Expecting justice: struggling with the indeterminate between ideals and practices

Abstract

Abstract This commentary contextualizes Jacobs’ study as a contribution to a body of anthropological research concerned with theorizing the state, and more importantly concerned with closing the analytical gap between the study of state images (representations) on the one hand, and practices (everyday experiences of the state) on the other. The commentary sketches three further analytical dimensions that stand in relation thereto: an investigation of historical trajectories of state images and practices; the significant but methodologically difficult move of studying affective registers as constitutive of the political; and an analytical perspective which goes beyond centers of state power and turns to the appearance of state effects in sites not readily seen as belonging to the political.