Conference: The Social Construction of Illegality

The Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren), the  Free University Brussels and the University of Leuven are organizing an international conference in October titled “Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm: the Social Construction of Illegality” October 25-27 in Belgium.

The international conference Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm. The social Construction of Illegality aims at fostering a cross-disciplinary debate on everyday practice seen as systems of practical norms in realms more commonly considered from a legal or moral standpoint. Political scientists, jurists, historians, sociologists and social anthropologists will exchange their views on interactions between normative systems produced by official actors such as States or international organizations and those systems of norms informing the actions of actors thriving in the margins of official categories. Official categories emerge as highly political creations, while powerlessness in the margin reveals itself as relative. Market oriented economy intertwines with underground networks and these interconnections produce implicit norms that are also produced in the loopholes of law in various spheres of societies. These themes will be analysed through case studies bearing on traffics in art, drugs, organs, etc as well as on corruption, the cultural production of rules, etc.