Counter-Forums and People’s Tribunals

The session explores people’s tribunals and other such grassroots formations of ‘theaters of justice and truth’: assemblies staged to claim the authority of justice as a way of countering legal violence performed by the state and its apparatuses. By looking into these collective acts of gathering for truth-seeking, the session will open the conversation toward alternative models of justice operating beyond law’s official frameworks, understood through their performative and embodied dimension.

The evening will consist of two parts: a talk titled “People’s Tribunals as Counter-Forums” with Başak Ertür, critical legal scholar, Reader at the Centre for Research Architecture and a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work engages with legal violence, legal performativity, and more broadly with law’s epistemologies and aesthetics (see her monography: “Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials”, Fordham University Press, 2022).

Her lecture will be followed by a screening of “hold on to her” (2024, 80 minutes), directed by Robin Vanbesien. The film addresses a recent case of police and state violence in the context of migration border control in Belgium. In 2018, Mawda Shawri was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a car chase on a central highway. “hold on to her” traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity and struggle for justice.