Affective constructions of justice: ISIS-families and the law in the Finnish public debate
Keywords:
Children’s rights, law and affect, foreign combatants, Syria, Derechos de los niños, derecho y afecto, combatientes extranjeros, SiriaAbstract
This article examines the political process and public debate in Finland concerning the Finnish women and children held captive in the refugee camp of Al-Hol in north-east Syria. The article studies the role of affect in the process of constructing justice in these debates. It argues that the debate demonstrates an affective process of bordering, in which a non-belonging and essentially non-Finnish identity was affectively constructed to the mothers, who were depicted as “converts” and “jihadists”. Emotions such as compassion were mobilised in the process with ambiguous outcomes. On the one hand, reference to compassion served the conservative agenda of attaching rights to worthiness, on the other hand reference to compassion towards the figure of the innocent child served to isolate the children from their mothers. In the legal context, the affectively constructed identities of the mothers as non-belonging were relevant to how the issue of rights and legal obligations of the state became perceived as something belonging to the realm of national law or international law.
Este artículo examina el proceso político y el debate público de Finlandia sobre las mujeres y niños finlandeses en cautividad en el campo de refugiados de Al-Hol, al nordeste de Siria. El artículo estudia el rol del afecto en el proceso de construcción de justicia en estos debates. Se argumenta que el debate pone de manifiesto un proceso afectivo de construcción de fronteras, en el cual se construyó afectivamente para las madres una identidad no perteneciente y básicamente no finlandesa, al ser retratadas como “conversas” y “yihadistas”. Se movilizaron emociones como la compasión, con resultados ambiguos. De una parte, la alusión a la compasión sirvió a los propósitos del programa conservador de conectar derechos con valor personal; de la otra, la alusión a la compasión por la figura del niño inocente sirvió para aislar a los hijos de sus madres. En el contexto jurídico, las identidades de las madres, construidas afectivamente como no pertenecientes, fueron importantes porque hicieron que los derechos y las obligaciones jurídicas fueran percibidos como pertenecientes a la esfera del derecho nacional o internacional.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1159
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 585
XML 206
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Sanna Mustasaari
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.