The Sentimental Court

Jonas Bens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on law, statehood, and colonialism in capitalist modernity. His books include The Indigenous Paradox: Rights, Sovereignty and Culture in the Americas (2020).

'This book constitutes a major work in the study of legal anthropology and, at the same time, a key contribution to current debates in the interrelated fields of affective politics and the anthropological study of emotions … Bens offers an original and innovative approach that reverses common assumptions, and it reforms and transforms our possibilities of thinking about law and legal processes differently, in a promising and productive manner – as emotionally charged, affectively framed, and contested. This is a thoroughly worked, wide-ranging, and impressive piece of scholarship that weaves together ethnography, legal theory, and a condensed re-reading of the history of legal anthropology, while navigating with deep knowledge and brilliant lucidity the current and recent debates in related fields.' Kai Kresse, S-Professor and Vice Director of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Freie Universität Berlin

• Introduction: Affect, emotion and the law; Part I. Atmospheres: 1. Courtroom atmospheres: The courtroom of the ICC as an affective arrangement; 2. Transitional justice atmospheres: The ICC's outreach work in northern Uganda; Part II. Sentiments: 3. The sentiment of plausibility: Affective framing and the production of legal truth; 4. The sentiment of objectivity: Arranging objects and subjects in the ICC courtroom; 5. The sentiment of justice: Navigating normative pluralism in northern Uganda; Part III. Politics: 6. The politics of atmosphere and sentiment: International criminal justice in Africa and competing indignation regimes; 7. We have never been rational: The emotions of liberal legalism and the affective politics of modernity; Epilogue: Affect and colonialism; Bibliography; Index.