Agathe Mora

Former Staff

Research Interests
Anthropology of law, anthropology in/of institutions, anthropology of bureaucracy, post-conflict property restitution, peace and reconciliation, access to justice, transitional justice

Research Area(s)
Kosovo and Serbia, India

Links
University of Edinburgh - Agathe C. Mora

Profile

Agathe Mora is a social anthropologist of law working on post-conflict property ‘restitution’, ‘formal’ access to justice, and the role of law and legal practitioners in mediating property disputes. Her PhD research is set in Kosovo, the site of the largest European Union rule of law mission outside its member states. Her PhD thesis, provisionally titled Returning property and property rights in post-war Kosovo: an ethnography of a transitional judiciary, looks through the eyes of the national and international legal practitioners involved in the property restitution process in order to analyse the legal mechanisms for the resolution of immoveable property disputes that emanate from the 1998−99 Kosovo war. To this end, she conducted 14 months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Kosovo and Serbia, benefiting from unique access to the inner workings of the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA), the institution mandated to resolve war-related property claims, as well as to the KPA Appeals Panel at the Supreme Court of Kosovo. She also conducted numerous interviews with national and international stakeholders as well as with parties to KPA claims. The latter interviews with claimants and respondents resulted in the publication of the book The Fates Behind the Numbers, funded by the Swiss Development Cooperation.

Mora is currently writing up her PhD thesis at the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology under the directorship of Prof. Marie-Claire Foblets and the supervision of Dr. Toby Kelly and Prof. Emeritus Anthony Good from the University of Edinburgh. Prior to entering the PhD programme at Edinburgh, she was awarded a Master of Research (MRes) degree in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Her master’s thesis, entitled Negotiating shifting grounds: land, law and identity among the Mundas of Jharkhand, India, looked at the ways in which Munda identity is constructed and negotiated through the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (CNTA) and its practices. She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium.

Why Law & Anthropology?

"The importance of legal restitution and of the promotion of a sustainable rule of law (be it through the setting up of quasi-judicial property restitution mechanisms or more generally through the strengthening of national legal institutions) in post-conflict settings is overwhelmingly perceived by the international community as a milestone towards post-conflict stabilisation, the disruption of cycles of violence and the fostering of peace and democracy. The social anthropology of law has for quite some time now tried to unpack these processes by looking at them through the micro lens of in-depth ethnography. Indeed, by focusing on the ways in which these processes are lived and experienced both by actors who ‘make’ them (such as lawyers) and ‘ordinary’ users of the law, anthropologists of law have helped understand some of the obstacles and challenges to promoting effective and accountable legal regimes. Thus, by looking at the ways in which legal practices are made, understood, used and discarded in such transitional settings, the anthropology of law is able to contribute to an understanding of the meanings and implications of these practices as politically and historically embedded."