Section: Staff Profiles

Gerhard Anders

Name
Dr Gerhard Anders
Title
Lecturer in African Studies - International Development
Organisation
School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh
Address
4.06 Chrystal Macmillan Building 15a George Square Edinburgh UK EH8 9LD
Telephone
+44 (0) 131 651 3178
E-Mail
URL
http://www.cas.ed.ac.uk/staff_profiles/gerhard_anders

Regimes of governance in the fields of development, international criminal justice and crime control; legal and political anthropology; development anthropology; law and development; the post-colonial state in sub-Sahara Africa

Qualifications
LLM (University of Amsterdam), PhD (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Outline biography
Gerhard studied law in Germany but soon moved to Amsterdam where he studied international law and legal anthropology. After a spell organising a short film festival in Amsterdam and screenings of silent films with live music he joined the Law Faculty at Erasmus University Rotterdam as a PhD candidate. His PhD project was an ethnographic study of the experiences of civil servants in Malawi where a civil service reform programme was implemented at the behest of the World Bank and other international donor agencies. In 2004, Gerhard became lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich where he worked until his move to the University of Edinburgh in July 2011. Between 2006 and 2009, Gerhard conducted a post-doc research on international criminal justice in Africa. Currently he is involved in a research project on transnational crime control in Africa focusing on counter-narcotics operations in West Africa.

Research interests
Gerhard’s research focuses on globally circulating ideas about development, good governance, international criminal justice and the rule of law, tracking the everyday experiences of civil servants, lawyers and others involved in the production and diffusion of administrative and legal knowledge.

Currently Gerhard is involved in a Swiss-German research project on the emergent regime of crime control in Africa titled The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control in Africa: The War on Drugs, the Fight against Human Trafficking and the Combat against Counterfeit Medicines. The project is part of the German Research Council’s new Priority Programme Adaptation and Creativity in Africa – Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder. The project will study how new legislation, training and technical support is adapted and translated in different environments in Africa, which is being turned into a laboratory for new technologies of crime control.

Between 2006 and 2009, Gerhard conducted an ethnographic research of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a UN-backed international tribunal in Freetown and The Hague. This study focuses on the multifarious ways in which connections between criminal acts and people are constituted in order to establish individual criminal responsibility. The study shows how legal arguments about criminal responsibility shape the historical narrative produced by the court. At a more general level, it contributes to the anthropological study of the global diffusion of legal norms. It shows how international criminal law is shaped by the specific localities where the vision of global justice is produced and instantiated. He is currently working on a monograph to present the findings of this research.

His Ph.D. research (2000-2004) traced the implementation of civil service reform in Malawi from the loan agreements to individual civil servants who responded to the reform in unforeseen and multifarious ways. A substantially revised version of the thesis, titled In the Shadow of Good Governance: An Ethnography of Civil Service Reform in Africa, has been published by Brill in its Africa Studies Centre Series. In contrast to many other anthropological studies of the state Gerhard’s book focuses on civil servants’ everyday practices both inside and outside the place of work.  The book’s main argument is twofold. On the one hand, it is a critique of the instrumentalist vision of good governance promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  On the other hand, it aims at de-exoticizing African bureaucrats by transcending the common idea of a disconnect between a dysfunctional state and African society.

PhD Supervision
Gerhard welcomes enquiries from students interested in any of his research fields.

Selected publications
1. Monographs:
In the Shadow of Good Governance: An Ethnography of Civil Service Reform in Africa. Leiden: Brill (2010).

2. Refereed Articles:

"Testifying about 'Uncivilized Events': Problematic Representations of Africa in the Trial against Charles Taylor," Leiden Journal of International Law 24:4 (2011), 937-959.

“The Normativity of Numbers: World Bank and IMF Conditionality,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review PoLAR 31:2 (2008), 187-202.

“Follow the Trial: Some Notes on the Ethnography of International Criminal Justice,” Anthropology Today 23:3 (2007), 22-26.

“Redimensionner la fonction publique au Malawi: préceptes des organisations internationales et réalités administratives,” Critique Internationale 35 (2007), 85-99.

3. Edited Volumes:
Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective (with M. Nuijten). Aldershot: Ashgate (2007).


4. Essays and Book Chapters

“Old-school Bureaucrats and Technocrats in Malawi: Civil Service Reform in Practice,” in T. Bierschenk & J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, eds., States at Work: Empirical Perspectives. Leiden: Brill (forthcoming).

"Bigmanity and International Criminal Justice in Sierra Leone," in M. Utas, ed. African Conflicts and Informal Regimes of Power – Big Men and Networks. London: Zed Books (2012).

“Juridification, Transitional Justice and Reaching out to the Public in Sierra Leone,” in J. Eckert, Z. Ö. Biner, B. Donahue & C. Strümpell, eds., Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2012).

“Global Legal Order as Local Phenomenon: The Special Court for Sierra Leone,” In: F. von Benda-Beckmann, K. von Benda-Beckmann & A. Griffiths, eds., Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society. Aldershot: Ashgate (2009).

“Like Chameleons: Civil Servants and Corruption in Malawi,” in G. Blundo and P.-Y. Le Meur, eds., The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services. Leiden: Brill (2009).

“Wie soll es Weitergehen? Die internationale Strafgerichtsbarkeit unter der Lupe,” Unijournal: Die Zeitung der Universität Zürich 6/09 (2009).

“Corruption and the Secret of Law: An Introduction” (with M. Nuijten), in: M. Nuijten and G. Anders, eds., Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate (2007).

“Good Governance as Technology: Toward an Ethnography of the Bretton Woods Institutions,” in D. Mosse and D. Lewis, eds., The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development. London: Pluto Press (2005).

“Lawyers and Anthropologists: A Legal Pluralist Approach to Global Governance,” in I. F. Dekker and W. Werner, eds., Governance and International Legal Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (2004).

“Freedom and Insecurity: Civil Servants between Support Networks, the Free Market and the Civil Service Reform,” in H. Englund, ed. A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi (2002).
 
5. Enyclopedia Entries
“Legal Order” (with M. Redner), in A. Iriye and P.-Y. Saunier, eds. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan (2009).

6. Book Reviews

Book review of Culture under Cross-Examination: International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone by Tim Kelsall. African Affairs 111:442 (2012).

Book review of Law in the Pursuit of Development: Principles into Practice by Amanda Perry-Kessaris. International Journal of Law in Context 6:3 (2010).

Book review of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation by Janet Roitman. Political and Legal Anthropology Review PoLAR 31:1 (2008).

7. Newspaper  reports
“Kon de aanklager echt niet zonder Naomi?” NRC Handelsblad: 7. 11 August 2010.

“Widersprüche im Taylor-Prozess,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung: 5. 10 August 2010.

“Kleine, schmutzige Kieselsteine,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung: 7/8 August 2010.

“Der Warlord Taylor nun Ankläger,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung: 7. 10 December 2009.

“Der frühere Warlord spielt den Idealisten,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung: 4. 18/19 July 2009.

“Historisches Tribunal, aber es verfehlt sein Ziel,” die tageszeitung: 11. 16.April 2009.

“Der Warlord Charles Taylor – ein Kannibale?” Neue Zürcher Zeitung: 7. 19 March 2008.

“Vom rituellen Verspeisen des Feindes im Krieg,” die tageszeitung: 11. 18 March 2008.



 

 



 

This page was published on 22 March 2012


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