Books by Eddie Bruce-Jones
Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe
Race in the Shadow of Law offers a critical legal analysis of European responses to institutional... more Race in the Shadow of Law offers a critical legal analysis of European responses to institutional racism, focusing on Germany. It draws connections between contemporary legal knowledge practices and colonial systems of thought, arguing that many people of colour experience the law as a part of a racial problem, rather than a solution, to racial injustice. Based on a critical legal ethnography of anti-racism work in Europe, the book positions Black and anti-racist perspectives at the centre, rather than the margins, of critically thinking through the intersection of race and law. Combining this ethnography with comparative legal analysis, discourse analysis, and critical race theory, the book develops a critical discussion of the European legal frameworks aimed at regulating racism, and particularly institutional racism, in policy and policing. In linking this critique to the transformative potential of social movements, however, it goes on to examine the strategic and creative possibility of disrupting conventional modes of engaging, and resisting, law.
Journal Articles by Eddie Bruce-Jones
Death Zones, Comfort Zones: Queering the Refugee Question
22(1) International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 2015
Sexuality-based refugee claims constitute an expanding area of legal practice and scholarship. Th... more Sexuality-based refugee claims constitute an expanding area of legal practice and scholarship. This expansion in the field of refugee law mirrors international efforts to address homophobia in various sites around the globe, and in legal terms, this has predominantly taken the form of rights-based protections, such as decriminalising same-sex sexual acts as a matter of civil and political rights. The strategies of addressing sex-, gender- and sexuality-based oppression in the context of free movement on one hand and constitutional protections on the other share a common set of tensions and dilemmas, and both risk re-inscribing fundamental aspects of the very violence that they each seek to address. This article asks what it might mean to “queer” refugee law, particularly in the context of its dynamic relationship with the discourse of decriminalisation. The article takes forward the centrality of sexual politics within the moral economy of migration regulation and attempts to approach it with the methodological impulse and transformative potential that “queer” suggests.
German Policing at the Intersection: Race, Gender, Migrant Status and Mental Health
56(3) Race & Class, Jan 2015
Germany not only avoids using the term ‘race’, but its institutions, such as the police, refrain ... more Germany not only avoids using the term ‘race’, but its institutions, such as the police, refrain from collecting statistics according to race, gender, ethnicity and so on, which makes it hard to prove that police actions, and particularly violence, differentially affect non-white Germans. Examining a series of controversial cases in which non-white Germans have been killed in encounters with the police, the author argues for an understanding of how race and other identities intersect, and shows how the police mount a dubious ‘cultural defence’ – based on their perceived fears – to justify their disproportionate use of force. Deaths in custody provide a lens through which to view the need in Germany to identify and accept the presence of patterns of institutional racism.
Germany's Stephen Lawrence
54(2) Race & Class, Dec 2012
Campaigners in Germany, protesting at the suspicious death in custody of Oury Jalloh in 2005 and ... more Campaigners in Germany, protesting at the suspicious death in custody of Oury Jalloh in 2005 and the subsequent cover-up by the criminal justice system, are looking to the Lawrence trial, the Macpherson Report and other British institutional responses to see how Germany could learn from the British experience.
Anthropology as Critical Legal Intervention? Instrumentalization, Co-Construction and Critical Reformulation in the Relationship between Anthropology and International Law
This article creates a coherent way to imagine the relationship between law and anthropology. It ... more This article creates a coherent way to imagine the relationship between law and anthropology. It describes an analytical separation between three overlapping and interacting branches, aiming to present the relationship in a way that is instructive and programmatic. This article first highlights relevant methods and epistemologies of law and anthropology. Then it explores three central branches of anthropological-legal interaction, framed respectively as instrumentalization, co-construction, and critical reformulation. Ultimately, the article posits that the tensions between anthropology and law, including the (mis)appropriation of anthropology by law, can be theorized and repositioned as a means of more critically understanding how power and culturally-informed perspectives coordinate the production of legal knowledge.
Race, Space, and the Nation-State: Racial Recognition and the Prospects for Substantive Equality Under Anti-Discrimination Law in France and Germany
Conventional knowledge in France and Germany would suggest that race does not play a significant ... more Conventional knowledge in France and Germany would suggest that race does not play a significant role in social stratification and has been dealt with by legal prohibitions on discrimination. This Note explores the role of race and anti-discrimination law in France and Germany. In doing so, it highlights the need for racial recognition and challenges dominant ideologies that strategically and systematically write race out of narratives of nationhood.
