipation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sally Moore began her career in a Wall Street law firm and then became a staff attorney at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. She returned to Columbia University for her doctorate in anthropology, graduating in 1957. Dr. Moore developed and chaired the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California (USC) (1963–1977). She also taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and Yale before joining the Harvard University faculty in 1981. Currently a Professor of Anthropology (emerita), she was Dean of the Graduate School from 1985 to 1989 and Master of Dunster House. Her books include Law as Process (1978, 2nd ed. 2000), Social Facts and Fabrications, “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro 1990–1980 (1986), Anthropology and Africa (1994), and Law and Anthropology, A Reader (2004). She has received a number of awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995–96), and the Kalven Prize of the Law and Society Association (2005). She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Fu Hualing is a Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong. He graduated from the Southwestern University of Politics and Law in Chongqing and received post-graduate degrees in Canada. His research interest includes public law, human rights and legal institutions in China. He has published widely in these areas.
Bin Li holds a PhD from the Université Paris i Panthéon-Sorbonne, and teaches Law at Beijing Normal University. In the last few years, he has produced theoretical and empirical comparative studies on legal cultures, in co-operation with Western colleagues. In 2011, he published Légitimité, légalité et effectivité: La protection de la propriété en Chine (t. 1) and Entre droit humain et droit du commerce: La protection de la propriété en Chine (t. 2). Bin Li is co-author of the e-book Le procès civil en version originale. Cultures judiciaires comparées: France, Chine, Etats-Unis, published by LexisNexis in 2014.
Didier Mineur is Senior Lecturer in political philosophy at the Institut d’études politiques de Rennes. He has published Archéologie de la représentation politique: Structure et fondement d’une crise (2010), Carré de Malberg: Le positivisme impossible (2010). He has tackled the topics of political representation, fundamental rights and rule of law, and is now working on the legitimacy of the majority principle.
Deborah Puccio-Den is an anthropologist at the LIER-Institut Marcel Mauss (CNRS-EHESS, Paris). In 2009, she authored Les théâtres de ‘Maures et Chrétiens’: Conflits politiques et dispositifs de réconciliation (Espagne, Sicile. XVII e-XXIe siècle), followed by other works on the judicial, artistic, memorial constructions of Sicilian mafia. She is currently working on the practices of anti-mafia judges and on the mode of governance, forms of justice and ‘moral economies’ of the Cosa Nostra.
Maud Saint-Lary is an anthropologist at the Laboratoire des Sciences Sociales Appliquées (LaSSA, Marseille). Since her PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2006), she has studied the transformations of Sub-Saharian Islam, with a particular focus on Burkina Faso. Her fieldwork with local Islamic authorities, in urban as well as rural environments, has let her study their role of mediators in the resolution of family conflicts. She is also interested in the current process of re-Islamisation, particularly visible in the urban space, and focuses on the appearance of an Islamic public space in Burkina.
Ranabir Samaddar is the Director of the Calcutta Research Group. He has pioneered, along with others, peace studies programmes in South Asia. He has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights, and peace. His research has covered migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. His recent political writings published in the form of a two volume account, The Materiality of Politics (Anthem Press, 2007), and The Emergence of the Political Subject (Sage, 2010) have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and have signalled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking.
Sarbani Sen has held post doctoral fellowships at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg. She has practiced law as a constitutional litigator in India. She has taught as adjunct faculty at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata; at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto. She is currently Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Centre for Public Law and Jurisprudence at Jindal Global Law School, India. Her book Popular Sovereignty and Democratic Transformations: The Constitution of India has been published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi in 2007. She has been working and has published in the areas of constitutional transitions; social and economic rights; law and development and refugee law. She received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Delhi, her graduate degrees in law from the London School of Economics and Yale Law School. She received her doctoral degree in law from Yale Law School. She has been the recipient of the Commonwealth Scholarship and graduate and doctoral fellowships from Yale Law School.
Gilles Tarabout is a social anthropologist, Emeritus Senior Fellow (‘Directeur de recherche’) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His work is focused on Indian society and more particularly on the relationships between society and religion in Kerala (South India). He has co-directed a dozen edited books or journal issues, and has co-organized with Daniela Berti an international research programme funded by the French ‘Agence Nationale de la Recherche’, Just-India, Justice and Governance in India and South Asia.
