Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City

Abstract

Recent sociolegal scholarship has explored the role of emotions in lawmaking and policymaking on security and crime issues. This article extends this approach to the relationship between law enforcement and affect by addressing the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of long‐term emotions, which bind a collective and fuel ethnonational division. An ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This emotional climate is the product of the subterranean ties of Lod Palestinians with the Israeli security agencies as well as their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I embed the initial creation and relative stability of this emotional climate in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. The article concludes with a discussion of how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and by arguing for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.

The Legalization of Emotion: Managing Risk by Managing Feelings in Contracts for Surrogate Labor

“…While past empirical research in law and society has failed to couple the study of law with emotions in contracts, it has addressed them in the context of disputing, and recently, on security and crime (Pasquetti ). Legal institutions have developed an array of techniques for containing feelings, regarding them as disruptive to the institutional discourse of rationality.…”

Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma, Ruins and Everyday Life

“…In this article, rather than engaging with this debate, I draw on works that dispute the usefulness of ‘parsing differences between the anthropology of affect and of emotions’ (Skoggard and Waterston, : 112; Ahmed, : 30, 39; Beatty, ). Specifically, I support Sarah Ahmed's () call for moving from substances (what emotions are) to relationships (how emotions work) and I look at how emotions work in conjunction with cognitive and interpretive processes (see also Pasquetti, ).…”

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The UK Citizens Advice service and the plurality of actors and practices that shape “legal consciousness”

“…Reflection, in this vein, upon the relational and emotional complexities of advice-giving resonates with the move in legal studies, since the 1990s, towards an increasing recognition of the emotional composition of actors within the legal process (see Kahan and Nussbaum 1999; and Marony 2006 for reviews of this field) and the ways in which a marginalization of the emotional, both historically and in the present, shapes and maintains power relationships and inequalities (Pasquetti 2013;Nussbaum 2009). For example, as Berk (2015) notes, not only does the imagining of legal actors as rational and calculative misrepresent the situations in which individuals enter, and proceed with, a legal problem, it "reinforces male privilege and female dependency by deeming emotions during conflict as differently appropriate based on gender" (2015,149).…”