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This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relates this back to the issue of minority protection and cultural recognition. Introducing a new method of inquiry, spatio-historical analysis, this article argues that a historical study of a legal and political geography can fundamentally enhance a sociolegal analysis of contemporary structures and processes of governance vested with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural diversity. Using the tribal areas of Pakistan as a case study, this article examines how the colonial history of the tribal areas brings into question its contemporary status in Pakistani constitutional law. It further problematizes the idea that the tribal areas’ unique legal position can be attributed to the state’s recognition and promotion of the Pakhtun community’s right of normative autonomy. This article demonstrates how a spatio-historical model of analysis can reveal previously less visible sites of power and forms of domination that bring into question the historical linking of race and space and the significance of this relationship to questions about appropriate forms and expressions of normative autonomy within liberal societies.

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence.

This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury, and death. Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury, and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materializing practices through which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgments, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think, and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is special.

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