When liberal anti-racism is not enough: thinking from UK's slavery laws about authoritarian state-making across the metropole
In this talk, I plead for an anthropology of law attuned to the analytical and political challenges of an increasingly authoritarian climate in liberal constitutional settings.
Drawing on my book, Drugs, Race, and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law (to be published with OUP in February 2026), I examine a new precedent in the making—namely, the application of UK ‘slavery laws’ to manage and punish its marginalised working-class and racialised populations.
Originally conceived in the context of debates around international human trafficking, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 became ‘domesticated’ as police and the courts, over the last ten years, have applied it to those at the bottom rung of the street-level drugs economy within the country’s borders.
Drawing on ethnography with police, the courts, and crucially the families affected, and situating this within histories of Empire and their afterlives, I reflect on how a juridical project in the making has become a political project, as logics of liberal saviourism and the image of ‘slave and ‘slave master’ have been projected onto the bodies of Black working class youth.
In what ways has juridical victimhood become a site for the remaking of political statecraft in times of deepening hegemonic crisis in the face of intensifying inequalities, enduring austerity, genocide and on-going climate catastrophes? How do attempts to work against the liberal anti-racist grain become weaponised by unexpected publics, generating backlash from both far-right and liberal audiences? To what extent are my ethnographic observations and their reception indicative of a liberal legal crisis in European metropoles writ large? And what challenges do they pose for the anthropologist of law to reconceive of ethnography not just as analytical work but as a form of political labour?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Insa Lee Koch is a writer, advocate and professor.
She currently holds the Chair of British Cultures at the University of St Gallen and was previously a professor at the LSE. Trained as both an anthropologist and as a lawyer, Insa has written several books and numerous articles on law, empire, race, class and the state. She is leading an SNF-project on ‘moral economies of racial reckoning’ (2026-2030) as part of which she investigates questions of (anti)racism and the possibilities of transformative and abolitionist futures together with a team of doctoral and post-doctoral students.