The Note argues that the lack of legal protections for non-white people cannot be reconciled with their lived experiences of racism. Anchoring its discussion in the history of colonialism, the Note distills two acts of racial violence, exposing whiteness as an organizing principle of race and racism. Ultimately, the Note argues for the social and legal recognition of race as a meaningful category in France and Germany.
Next Step Forward-The Development of Clinical Legal Education In Poland Through a Clinical Pilot Program In Bialystok, The
Colum. JE Eur. L., Jan 1, 2008
Book Chapters by Eddie Bruce-Jones
Refugee Law in Crisis: Decolonising the Architecture of Violence
Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging (Mary Bosworth, Alpa Parmar and Yolanda Vazquez, Eds.), 2018
This chapter reflects on the problematic crossroads in which refugee law finds itself, as a field... more This chapter reflects on the problematic crossroads in which refugee law finds itself, as a field of law and as a sub-discipline for teaching. The central argument is that refugee law is not designed as a structural solution to the world's violence, but rather as a remedy for a privileged few, and failure to centre the selective nature of refugee law's conception of violence within refugee law teaching risks reinforcing the impoverished framing of violence that the narrow legal category of persecution suggests. The article suggests that this narrow framing of violence within refugee law supports colonial logics of safety and danger, legitimises state logics of security and stabilises state-building discourses of human rights.
Papers by Eddie Bruce-Jones
Archiving racial violence: some reflections from the UK’s Institute of Race Relations
This short chapter examines the work of the UK's Institute of Race Relations in archiving and... more This short chapter examines the work of the UK's Institute of Race Relations in archiving and accounting for various forms of institutional and structural racial violence. The chapter argues that this process of archiving, which includes documenting and analysing systemic racism is, itself, a constituent part of anti-racism work. This work is instructive for the German context, in which there are particular challenges to identifying, analysing and recording patterns of racism.
Race & Class, 2021
's insightful new book, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition use... more 's insightful new book, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition uses mad studies as a lens to examine decarceration and deinstitutionalisation as approaches by which to understand a broader political position of anti-racism, anti-carcerality. The book is a timely intervention into broader academic and social debates in North American and beyond. In the context of the discussions held at the 2018 Symposium on Race, Mental Health and State Violence, which provided the conceptual frame for this special issue, this review also serves as an occasion to revisit the important work of legal scholar, Camille Nelson, who served as a keynote at the Symposium. Her two articles on policing race and mental health have made an important contribution to the field of critical race scholarship and share important common ground with Decarcerating Disability. Decarcerating Disability comes at a moment of crossroads in the political landscape, which includes the mass organisation of people in the project of reducing the reach and infrastructure of the police. This aspect of the larger movement for the abolition of prisons and a vast reduction of the criminal justice system has not been conceived recently; indeed, for many decades, organisers, and in particular people of colour, women and queer people have been laying the theoretical and practical foundations for articulating the demands of abolition. The current moment, not least of all the culmination of the demands of the Movement for Black Lives a few years ago, and the 2020 protests in response to the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Elijah McClain and others, has taken forward the more transformative demand of defunding policing institutions, rather than simply calling for the arrest of the officers who undertook the killings.
