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Legal Consciousness and Vigilantism: Seeking Justice for Witchcraft Harms in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2023
Abstract
Theories of vigilantism frequently locate its cause in the ineffectiveness of the state legal system. The state legal system does not work for some, so they take the law into their own hands. Even in communities where vigilantism is prevalent, however, only certain harms are met with vigilantism. Why are some harms met with violence while others are not? To explore this question, I draw on nine months of fieldwork in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation with a largely ineffective state legal system and the presence of vigilantism. Yet vigilante remedies are largely reserved for harms attributed to witchcraft, and typically only particularly serious witchcraft harms. In this article I draw on the concept of legal consciousness to understand why people might turn to vigilantism in response to witchcraft. I develop two themes of legal consciousness—a disconnect in harm naming and different logics of justice—that help explain dynamics vigilantism. My research thus contributes to the scholarship on both vigilantism and legal consciousness.
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation
Footnotes
The author would like to thank the audiences at the New Directions in Law & Society workshop at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, especially David Mednicoff and Janice Gallagher, and at the Southern Political Science Association annual meeting. I am grateful for the thoughtful feedback provided by the anonymous reviewers at Law & Social Inquiry.
This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was further made possible by the financial support of the University of Minnesota’s Political Science Department and the Humanities Institute at the University of South Florida. The author received IRB approval from the University of Minnesota in 2017 and REB approval from Carleton University in 2011.
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