This article examines the role of identity documents in producing the particular texture of relationships between persons and states in the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. For many people in the region the forms of legal identification they hold are central to their life chances. Considerable efforts are therefore made in trying to accumulate and manipulate documents for political and economic advantage. However, the implications of holding identity documents are always partial and unstable. This article argues that identity documents penetrate into the lives of those who hold them, not as reifying abstractions, but as an unpredictable and unstable technique of governance, producing fear and uncertainty for all those subject to their use. Although the production of identity documents creates a separation between the legal and the physical person, these two aspects of personhood are recombined as, through their anxieties, people come to embody the indeterminacies of the documents that they hold. In this way documents produce legibility and illegibility, stability and instability, coherence and incoherence.

As the Oslo Peace Process has given way to the violence of the second intifada, this book explores the continuing legacy of Oslo in the everyday life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking a perspective that sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a conflict over the distribution of legal rights, it focuses on the daily concerns of West Bank Palestinians, and explores the meanings, limitations and potential of legal claims in the context of the region's structures of governance. Kelly argues that fundamental contradictions in the process through which the West Bank has been ruled and misruled have resulted in an unstable mixture of legality, fear and uncertainty. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides an insight into how the wider Middle East conflict manifests itself through the daily encounters of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, offering an evocative and theoretically informed account of the relationship between law, peace-building and violence.

This article examines the assessment of claims about torture in the British asylum process. It is compassion in the face of suffering that underlies much of the ethical objection to torture. Yet, at the same time, torture survivors, as with asylum seekers more broadly, are subjected to widespread suspicions about the genuineness of their claims. This article argues that the very process of imagined identification found in compassion can lie behind suspicion. Anthropology has largely treated otherness as a cause of fear and suspicion. However, the denial of another's suffering is not always about a failure to recognize mutual humanity. It can also be a product of a sense of fundamental similarity, based on assumptions about the mutual capacity to dissimulate. Ultimately, though, scepticism is on just as shaky ground as belief, as it is filtered through the lens of imagined identification. Denial is just as vicarious as acknowledgement.

This article examines the distribution of legal rights in the Israeli occupied West Bank. It argues that legal rights are distributed through a "jurisdictional politics" that tries to stabilize the contingent relationship between political community, territory, and legal subjects. In particular, this jurisdictional politics seeks to delimit the contradictory boundaries of the Israeli state by creating distinct categories of person out of the populations that live and work in the region. These issues are addressed by examining a dispute concerning the jurisdiction of Israeli law over Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The article ends by arguing that in the context of multiple movements of people, capital, and military force, attention must be paid to the often contradictory ways in which jurisdictional regimes seek to produce particular types of citizens and subjects.

Freedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of “detached conviction.” Yet evidence of such “detached convictions” always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.