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Please join the Harriman Institute for a Director’s Seminar by Renata Mustafina. Moderated by Jack Snyder.
How does an opposition protest turn into a “mass riot”? In this talk Renata Mustafina will examine the politics of case-making in one of the largest protest-related prosecutions in the history of contemporary Russia, the Bolotnaya Square case (2012), which charged twelve protesters with participation in “mass riots” and the “use of violence against representatives of power”. Drawing on a close reading of several volumes of the criminal case file, she will trace how pre-trial inquiry officials, called investigators, meticulously assemble the riot, relying on an infrastructure of procedures, documents and imagery to re-order the messy events at the square. Mustafina will move beyond familiar questions of inappropriate interference or falsification of evidence hoping to contribute to comparative ethnographies of legal and truth-making practices constitutive of state violence. She argues that the legal fiction of a riot emerges at the intersection of two epistemic cultures-one of formalistic translation in pursuit of a known “truth”, and one of knowledge-seeking to support that same truth. Investigators draw on this new knowledge to enact the riot–at material, narrative, visual and spatial levels. On the one hand, knowledge generated through the variety of information-gathering operations increases the epistemic force of the legal account. On the other hand, it repeatedly destabilizes the assembling of a riot by constantly bringing into the case file new pieces of reality that need to be tamed.
Renata Mustafina is a law and society scholar with research interests in authoritarian legality, legal mobilization, and defense lawyering in repressive settings, as well as in critical approaches to human rights. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Against Impossible Odds: Defensive Legal Mobilization in Russian Protest-Related Prosecutions,” ethnographically studies the legal aftermath of opposition protests. It explores the inventiveness of actors with little room for maneuver—both laypeople and legal professionals (defendants, lawyers, human rights activists)—as they navigate this repressive legality in the square, police buses, police precincts, courtrooms, and beyond. Mustafina’s other research, based on the study of a legal archive, examines the production of legal truth by the prosecution.She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po, an M.A. in Sociology from École Normale Supérieure, and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Moscow State University.
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