Research Handbook on International Refugee Law, 2019
This chapter outlines out some of the ways in which the concept of 'burden sharing' has been cons... more This chapter outlines out some of the ways in which the concept of 'burden sharing' has been considered within international refugee law. As it would be misleading to insist on too rigid a genealogy of the term 'burden sharing', given the far-reaching potential for application of such a concept within international refugee law theory and practice, the first section identifies the defining ways in which the concept is used. The second section critically interrogates the logics that underlie the commonplace notion of 'the burden' of burden sharing and postulates a different framework for understanding the concept. Burden sharing-the main debates Both legal scholarship and policy analysis on contemporary challenges in refugee law have incorporated, explicitly and implicitly, what has come to be known as the concept of burden sharing. While burden sharing is not a terribly stable term, it has featured explicitly in policy debates on issues ranging from climate change (see e.g., Ringius, et. al., 2002) to international military defense campaigns (see e.g., Sandler and Forbes, 1980). In its most general sense, burden sharing can be thought of as international cooperation for the purpose of sharing the costs or, with a more ethics-based charge, responsibility for a common task. However, its deployment as a term of art within refugee law has been concisely described by Astri Suhrke, who notes that early proposals for international cooperation on refugee law by Grahl-Madsen in 1983 and Hathaway and Neve in 1997 called for collective action that would "strengthen the protection for refugees by reducing inequities among recipient states. (Suhrke, 1998: 397). Other proposals that we might refer to under the rubric of burden sharing have developed in the same context as interventions by Grahl-Madesn, Hathaway and Neve, in the form of UNHCR resettlement schemes and similar interment schemes, which Suhrke refers to as sharing schemes (ibid:
Eddie Bruce-Jones, Review of Cengiz Barskanmaz, Recht und Rassismus: Das menschenrechtliche Verbot der Diskriminierung aufgrund der Rasse [Law and Racism: The Human Rights Prohibition of Racial Discrimination]
International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2021
Black lives and the state of distraction
This essay examines the relationship between racism, reform, abolition and imagination in the wak... more This essay examines the relationship between racism, reform, abolition and imagination in the wake of the deaths of Black Americans in police custody and during policing altercations
Police brutality and racism in Germany
African American Intellectual History Society, Apr 17, 2017
Race & Class, 2021
Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mounta... more Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mountains) and his collaborator Omid Tofighian speak about the experience of indefinite incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island and the psychological toll of waiting. They compare this form of detention to prison and the existential impact to torture. This Kyriarchal System, they argue, strips the individual of identity and humanity and they explain how such a system can perhaps be questioned better through the poetic fiction that Boochani has used in his path-breaking narrative than through appeal to dry rational facts and figures.
Deterrence unto death: running fast into a neighbour's knife
Oury Jalloh and the colonial scene: law as reminder
Event synopsis: The London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) is an interdisciplinary and inte... more Event synopsis: The London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) is an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional event created to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration. It welcomes diverse and interdisciplinary work from the humanities and social sciences including, but not limited to, papers drawing upon continental philosophy, critical legal theory, critical geography and critical theory, etcetera.
Death zones and comfort zones: LGBTI decriminalisation and the refugee question
This paper examines the contentious contemporary discussion among lawyers, scholars and activists... more This paper examines the contentious contemporary discussion among lawyers, scholars and activists engaged in two strands of advocacy, sometimes simultaneously: expanding the coverage and accessibility of refugee claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity on one hand and supporting the global decriminalisation of same-sex sexual activity on the other. While such a framing of these areas of advocacy suggests a dichotomous relationship, one that is mirrored in the discursive practices that ground policy advancements in these areas, the two areas are deeply interwoven and underlie an integrated geo-bio-politics at the core of contemporary discussions on human rights, racism, gender violence, citizenship and colonialism. The article suggests that advocates must be wary of all of these issues to both best appreciate the broader political circumstances that help constitute dichotomous thinking around local legal reform and refugee law reform and to identify common lessons that ...
The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain by police officers in the United ... more The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain by police officers in the United States have served as a crystallising moment around which a new dimension of a longstanding movement has come into being. Floyd, Taylor and McClain were, like many others before them, unlawfully killed by uniformed law enforcement officers in circumstances where civilians would have very little protection from swift charges of murder. The officer who killed Floyd was charged with second degree murder arguably only after public protest, sparked by a video of the officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes while he plead for life. The officers who killed Breonna Taylor have not yet been charged at all. The officers whose actions led to McClain’s death have been cleared of all wrongdoing. The current protests in the United States and around the world are not only about policing; they cannot be understood without also understanding systems of racial oppression, including lynching, p...
Race & Class, 2021
The author discusses the findings and recommendations of the first official review of practices a... more The author discusses the findings and recommendations of the first official review of practices and processes relating to and following police-related deaths in the UK. Dame Elish Angiolini’s 2017 report paid particular notice to mental health implications and the impact on families who had lost loved ones. Excerpts are provided here of remarks by Deborah Coles (of INQUEST) and Marcia Rigg (of the United Families and Friends Campaign) at the report’s launch – focusing on the call for automatic legal aid for families at inquests and the end to police conferring after an incident. Though not an abolitionist text, the author points to certain recommendations which could lead to less and less dangerous policing of vulnerable communities.
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Books by Eddie Bruce-Jones
Journal Articles by Eddie Bruce-Jones
The Note argues that the lack of legal protections for non-white people cannot be reconciled with their lived experiences of racism. Anchoring its discussion in the history of colonialism, the Note distills two acts of racial violence, exposing whiteness as an organizing principle of race and racism. Ultimately, the Note argues for the social and legal recognition of race as a meaningful category in France and Germany.
Book Chapters by Eddie Bruce-Jones
Papers by Eddie Bruce-Jones